Unpacking the Chief Rabbi’s Biblical War

Daniel Friedman

Every accusation is a confession. It has become a cliche. But there is no other way to respond to the latest pseudo-biblical diatribe by South African Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein, a person whom no-one has elected and yet who believes he has the divine power to speak for all South African Jews.

While he invokes the bible to suggest that the illegal US/Israel bombing of Iran is the only thing saving the world from the wrath of Islamic fire and brimstone, his rants demonstrate who we should really be fearing right now – people like him.

If there are any Islamists posting videos that reflect any ideas as fanatical as Goldstein’s latest ode to war,  I am yet to see the evidence.

It is tempting to ignore people like Goldstein, who think their words still carry moral weight after two years loudly cheering on the Palestinian Genocide, and to dismiss them as lunatics on the fringes of society. His latest rant certainly indicates that he is unhinged. But many South African Jews – and Christian Zionists – take everything he says as gospel.

If you, as some in our local Jewish community do, get all your news from The Jewish Report, Chai FM and the Chief Rabbi’s a-historical perversions of the Torah, you end up believing the absurd notion that war is the only path to peace.

That’s why it’s up to those Jews that understand the consequences of violence masquerading as religious piety to try and set the record straight. I don’t even know where to start, yet I will try my best.

The Rabbi’s latest message is such a profound abuse of Jewish tradition that it’s impossible simply to  ignore it. He takes the Book of Esther—a text that has for millennia been interpreted by Jews as a message of survival against the odds, of courage in the face of imperial power, and turns it into a war manual.

By invoking this Bible story and turning it on its head, he is able to pretend that what is happening now is the fulfilment of some kind of divine decree, rather than the dying gasps of an empire desperately clinging to its goal of global dominance, and willing to go to war, regardless of the costs, even if they include committing genocide, killing children, and wreaking destruction on the world.

I wouldn’t naively expect Goldstein to come forward as a peacenik, but he could at least respond responsibly. Perhaps he could avoid banging on his war drum for long enough to say something reasonable, like calling this a complex geopolitical crisis requiring restraint, diplomacy, and a commitment to international law.

Instead, drunk on his own misinterpretations of Judaism, he expects us to believe that this is all a divinely ordained re-enactment of an ancient drama.

In this telling, the Iranian regime conveniently becomes Haman, the IDF and the US military perversely become Mordechai and Esther, and the massive, state-level use of force becomes a miraculous salvation.

The bogeyman here is Islam as a whole, and we are meant to believe that Muslims hate Israel and the US because we’re living in a fairy story where Islam is inherently evil and the US and Israel are pure and good, dropping bombs of righteousness.

Of course, the real reason why some in the Middle East, and all over the Muslim world, hate the US and Israel, is because the US and Israel continue to bomb their countries with impunity.

Goldstein commands a loyal following, and that makes his words dangerous. They provide religious cover for actions that are, by any objective measure, illegal and escalatory.

A strike on Iran is not a “preemptive” act of self-defence in any legally recognised sense; it is an act of war. To call it “biblical” is to remove it from the realm of accountability. If this is God’s plan, who are we to question the civilian casualties? Who are we to worry about a regional conflagration? The Chief Rabbi is effectively offering his flock a theology that absolves them of the messy, difficult work of moral reasoning, a job that they seem all too eager to outsource.

Even worse is Goldstein’s distortion of Jewish history and identity. He invokes the Holocaust repeatedly, comparing Iran’s rhetoric to the Nazi genocide. He uses the memory of six million murdered Jews as a rhetorical tool to drum up support for contemporary military campaigns. When everything is a Holocaust, nothing is. When every enemy is Amalek, every war becomes a holy war. This is not how a living, breathing faith should engage with the world. It is how a closed, fearful cult prepares for battle.

Goldstein’s words are also politically and socially incendiary in the South African context. South Africans know what happens when religion is used to sanctify state power. We lived through it. The apartheid regime was full of devout Christians who believed they were executing God’s will. To now have a senior Jewish leader in this country speaking in precisely those terms—painting a conflict far from our shores as a cosmic struggle between civilisation and barbarism, between the children of light and the children of darkness—is deeply irresponsible. It feeds the very antisemitism he claims to be fighting, by positioning Jews as cheerleaders for Western military adventurism and barbarism in the Middle East.

And of course, the few actual facts cited by the Rabbi fall apart on examination. He claims Iran was building nuclear weapons. The US intelligence community has consistently assessed that Iran has not had an active nuclear weapons program since 2003. Israel, a genocidal country that believes eternal war is essential to its survival, meanwhile, has nuclear weapons, and perhaps we’d know how many if they would comply with IAEA safeguards, which they don’t.

The US, governed by a man who has made it clear that he is above the law, has nukes too. Surely we should be worrying about these very real nuclear weapons as opposed to the hypothetical ones used to justify this supposedly holy war? Say what you want about the late Ayatollah Khumenei, but he opposed his country’s nuclear program. Now that he is dead, perhaps his successor will indeed try and create some.

Goldstein claims this war is making the world safer. Ask the families of the 70,000+ Palestinians killed in Gaza if they feel safer. Ask the Lebanese, the Syrians, the Yemenis, the Saudis, the Emiratis and the Kuwaitis who have already been caught in this widening conflict. Ask the Americans and Israelis shipped off to war. Ask the already cashstrapped billions who can’t afford another oil hike. “Safety” for who? At whose expense?

The Chief Rabbi spews his zealotry from a religious pulpit, purportedly on behalf of Judaism for the Jewish community. But, while many in his brainwashed flock lap up his justifications for violence, he is not speaking for all Jews. He does not speak for me, or for other Jews who, like me, oppose violence in the name of God. And he is not speaking for a tradition that has always valued life and questioned power. God willing, we will all return to this, true, version of Judaism some day.

Daniel Friedman

Writer, Activist, Entertainer and member of South African Jews for a Free Palestine