Choosing to Stand (as if) Unafraid

On Soldiers, Fear and God - Shoftim

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Wishing you all a Chodesh tov - a wonderful beginning to the month of Elul!

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Choosing to Stand (as if) Unafraid

Last week I joined a Zoom call with a group of wonderful Jewish professionals who wanted to connect and discuss some questions facing their local community. They live in one of those places doing worse than New York City right now.

I commented on the explosive antisemitism around them. I offered empathy, saying I assumed they might be feeling besieged, dealing with a lot of fear and uncertainty.

The three people on my screen didn’t hesitate. They disagreed immediately. “We’re feeling defiant,” said one. “Feisty,” added another. Then they gave me example after example of how their community was responding to this moment: with a resolution to fight.

I didn’t show this to them, but I had an immediate gut reaction. Wow. I loved their response so much. I loved that despite everything they were facing, their impulse was feisty. I even envied them. I had been knee-deep in Michigan politics analysis and the vibe around me was scared.

I kept thinking about that conversation long after it ended. I have realized that there’s something in me that didn’t want to let go of fear. I think I am afraid that if I’m unafraid I will become naive or complacent, and that this will lead to inaction.

This made me wonder whether I was right. Is fear an asset because it leads to action? I had been assuming there were only two postures available: fear that fuels action, or calm that breeds complacency. But there is a third posture, and it might be the only one that actually makes sense: courage, joined to action.

The reason this posture is critically necessary is that you cannot win a war if you are overtaken by fear, if you don’t believe you can win. This isn’t new wisdom. The Torah understood this, and legislated accordingly: courage is a choice, and that choice changes what an army can accomplish.

This week’s Torah portion, Shoftim, teaches this through one of the strangest military laws in existence.

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Our Torah portion, Shoftim, continues Moses’ final speech and turns to institution building: courts, the powers and limits placed on a king, prophets who speak in God’s name. Among the laws of war is one about who gets to walk away from battle.

Before battle, Moses commands, officers must address the all-male troops and announce a series of exemptions. Whoever has built a house and not yet lived in it, go home. Whoever has planted a vineyard and not yet enjoyed its fruit, go home. Whoever has betrothed a woman and not yet married her, go home.

There’s something compassionate and even hopeful about these exemptions. We are told: if you are busy creating Jewish life, nurturing seeds that will grow, focus on that and not on staving off enemies.

But what’s most fascinating is the final exemption, different from all the others: “Is there a man who is fearful and softhearted? Let him go and return to his house, and let him not melt his brothers’ hearts like his own heart.” (Deuteronomy 20:8)

Officers must address their soldiers and simply say: if you are scared, you should not be fighting.

If we think about this, we will realize how bizarre and even dangerous it is. Armies usually hold together by making it costly to leave. For much of human history, deserters were executed.

The Torah does something unique. On the eve of battle, it not only legalizes walking away. It encourages those who want to walk away simply because they are scared.

This year I started wondering: wouldn’t this empty the ranks? Who among us, watching the enemy’s swords glint across the valley, would not be tempted to take the exit?

The Torah’s reasoning is that fear is contagious, and its calculus seems simple: better to have a smaller army of men willing to fight than a big army filled with men who might make each other afraid.

Part of what makes this exemption so extraordinary is that it is not verifiable. There is no external authority that can look into your heart and see if you are afraid. No one measures courage.

This means that the exemption ultimately becomes a subjective choice. A soldier can stand there anxious, fear moving through him, and still decide not to walk away. He can choose the posture of the courageous before he feels courageous. The law creates room for exactly that decision.

Each soldier decides for himself what he is. The ones who remain, having been given every permission to leave, have declared themselves courageous.

Maimonides pushes this further. In a war of survival, he rules, the exemptions disappear and everyone fights, “even a groom from his chamber.”

Once battle is joined, a soldier is forbidden to dwell on his fear, “for the blood of the entire people hangs upon him” (Laws of Kings 7:15).

For both laws, fear is dangerous to the stakes of winning. What a people believes about its own chances changes the fates of wars. Courage, the decision to take the posture of the unafraid even while fear is still in you, is a strategic asset, as real as swords or numbers.

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I keep imagining what it would feel like to stand in an ancient army and hear my commanding officer announce that anyone who is fearful may step aside.

I would then wonder: Do I have what it takes to fight? Do I even want to be unafraid?

I think these are the questions in front of us right now.

Shoftim tells us courage can be chosen, and that it is the most important asset in winning a war. But it doesn’t fully tell us what helps us choose it.

For a soldier in an ancient Judean army, that might have been the men beside him, knowing what he was fighting for, his family waiting behind the lines, the memory that his ancestors were slaves in Egypt who would have given anything for the chance to stand and fight at all. Community, purpose, memory. But there’s more.

Today is Rosh Chodesh Elul, the start of the month of introspection, the month when we’re taught to draw closer to God. And I want to add one more weapon to our arsenal, one more way to help those of us who want to stand unafraid choose to do so, maybe the most powerful one: God.

God: the belief that we are not cosmically alone, that there is a higher judge and a higher power watching over us. The knowledge that the Jewish people have always been outnumbered, and have still endured, because God was on our side. The conviction, one my teacher Rabbi Sacks used to repeat, that God created us in love and with love.

When God is present in your mind, when you know that this is a month built for drawing closer, for reaching greater spiritual presence, for understanding there is just One King who decides the fate of every human, courage becomes something easier to choose.

Wishing all of us a good month, and a season not only of introspection but of decision: to acknowledge our fears without surrendering to them, to stand as if unafraid, and to meet this moment with courage—and perhaps a little feistiness.

Shabbat Shalom and Chodesh Tov,

Mijal