#moshe halbertal

"A past sacrifice can be a genuine motivating force for a political purpose; it can serve manipulative and dangerous functions as well. The source of its danger lies in the sacrifice sanctifying something that is unworthy and then holding future generations captive to its lingering onus. A primordial sacrifice—not original consent—might become the strongest glue adhering individuals to a political project."

"A pleasure that has a memory numbs our ability to repeat it."

"The past is never a closed event; its meaning continues to unfold and retroactively change in relation to new developments. This is as true of personal life as it is of historical events. ... This open-endedness of the past means, in effect, something much more radical than the common claim that we don't control the future of our efforts, given our finitude and limits. Rather, it is a more daring assertion: whatever we accomplish in the past is at the mercy of future action."

"War is a perverse, though powerful, form of confronting birth and death. By risking their lives, soldiers earn their right to live. They become, though this baptism of fire, owners of their own lives. What was given to them at birth arbitrarily and without choice belongs to them now. In risking their lives they mock death, and in killing they own death by taking life; it is as if they work out the drama of rebirth and death in that same action."

"...the connection between self-sacrifice and violence is established through a dangerous yet common reversal between two claims: since it is the mark of the good that it deserves sacrifice, the reverse must be true too—namely, that sacrifice makes something into a good. ... Self-sacrifice, with all its subtleties and complexities, enables violence because it allows a role reversal between the aggressor and the victim."

“Sacrifice is an essential phenomenon of religious, ethical, and political life. In its two senses, as “sacrificing to” and “sacrificing for,” the linguistic use of the term covers immensely diverse experiences. It touches on ritual, atonement, substitution, self-transcendence, war, the responsibility to the past, and the state. Yet there is something at the core of this varied, rich phenomenon that justifies the use of the same word to express both meanings in so many languages.”

Killing 40 civilians in one go is “reasonable,” says Israel army ethicist