Trees, Utopias, and Omelets

Dear Friends and partners,

One of the most frequently-cited quotes around the holiday of Tu Bishvat – the “New Year of the trees” – is the prohibition against the wanton destruction of trees in wartime, found in Deuteronomy 20:19:

"When you besiege a city for many days, waging war against it to capture it, you must not destroy its trees by wielding an axe against them. You may eat from them, but you must not cut them down. Is the tree of the field a human to withdraw before you in the siege?"

Let’s face it: if you are in the middle of a war, forbidding you to cut the trees seems a little extreme, like shooting your own foot. What if you need the trees to create siege engines? What if you need to produce arrows or light fires?

It appears that this is about more than just trees. Indeed, later commentaries derive from this quote the commandment of Bal Tashchit, the prohibition of unnecessary destruction and wastefulness. Maimonides codified this principle in quite stark terms:

"Not only trees, but whoever deliberately destroys household goods, garments, buildings, springs, or food in a destructive manner violates the commandment of Bal Tashchit."

And so this passage triggers a debate. The cutting of trees is a means to the end of winning the war, but by forbidding it, the Torah seems to say that the end doesn’t justify the means.

This idea seems fine in principle, but let’s face it, few people truly believe it. Many of history’s evil men have espoused Nicolo Machiavelli’s maxim, “The end justifies the means.” 

Leon Trotsky complicated the idea when he said, "The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end." In other words, the means should be commensurate with the goodness of the end we seek to achieve. The size of the omelet we want to  make should dictate the number of eggs we’re willing to break. But what if I promised you not just a soggy, bland egg-wrap, but the greatest omelet ever made–the omelet to end all omelets? One so delicious that it satisfies your hunger forever, eliminates dandruff, cures hemorrhoids, and provides everlasting bliss? Wouldn’t that be worth breaking more eggs?

Throughout the horrors of the 20^th century, those caused by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and others, negative human emotions like greed, hatred, jealousy, and the lust for power played important roles but were not the primary determinants. The defining factor of the worst tragedies in human history was that they were all caused by the pursuit of some utopic vision based on lofty ideas. An inquisitor who truly believes that a Jew will burn in hell for all eternity if he doesn’t recant his heresy or Judaism, then shouldn’t the inquisitor consider torture not only justifiable but compassionate? After all, he’s inflicting a few hours of suffering, but dolling out eternal bliss.

That is to say, if you believed that there was one solution to all human problems, that there’s an ideal society of complete happiness and prosperity that we can achieve if only people would do what is necessary to attain it, any price would be justified in the pursuit of that around-the-corner paradise.

And with that, all the things that you could have considered horrific become meritorious. 

As Isaiah Berlin puts it, “There are men who will kill and maim with a tranquil conscience under the influence of the words and writings of those who are certain that perfection can be reached.” For those people, “Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion and violence will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror and slaughter.”

At the root of this is a flattening of complexity: the belief that the central questions of human life, individual or social, have one true answer that can be discovered. This answer can and must be implemented, and those who have found it are the leaders whose word must be law.

Then, the passionate idealist, the one whose head is filled with lofty ideals, from universal justice to the thousand-year Reich to making his country great again, finds himself deporting families, shooting babies, or sending people to the Gulags. Because what’s a bit of suffering compared to the magnificence of the goal.

Judaism offers two responses. One is halachic, legal. No, the end doesn’t justify the means. The Talmud (Sukkah 30) can’t be more precise: "A mitzvah that comes through a transgression is not a mitzvah." You may, under particular circumstances, sacrifice one of them when two mitzvoth are in conflict (Talmud Yoma 58): "One may override the Sabbath to save a life, but one may not sin to bring about a mitzvah."

But the other answer is more profound. It manifests itself in a distrust of absolutes, a distrust of simplistic solutions, and a skepticism toward utopias. Yes, the utopic messianic belief is core to Judaism, but we are not allowed to violate a single mitzvah to hasten his arrival. Rather, God will bring about the messianic era when He finds us worthy, and the only thing we can do is be pious and wait for His reward.

Judaism is a religion of greys. The Talmud spends countless pages trying to discourage zealotry. There’s debate, compromise, and rejection of absolutes. No human has a “THE” truth, only pale approximations. This keeps us from ever being so confident of the justness of our goals to allow a compromising of other values. Instead, like Rabbi Samsom Raphael Hirsch said in the 19th century when utopic visions were raging, "The worth of a goal is measured by the means used to achieve it." Rabbi Hirsch’s rule of thumb: if you need to apply immoral ends to achieve your vision, your vision is probably immoral.

"The refusal to see shades of grey leads to fanaticism,” said Polish dissident Adam Michnik. Every time you believe in absolutes, every time you flatten complexity to adjudicate all the ills of the world to one cause, invariably, coercion and violence will follow.

And here’s the biggest tragedy. When your humanity is compromised, there’s no turning back. Lenin might have genuinely thought of the socialist paradise when he sent the first person to Siberia because while the Gulags were temporary, the idea was eternal. But soon after, the lofty idea disappeared, the socialist utopia was forgotten, and the Gulags remained. When the first deportation didn’t bring about the desired goal, the conclusion wasn’t that the goal could be wrong, but that more deportations were needed to achieve it. Eventually, deportations became a goal in and of themselves. Absolute idealists will always continue to break eggs long after the omelet is forgotten. Always.

In this light, the biblical prohibition of cutting trees down during a siege makes more sense. It’s an imprecation against absolutism and certainty, a celebration of greys, and a reminder that you can never be so affirmed in your goals so as to allow yourself to attain them by unjust means. It forces you to pause, reconsider, and  reality check your utopian ideals.

This message contains nothing new. The Talmudic quotes we saw above are 2,000 years old. Alas, it seems that our times badly need a reminder.

Chag Sameach,

Andrés