Rabbi Shlomo Goren on conduct during war

Despite the explicit Torah obligation to wage war, we are also commanded to have mercy on the enemy, and even during wartime, only to kill when it is necessary for self-defense for the purpose of conquest and victory; and not to attack non-combatants, and certainly not to strike at women and children who are not participating in the war effort.  With the exception of obligatory wars about which we were explicitly commanded by the Torah in ancient times, "You shall save alive nothing that breathes" (Devarim 20:16), since the enemies of that time also practiced cruelty, and so the Torah was stringent about them.  Nothing may be learned from them, God forbid, about other wars or about our time.  

Rabbi Shlomo Goren, Meshiv Milchama I, p. 14)[7]

Military Rabbinate: Founded and led the IDF Military Rabbinate from 1948 to 1968 (rising to the rank of brigadier-general), personally accompanying troops into multiple wars including the 1948 War of Independence, the 1956 Sinai Campaign, and the Six-Day War. In 1972 elected Chief Rabbi of Israel; the fourth Ashkenazi Jew to hold office.

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Tsundoku

 Tsundoku (積ん読) is a Japanese word that describes the habit of acquiring books and letting them pile up unread — buying more books than you can actually read, creating a growing stack (or library) of untouched volumes.

Saw this on the web. How true.

 

Kush

Adults are far more stupid than I had anticipated as a child

An absolute war crime: the total destruction of the Palatinate.

 

Auguste Bardamu

@AugusteBardamu

·

9h

Translated from French

The myth of the "Sun King" is a masterpiece of propaganda. Behind the gilding of Versailles, Louis XIV conceals an absolute war crime: the total destruction of the Palatinate. In 1688, the King of France makes a decision of unprecedented brutality to protect his borders. With his Minister of War, Louvois, he orders the region of Germany to be wiped off the map. The directives sent to the generals in the field are explicit and utterly pitiless: "The King's intention is that the Palatinate be ruined from top to bottom." The French army does not stop at occupation. It razes everything. General de Tessé, tasked with carrying out the deed, writes to his superiors himself, terrified by the scale of the disaster he is unleashing: "I do not believe that in eight days my heart will return to its ordinary state." But the machinery of the state crushes everything. Mannheim, Speyer, Worms, and Heidelberg are methodically plundered and then reduced to ashes. Castles are dynamited. Churches are desecrated. Vineyards are uprooted, and grain reserves are set ablaze. The human toll is apocalyptic. More than 100,000 civilians are deliberately driven from their homes in the dead of a freezing winter. Those who try to resist are put to the sword. The others succumb to the cold, typhus, and famine on the roads of exile. From the gilded corridors of Versailles, Louis XIV's own sister-in-law, the Princess Palatine, watches helplessly as her native people are massacred. Her private letters bear witness to the nightmare and the indecency of the court: "I spend my nights weeping. Every day they tell me new horrors about the misery to which my poor compatriots have been reduced." Even in the 17th century—an era when war was notoriously ferocious—this act shocks the world. All of Europe brands the operation as pure barbarism. A savagery so brazen that it unites every European power against France. While the court dances and powders its noses, an entire region of Europe is literally erased from the map on the king's orders. History has remembered the grandiose splendor of Versailles, but its true legacy is shrouded in blood and ashes.

The wise will understand.