DEUT984 We begin with the value of peace. Every major prayer in Jewish liturgy concludes with the plea for peace, including the grace after meals, the Amidah, the priestly blessing, and the Kaddish. (Numbers Rabbah 11:7, Deuteronomy Rabbah 5:14). Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn notes that “Not one single Jewish festival or holiday celebrates the waging or the winning of a war! Not one!” “Judaism on War, Peace, and Conscientious Objection,” Jewish Digest 15, no. 4 (April 1970): 52. (Hanukkah, as the name indicates, celebrates the rededication of the Temple, not the war that preceded it.) From the time that Isaiah revealed his vision of a future when even the wolf shall lie down with the lamb (11:6), peace has been a cornerstone of Jewish Messianism. “Great is peace,” said the Rabbis, for all blessings are contained in it.... great is peace, for God's name is peace.” Numbers Rabbah 11:7. In light of this background, the question of this chapter is: When may the pervasive value of peace be superseded to permit or even demand hostile actions against another country as a matter of justice? Contemporary history offers many examples of political and economic interference in the affairs of one nation by another. Even in the few periods of history in which Jews have had political autonomy, however, the Jewish state was small and hardly in a position to affect another in these indirect ways. Consequently, it should not be surprising that Jewish sources on this are sparse. The Sifrei Devarim, the earliest rabbinic interpretation of Deuteronomy, does include one comment on this issue, and it is rather surprising. The Torah says, “when you approach a town to attack it, you shall offer it terms of peace.” Deuteronomy 20:10 Commenting on the introductory clause of that verse, the rabbi said: “‘to attack it’-- and not to make it suffer starvation or thirst and not to make it die the death of sicknesses.” Sifrei Devarim to Deuteronomy 20:10, “Shofetim,” par. 199. On the one hand, this source articulates a manifestly moral stance for our age on the ethics of using chemical warfare to contaminate the food and water supply, to despoil the environment, or to inflict illness as a means of waging a war. On the other, this source seems to require that the only legitimate form of intervention is military. Cutting off the food or water supply of an enemy is clearly a step short of killing them outright, especially since it provides an extended opportunity for the enemy to change its mind and sue for peace, and so one would expect that that would be preferable to direct attack. This source, though, apparently prefers the latter to the former, perhaps to avoid making the deaths of the enemy soldiers any more agonizing than they need be. This source never made it to the later codes of Jewish law, however, and so its authority is questionable. Moreover, in Jewish law, as in other legal systems, killing or injuring a person is always treated more seriously than damaging his or her property, and so one would presume that nonmilitary intervention would generally be considered preferable to military forms. The grounds for political or economic intervention are not spelled out in the tradition, undoubtedly because the opportunity never arose; only the rationales for waging war are discussed. Consequently, one must extend by analogy the justifications for military intervention to political and economic forms. No thorough analysis of that sort has yet been produced. As a result, the only guidance in the Jewish tradition in regard to political and economic interference is that, as a general rule, it is preferable to military means.