‘National Movements and International Law: Rabbi Shlomo Goren’s Understanding of International Law’ (2014)

The intellectual significance of Rabbi Shlomo Goren lies not simply in his attempt to reconcile Halacha with modern international law, but in the much larger civilizational problem his work confronted: the reconstruction of a sovereign Jewish jurisprudence after nearly two millennia in which Judaism functioned as the legal and ethical system of a dispersed minority community rather than as the governing framework of a state. The 2014 article by Ilan Fuchs and Aviad Yehiel Hollander, “National Movements and International Law: Rabbi Shlomo Goren’s Understanding of International Law,” is therefore best understood not merely as a study in religion and law, but as an examination of the deeper crisis generated when an exilic legal tradition suddenly reacquires political sovereignty and must once again address armies, borders, diplomacy, occupation, minority populations, and participation within a universal international order.
The central achievement of the article is its recognition that Goren neither rejected international law outright nor simply absorbed it into a liberal framework. Rather, he attempted to construct what the authors aptly describe as a “critical dialogue” between Halacha and international legal norms. Yet the full depth of Goren’s project emerges only when one recognizes that he was attempting to rebuild the sources and structure of halachic authority under conditions of renewed sovereignty. His jurisprudence therefore represents one of the earliest and most ambitious efforts to formulate a theory of Jewish statehood adequate to the realities of modern politics while preserving the covenantal and particularistic foundations of Jewish tradition.
The historical rupture confronting Goren was immense. Rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple evolved overwhelmingly under conditions of political exile. Jewish law became extraordinarily sophisticated in the governance of ritual life, communal institutions, commerce, contracts, family relations, and minority survival within larger imperial systems. Yet the practical jurisprudence of sovereignty largely receded from lived experience. Questions concerning constitutional order, military ethics, territorial annexation, civilian immunity, treatment of prisoners, diplomacy, and relations with foreign powers remained largely theoretical after the collapse of Jewish political independence in antiquity. Consequently, when the State of Israel emerged in 1948, Religious Zionist thinkers faced not merely a political challenge but a jurisprudential vacuum. Classical halachic literature had never developed a fully modern public law tradition because the historical conditions necessary for such a development had not existed for centuries.
Goren occupied a uniquely consequential position within this transformation. As the first Chief Rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces and later Chief Rabbi of Israel, he was a halachic architect. The formation of the Israeli military, the integration of religious observance within a modern army, the treatment of enemy combatants, the handling of occupied territory, and the status of minorities within a Jewish state were no longer abstract theological questions. They had become immediate administrative and moral realities. Goren’s task was therefore unprecedented in post-biblical Jewish history: to formulate a halachic framework capable of governing sovereign Jewish power.
This required not merely new rulings but a transformation in legal methodology. One of the most important aspects of Goren’s jurisprudence, and one only partially developed in the Fuchs and Hollander article, is that he effectively expanded the halachic toolkit by partially bypassing the dominant interpretive structure of diaspora-era rabbinic legalism. In classical post-Talmudic jurisprudence, biblical texts are ordinarily mediated through centuries of rabbinic commentary, decisional precedent, and legal formalization. Goren, however, repeatedly returned directly to biblical narratives, ethical motifs, and pre-exilic political categories in order to reconstruct a sovereign Jewish legal consciousness.
This move was radical precisely because it implicitly acknowledged that the inherited halachic canon lacked sufficient sovereign content for the realities confronting a modern state. The kings of Israel, biblical warfare, covenantal territory, and narratives of national power became jurisprudential resources once again because sovereignty had returned as a lived condition. Goren therefore did not merely interpret texts under conditions of sovereignty. Sovereignty transformed the interpretive architecture of Halacha.
The significance of this methodological shift cannot be overstated. Diaspora Judaism developed through layers of rabbinic mediation precisely because Jews lacked direct political authority. Under conditions of exile, legal reasoning naturally gravitated toward communal administration, ritual discipline, and minority survival. Biblical political categories remained authoritative but largely dormant. Goren effectively reversed that historical process by retrieving the Bible as a living constitutional source for modern Jewish statehood. His repeated appeals to biblical kings, military narratives, and covenantal claims were not rhetorical flourishes but part of an attempt to reconstruct the jurisprudence of sovereign Jewish existence.
This reconstruction also explains the unusual interpretive flexibility visible throughout his work. Goren frequently elevated aggadic, narrative, and ethical materials into quasi-normative status because conventional halachic precedent alone could not fully address the moral dilemmas generated by sovereign power. The concept of lifnim mishurat hadin, conduct beyond strict legal obligation, became especially important in this regard. Through such concepts, Goren created a broader category of legal-moral reasoning that allowed humanitarian and universal ethical concerns to become internal religious obligations rather than external secular impositions.
This point becomes especially clear in his reconstruction of Jewish military ethics. One of the central challenges confronting Goren was the relationship between Halacha and modern humanitarian law. The conduct of warfare in the twentieth century had become increasingly governed by international conventions concerning civilians, prisoners of war, enemy dead, and proportionality. Yet Jewish law lacked a continuous sovereign military tradition comparable to the Christian just war tradition that had developed from Augustine of Hippo through Thomas Aquinas into modern international humanitarian law.
Goren’s solution was neither simple accommodation nor rejection. Instead, he sought to demonstrate that the ethical principles underlying modern humanitarian law were already latent within Jewish sources themselves. His interpretation of Ben Azzai’s reading of Genesis is especially revealing. By emphasizing the shared ancestry of all humanity through Adam, Goren constructed a theological basis for universal human dignity extending beyond ethnic or national boundaries. Enemy combatants retained dignity because all human beings participated in a common divine origin.
At the same time, Goren’s approach was not merely derivative of liberal humanitarianism. He insisted that the moral foundations of humane warfare arose internally from Torah rather than externally from international conventions. This was crucial to his broader intellectual project. Goren feared that if Halacha could not produce doctrines analogous to equality, minority protections, and humanitarian ethics, it would become irrelevant to the Zionist project and vulnerable to accusations of moral primitivism. The emerging postwar international order increasingly defined legitimacy through what nineteenth- and early twentieth-century jurists had termed the “standard of civilization.” States were expected to uphold norms of equality, minority protection, and civilized conduct if they wished to participate fully in international society.
Goren clearly understood that a Jewish state detached from such norms would face not only diplomatic isolation but civilizational delegitimation. Yet his response was not secularization. Rather, he attempted to invert the moral hierarchy implicit within the discourse of civilization. Because the Jewish people had endured centuries of minority vulnerability and exile, they were uniquely positioned, in his view, to model ethical sovereignty. The humanitarian achievements of modern civilization were therefore not foreign imports into Judaism but partial reflections of moral truths already embedded within Torah.
This concern with legitimacy explains Goren’s remarkable engagement with constitutional equality and minority rights during the formative years of the Israeli state. In his early constitutional writings, he explicitly insisted that the future Jewish state would not conflict with international law. He supported guarantees for minority populations and, in some contexts, abolition of the death penalty, not merely as pragmatic concessions but as evidence that Jewish sovereignty could embody a morally advanced civilization. The Jewish people, having suffered as minorities throughout history, possessed a special obligation to model just treatment of minorities within their own state.
Yet Goren’s universalism always remained bounded by covenantal sovereignty. This limitation appears most clearly in his treatment of Judea and Samaria following the Six-Day War. Although he acknowledged the practical force of international law and the de facto commitments incurred by Israeli participation within the international order, he nevertheless insisted that Jewish sovereignty over the biblical Land of Israel ultimately derived from divine covenant rather than from international recognition. International law could regulate administrative arrangements and practical governance, but it could not nullify the eternal relationship between the Jewish people and their ancestral land.
Here one sees most clearly the layered structure of Goren’s jurisprudence. International law possesses genuine authority, but only within boundaries established by Torah and covenant. The doctrine of Dina Demalchuta Dina, traditionally meaning “the law of the land is law,” became central to this framework. Goren extended the concept beyond domestic governance into the international sphere. Because the Knesset had accepted participation within the international legal order, international law acquired a degree of halachic validity. Yet this validity remained procedural and contingent rather than metaphysically ultimate. International law governed participation within the international system, but it could not override divine covenant or negate Jewish sovereignty over the Land of Israel.
This distinction clarifies the apparent inconsistency in Goren’s treatment of international law. At times he speaks in strikingly universalist terms, emphasizing civilian immunity, humanitarian obligations, and universal human dignity. At other moments he treats international law primarily as an instrument of geopolitical force. The contradiction is not accidental. Goren simultaneously occupied two different conceptual worlds.
In the first, international law represented genuine moral achievement and the ethical maturation of civilization. In the second, it functioned as an operational system of power regulating participation within global politics. This explains his remarkable argument that diplomatic pressure could be treated analogously to military pressure in halachic reasoning during the Sinai withdrawal. International law became not merely a moral language but a structure of coercive realities through which sovereign states were compelled to navigate.
In this respect, Goren’s jurisprudence displays a surprisingly modern realism. He implicitly recognized that legal systems derive authority not solely from abstract moral truth but from embedded structures of power and recognition. International law mattered because Israel existed within an international order capable of exerting practical consequences. Yet that order never acquired ultimate theological authority. Covenantal sovereignty remained prior.
The sociological implications of Goren’s work are profound. Viewed through the lens of Stephen P. Turner’s analysis of tacit knowledge and expertise, Goren appears as a jurist operating within a zone where inherited rules proved insufficient for unprecedented historical conditions. There existed no settled halachic framework governing aerial warfare, occupation, democratic constitutionalism, or international diplomacy. Consequently, Goren relied heavily upon institutional intuition, historical analogy, practical judgment, and interpretive improvisation, all while presenting his conclusions as continuous with tradition. His jurisprudence therefore illustrates the extent to which sovereignty transforms legal consciousness.
Indeed, one might say that Goren’s deepest contribution was his recognition that Jewish morality under sovereignty could not simply replicate Jewish morality under exile. Exilic Judaism conceptualized ethics largely from the standpoint of vulnerability and minority survival. Sovereign Judaism, by contrast, was forced to confront the moral responsibilities generated by coercive power. Questions that had remained theoretical for centuries became immediate and concrete: What constrains national violence? How should enemies be treated? What obligations exist toward civilians? How can a covenantal people wield military power without moral corruption?
Goren did not fully resolve these dilemmas because they are not fully resolvable. Rather, his importance lies in the seriousness with which he confronted them. He understood more clearly than many later religious-nationalist figures that a Jewish state could neither survive as a purely secular liberal entity detached from covenantal identity nor function as a purely theological polity indifferent to international legitimacy and universal norms. His life’s work therefore became an attempt to mediate between two legal civilizations whose foundational assumptions often remained fundamentally in tension: the universalist order of modern international law and the particularistic covenantal logic of Jewish sovereignty.
The enduring significance of Goren lies precisely in this unresolved mediation. He was among the first major rabbinic thinkers compelled to grapple with the full moral and jurisprudential consequences of Jewish power after exile. Sovereignty, he understood, changes not merely politics but law, ethics, interpretation, and theology. His work therefore remains one of the foundational attempts to articulate what a sovereign Halacha might look like in the modern world: neither wholly absorbed into liberal universalism nor sealed within uncompromising particularism, but existing uneasily and creatively between them.