The Jewish View of Our Differing Inclinations or Drives of Our Behavior: Yetzer Hatov and Yetzer Hara Part III

 Nadene Goldfoot                                          

Yetzer Hatov is often referred to as our good inclination and Yetzer Hara our evil inclination.  Yetzer Hara is frequently used in a restricted sense to refer to the sexual urge.

Good means:  pleasing in the eyes of the Lord.

For the rabbis, adults are distinguished from children by the yetzer hatov, which controls and channels the drives that exist unchecked in the child. Thus children may seek pleasure and acquisition, but they are not able to create a sanctified relationship or exercise the responsibility to engage in business.                                 

                 Which will be my snack today?  I'm still dieting. How many of us are faced with this choice every day?   

Evil means:  displeasing in the eyes of the Lord.  

Yetzer hara is not a demonic force that pushes a person to do evil, but rather a drive toward pleasure or property or security, which if left unlimited, can lead to evil (cf. Genesis Rabbah 9:7). When properly controlled by the yetzer hatov, the yetzer hara leads to many socially desirable results, including marriage, business, and community.  It provides the energy of life.                          

King David had the largest yetzer hara of all say the rabbis.  He had the chutzpa to challenge the enemy's greatest fighter.  

Good and Evil in a wider sense are what the Divine order has determined as ultimately advantageous or harmful to man (Deut. 30:15.  

The story in Genesis  2-3 concerning the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil is explained by Rabbi Golub, see below in References.   

How we develop a moral sense is like this:

The classical text that describes how children are born with a yetzer hara but only later develop a yetzer hatov comes from Avot d’Rabbi Natan, a third-century midrashic companion volume to the more well known Ethics of the Fathers.  (The Midrash is a book that has formulated certain rules to deduce such hidden and new meanings, sometimes established the law, other finding scriptural support for laws already accepted). (Ethics of Our Fathers (Avot) contains the sayings and religio-ethical teachings of the sages from the 3rd century BCE to the 3rd century CE, read in Ashkenazi communities every Shabbat afternoon during the summer.  Sephardim recite it at home on the Sabbath between Passover and Shavuot.  

At 13 a boy is bar mitzvahed, as well as girls who get bat mitzvahed.  (one who is obliged to fulfill the commandment.  It's a ceremony marking the initiation of a boy or girl at age 13 into the Jewish religious community and into observance of the precepts of the Torah).  

The yetzer hara is 13 years older than the yetzer hatov. While still in the mother’s womb, the yetzer hara begins to develop in a person. After birth, If he begins to violate the Sabbath, nothing stops him. If he commits murder, nothing stops him. If he goes off to another sin, nothing stops him.

Developing a sense of right and wrong after age 13: age of Bar Mitzva

But 13 years later, the yetzer hatov is born. When he violates the Sabbath, it rebukes him, “Airhead [literally: “empty one”]! Don’t you know it says ‘Everyone who violates it will surely be put to death’ (Exodus 31:14)?” If he is about to commit murder, it rebukes him, “Airhead! Don’t you know it says ‘Whoever sheds a man’s blood, by man will his blood be shed’ (Genesis 9:6)?” If he is about to engage in a sexual sin, it rebukes him, “Airhead! Don’t you know it says ‘Both the adulterer and the adulteress will surely be put to death’ (Leviticus 20:10)?” (Avot d’Rabbi Natan 16).

Our Sages teach1 that we each have two yetzers (inclinations) within us, one that seeks to serve our soul and spiritual drive, and one that caters to our ego and physical appetites. Our highest potential is achieved when we are able to channel both of these resident energies in the direction of the greatest possible health and holiness. This requires us to actively engage the positive inclination and work to transform the negative inclination.

How do we avoid evil within ourselves?  Here's 2 thoughts:

Rabbi Aryeh Leib quoted King David: Turn from evil and do good, which he explained to mean that they must be in that order—first turning from evil and only then concentrating on doing good. The scriptural proof for this opinion is commonly bolstered with a simple analogy: “Does it make sense to bring ornate furniture into a home without cleaning it first? What’s the point of beautiful furnishings if they sit in filth?”

Rabbi Schneur Zalman disagreed; he argued in support of a more “offensive” strategy. He taught that by focusing and building on the good qualities already present within us, we can shift the momentum and diminish the magnetic pull of our negative feelings. Rather than putting one’s ego under a microscope, which only brings us into closer contact with the evil inclination, Rabbi Schneur Zalman suggested instead that we should go straight for the soul, so to speak. As he wrote pointedly in the Tanya: “One who wrestles with a dirty opponent becomes dirty himself.” Most political campaigners can attest to this. I take this as don't associate with people who are doing the wrong things you're trying to end in yourself.

  The Kabbalists of the 12-16th century taught in Safed by Isaac Luria's doctrine (1534-1572)  that evil is ultimately grounded in the manifestations of the Divine essence known as the 10 Sephirot of potencies or emanations through which the Divine manifests itself. Isaac was born in Jerusalem but educated in Egypt, then moved to Safed in 1570.  He led an ascetic life which was not considered to be very Jewish.  His teachings caused mystical thought. His teachings have become very popular again by people of other religions.       

Resource:

https://jbstv.org/archives/2862  Rabbi Golub's video on Yetzer hatov and Yetzer hara,  about in middle of video to end. Jewish 101, Episode 18, Human Nature 

https://www.chabad.org/therebbe/article_cdo/aid/4405214/jewish/Chapter-14-How-Not-to-Fight-Evil.htm

Jewish Philosopher, Hanna Arendt, Missed the Meaning of the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem

                                            

                           Eichmann in 1961 on trial in Israel

The most important factor is that to know Hannah Arendt, one has to know what kind of family she came from. 

Hannah Arendt, an only child,  born in Hanover, Germany in October 14,  1906, into a Jewish family  who became a Holocaust survivor,  became a famous female philosopher that turned against Israel's handling of the Eichmann trial. She was named after her paternal grandmother Arendt.   Her first visit to Israel was to witness the trial for the reason of testing her theories she had developed after studying THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM and see how justice would be administered to such a person as Eichmann. Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control and regulation over public and private life.  .She was a person who had not witnessed much of the Nazi regime herself, other than her own experience. I would say that Putin's Russia practices totalitarianism.  

At this point, I doubt if Hannah knew what he was even charged with specifically, or anything about Israel's creation and why.    

We need to know that after 1937 the lord mayor and the state commissioners of Hanover were members of the NSDAP (Nazi party). A large Jewish population then existed in Hanover. In October 1938, 484 Hanoverian Jews of Polish origin were expelled to Poland, including the Grynszpan family. However, Poland refused to accept them, leaving them stranded at the border with thousands of other Polish-Jewish deportees, fed only intermittently by the Polish Red Cross and Jewish welfare organisations. The Grynszpans' son Herschel Grynszpan was in Paris at the time. When he learned of what was happening, he drove to the German embassy in Paris and shot the German diplomat Eduard Ernst vom Rath, who died shortly afterwards.                    

Her father, Paul Arendt (1873-1913) engineer, died when she was 7, but she was raised in a politically progressive, secular family, so I take it that after her father died, the practice of Judaism was forgotten by her mother.   The Arendts had reached Germany from Russia a century earlier.  Usually, Jews moved from Germany to Russia for reasons of anti-Semitism and the political scene of what county owns what land at the moment.                        

her mother, Martha Arendt nee Cohn, born 1874 and died: 1948. They had married on 11 April 1902.    Her father's sister, Henriette, (1874-1922) a policewoman turned social worker,  was an ardent supporter of the Social Democrats.   Her family were merchants of Russian extraction from Königsberg, the East Prussian/German capital.  The Cohns had originally come to Königsberg from nearby Russian territory (now Lithuania) in 1852, as refugees from anti-Semitism, and made their living as tea importers; J. N. Cohn & Company became the largest business in the city.

Hannah's extended family contained many more women, who shared the loss of husbands and children. Hannah's parents were more educated and politically more to the left than her grandparents. The young couple became members of the Social Democrats, rather than the German Democratic Party that most of their contemporaries supported. Paul Arendt was educated at the Albertina (University of Königsberg). Though he worked as an engineer, he prided himself on his love of Classics. He collected a large library, in which Hannah immersed herself. Martha Cohn, a musician, had studied for three years in Paris.

 Arendt's grandparents were members of the Reform Jewish community there. Hannah's paternal grandfather, Max Arendt [de] (1843–1913), was a prominent businessman, local politician, one of the leaders of the Königsberg Jewish community and a member of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Organization for German Citizens of the Jewish Faith). Like other members of the Centralverein he primarily saw himself as a German and disapproved of the activities of Zionists, such as the young Kurt Blumenfeld (1884–1963), who was a frequent visitor to their home and would later become one of Hannah's mentors. 

Hannah, therefore, was not only a Reform Jewess, but had become secular as well.  A part of her family had been against Zionism.                           

Hannah Arendt married Günther Stern in 1929, but soon began to encounter increasing anti-Jewish discrimination in 1930s Nazi Germany. In 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, Arendt was arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism in Nazi Germany. On release, she fled Germany, living in Czechoslovakia and Switzerland before settling in Paris.

Hannah Arendt attended six weeks of the five-month trial with her young cousin from Israel, Edna Brocke. On arrival she was treated as a celebrity, meeting with the trial chief judge, Moshe Landau, and the foreign minister, Golda Meir. 

In her subsequent 1963 report, based on her observations and transcripts, and which evolved into the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, most famously, Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe the phenomenon of Eichmann. She, like others, was struck by his very ordinariness and the demeanor he exhibited of a small, slightly balding, bland bureaucrat, in contrast to the horrific crimes he stood accused of. He was, she wrote, "terribly and terrifyingly normal."

 She examined the question of whether evil is radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness, a tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without a critical evaluation of the consequences of their actions.

Arendt's argument was that Eichmann was not a monster, contrasting the immensity of his actions with the very ordinariness of the man himself. Eichmann, she stated, not only called himself a Zionist, having initially opposed the Jewish persecution, but also expected his captors to understand him. She pointed out that his actions were not driven by malice, but rather blind dedication to the regime and his need to belong, to be a "joiner."  She said he was banal.  (so lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring).

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Otto Adolf Eichmann 19 March 1906 – 1 June 1962) was a German-Austrian SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organisers of the Holocaust – the so-called "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" in Nazi terminology. He was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe during World War II. Eichmann was captured by Mossad agents in Argentina on 11 May 1960 and subsequently found guilty of war crimes in a widely publicized trial in Jerusalem, following which he was executed by hanging in 1962.   

  Hitler and Himmler reviewing Hitler's personal guards.                                     Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy                                                                                                                                                                

Otto Adolf Eichmann, the eldest of five children, was born in 1906 to a Calvinist Protestant family in Solingen, Germany. His parents were Adolf Karl Eichmann, a bookkeeper, and Maria (née Schefferling), a housewife. Eichmann was born on March 19, 1906 near Cologne, Germany. His family moved to Austria following the death of young Adolf''s mother. He spent his youth in Linz, Austria, which had also been Hitler's home town. As a boy, Eichmann was teased about his looks and dark complexion and was nicknamed "the little Jew" by classmates. The elder Adolf moved to Linz, Austria, in 1913 to take a position as commercial manager for the Linz Tramway and Electrical Company, and the rest of the family followed a year later. After the death of Maria in 1916, Eichmann's father married Maria Zawrzel, a devout Protestant with two sons.

He studied all aspects of Jewish culture, attended Jewish meetings and often visited Jewish sections of cities while taking volumes of notes. He became familiar with the issue of Zionism, studied Hebrew and could even speak a bit of Yiddish. He gradually became the acknowledged 'Jewish specialist,' realizing this could have positive implications for his career in the SS.  He soon attracted the attention of Heydrich and SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler who appointed Eichmann to head a newly created SD Scientific Museum of Jewish Affairs.  Eichmann was then assigned to investigate possible "solutions to the Jewish question." He visited Palestine in 1937 to discuss the possibility of large scale immigration of Jews to the Middle East with Arab leaders. British authorities, however, ordered him out of the country.  With the Nazi takeover of Austria in March of 1938, Eichmann was sent to Vienna where he established a Central Office for Jewish Emigration. This office had the sole authority to issue permits to Jews desperately wanting to leave Austria and became engaged in extorting wealth in return for safe passage. Nearly a hundred thousand Austrian Jews managed to leave with most turning over all their worldly possessions to Eichmann's office, a concept so successful that similar offices were established in Prague and Berlin.

He was failing in school.  On the advice of family friend and local SS leader Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Eichmann joined the Austrian branch of the Nazi Party on 1 April 1932, member number 889,895. His membership in the SS was confirmed seven months later (SS member number 45,326). His regiment was SS-Standarte 37, responsible for guarding the party headquarters in Linz and protecting party speakers at rallies, which would often become violent. Eichmann pursued party activities in Linz on weekends while continuing in his position at Vacuum Oil in Salzburg.

A few months after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in January 1933, Eichmann lost his job due to staffing cutbacks at Vacuum Oil. The Nazi Party was banned in Austria around the same time. These events were factors in Eichmann's decision to return to Germany.

Nazi Germany used violence and economic pressure to encourage Jews to leave Germany of their own volition; around 250,000 of the country's 437,000 Jews emigrated between 1933 and 1939. (My own uncle by marriage, Werner Oster, managed to just 

make it out in May of 1939, before they closed the door.) 

“Eichmann reported from his visit to the Land of Israel: The creation of a Jewish State must be prevented“, a headline in Maariv, 28th of April, 1961

Eichmann travelled to British Mandatory Palestine with his superior, Herbert Hagen, in 1937 to assess the possibility of Germany's Jews voluntarily emigrating to that country, disembarking with forged press credentials at Haifa, whence they travelled to Cairo in Egypt.  He went undercover as a journalist.  

There they met Feival Polkes, an agent of the Haganah, with whom they were unable to strike a deal. Polkes suggested that more Jews should be allowed to leave under the terms of the Haavara Agreement, but Hagen refused, surmising that a strong Jewish presence in Palestine might lead to their founding an independent state, which would run contrary to Reich policy. Eichmann and Hagen attempted to return to Palestine a few days later, but were denied entry after the British authorities refused them the required visas. They prepared a report on their visit, which was published in 1982.

Long before the “Final Solution” was conceived at the Wannsee Conference, Hitler and the upper echelon of the Nazi regime had hoped to resolve the “Jewish problem” through forced emigration of the Jews living in Germany. Almost three years before the outbreak of World War II, in 1937, a nondescript German bureaucrat by the name of Adolf Eichmann was sent on a covert visit to Mandatory Palestine, together with his direct supervisor in the Nazi party’s intelligence service (the notorious SD), in order to explore the possibility of deporting Germany’s Jews to the region.

On February 13, 1940, Eichmann organized a forced emigration of the Stettin Jews, of which 230 were killed during the operation. 

In 1941, Eichmann recommended to use Zyklon B in Auschwitz. (There it is.  He came up with killing Jews to get rid of them.   At this time, the extermination of Jews had not yet started. On September 13, 1941, Eichmann contacted Rademacher (Foreign Affairs) to discuss the fate of about 8,000 Jews from Serbia. As Eichmann was unable to find a solution regarding their destination, he chose to let them shoot all. 

On October 10, 1941, Eichmann and Himmler met to discuss about the Final Solution. After the Wannsee Conference (January 20, 1942) – Eichmann consigned all that had been said – He coordinated the Final Solution with the help of his assistants: Alois Brunner, Theodor Dannecker, Rolf Günther and Dieter Wisliceny. 

On July 10, 1942, Eichmann answered Dannecker who asked him what to do with the 4,000 children of the Drancy camp that they should all be deported as soon as the railway convoys would be organized. 

On August 1, 1942, he ordered to all SD representatives in Brussels (Belgium) to deport all stateless Jews. Even when Himmler ordered to cease gassing at the end of the war, Eichmann felt strong because he was supported by Kaltenbrunner. He played a central role in the deportation of the Hungarian Jews. 

After the war, he fled to Argentina but the Israeli secret services spotted him and Eichmann was captured and brought to Jerusalem to be judged. The trial had a big impact throughout the world. 

Hannah Arendt followed all the sessions and wrote a book on Eichmann’s process in which he appears as a typical “office criminal”. The trial allowed many Holocaust survivors and witnesses to tell what they had experienced. The charges were composed of 15 different crimes to be prosecuted. One of them was crime against the Jewish people (which was not mentioned during the Nuremberg Trial in 1946) and crime against humanity. Eichmann was hanged on June 1, 1962.

Arendt's five-part series "Eichmann in Jerusalem" appeared in The New Yorker in February 1963 some nine months after Eichmann was hanged on 31 May 1962. By this time his trial was largely forgotten in the popular mind, superseded by intervening world events. However, no other account of either Eichmann or National Socialism has aroused so much controversy.                  

                   Prosecution Team at Eichmann's Trial 

 Prior to its publication, Arendt was considered a brilliant humanistic original political thinker. However, her mentor, Karl Jaspers, warned her about a possible adverse outcome, "The Eichmann trial will be no pleasure for you. I'm afraid it cannot go well". On publication, three controversies immediately occupied public attention: 

1. the concept of Eichmann as banal 

2, her criticism of the role of Israel and 

3. her description of the role played by the Jewish people themselves.

I. The Nazi goal was to kill all Jews worldwide.

II. Israel was created as the only Jewish state in the world, a refuge for the discrimination against them worldwide

III.  The Jews themselves were able to testify to the world the cruelty and inhumaneness they endured.  Arendt criticized the victims!  

Can one do evil without being evil? This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organizing the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in support of the Nazi’s Final Solution.

In Judaism, Good, means:  pleasing in the eyes of the Lord.  Evil, means:  displeasing in the eyes of the Lord.  What the Divine Order has determined as ultimately advantageous or harmful by man.  This touches the roots of religion.  In the view which considers all opposition or phenomens of variety to be mere illusion, the problem is merely denied.  On the other hand, it is resolutely tackled by Zoroastrianism which poses 2 primeval principles:  Good and Evil=light and darkness, locked in mortal combat.  Dualism results from a logically consistent and ethically perfect good G-d.  Judaism rejected this solution in the pointedly polemical utterance of Isaiah (45:7)"I form the light and create darkness:  I make peace and create evil.  I am the Lord that doeth all these things."  Only in a monotheistic religion does the problem of the origin and continued existence of evil become acute.  

An amoral person can be very dangerous.  What she should have grappled with is: how can a whole country allow amoral behavior internally to exist?  It was happening to Jews in Germany since 1933.  Amoral is an adjective used to describe someone or something that is neither moral nor immoral. That is, something that's amoral operates outside the confines of morality. A good example of this would be to think of a robot that is programmed to demolish buildings. This hypothetical robot has amoral coding that could be useful for demolishing buildings for construction projects, but it could also be horrifying if used in warfare. However, the robot and its coding is not concerned with morality; the amoral robot just does as it is told.

Eichmann can even take notes during trial 

Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong’.

Isn't this amoral behavior?  Lacking a moral sense; unconcerned with the rightness or wrongness of something.  Amorality, consists in a person's not having any moral beliefs at all- i.e. for any given act (or kind of act), such a person neither believes. that it is morally wrong nor that it is not morally wrong.  Can't we say this about every Nazi that was involved in the Holocaust of World War II?  

Portrait of Adolf Eichmann. SS-Obersturmbannführer Karl Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962) was head of the Department for Jewish Affairs in the Gestapo from 1941 to 1945 and was chief of operations in the deportation of three million Jews to extermination camps.
Photo credit: USHMM

Eichmann was one of the major players, a leader in the organization of it all.  He was responsible for many many deaths of which turned out to be 6 million of them.  

Whatever had happened to Hannah's moral compass that she could not see the evil in Eichmann's actions?  Anyone that went along with Hitler joined in his evil deeds.  Evil Shmevil, it's all bad.  

"an amoral attitude to sex"

Similar:

unprincipled

without sta

Updated on 6/27/22

Resource: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Eichmann

https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/eichmann-1906-1962-adolf.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanover

https://spartacus-educational.com/Gunther_Stern.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_K%C3%B6nigsberg

https://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/biographies/eichmann-biography.htm

Good versus Evil

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                  

        
There must be  one opinion as to what is good and what is evil in this world just as there is but one G-d. Surely he isn't telling the Christians something different from the Jews or the Muslims.  There must be one accepted form of good and evil that we all can accept.  

 It's how mankind judges for themselves what they are doing and what category it fits into as to what we see as good or evil.  The highest form of goodness to perform is to save a life.  We can't all be lifesavers, such as what swimming pools hire, and such, but if the moment comes, that is a huge piece of goodness.  Evil would be to take a life such as in murder.

"To hate evil is as much a virtue as to love justice.

To hate cruelty is as much a virtue as to love mercy.

But it is not enough only to refrain from evil or to disdain cruelty.  One must also actively pursue justice and mercy for it is written in :  (Psalms 34:15, 37:27.)
  1.  Turn away from evil
  2. Do good.  

We start by being kind to animals. 

Eating the flesh of a living animal is forbidden. This teaches us to be sensitive to cruelty to animals

1. The Torah prohibits the torture or causing of pain to any living creature.  It is our duty to save every living creature from pain or distress, even if it has no owner.  
2. If the animal has hurt a human, we are allowed to kill it.
3. We look upon hunting which  involves an element of cruelty to animals in the kill as something we are not to do. .  Usually it has no utilitarian value as meat is available in stores.
4. We do not sit down and eat until our animals are fed.  "And I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you shall eat and be satisfied." Deut. 11:15)
5. We may drink before giving water to our animals because man is less capable of enduring thirst than hunger.  "Drink, and I will give your camels drink also." (Genesis 24:14.)
6. Show kindness to our animals:  A righteous man considers the life of his beast.  (Proverbs: 12:10)

Rules of Engagement  in War

War has been with us ever since man crawled out of caves.  Moses in Deuteronomy 20:19-20,  4,000 years ago,  laid down conduct in war: in the 2nd millennium BCE

 1. When you besiege a city for many days to wage war against it to seize it, do not destroy its trees by swinging an axe against them,  for from it you will eat; and you shall not cut it down;  
2. Is the tree of the field a man that it should enter the siege  before you?  
3. Only a tree that you know is not a food tree, it you may destroy and cut down, and build a bulwark against the city that makes war with you, until it is conquered.  

Moses in Deuteronomy 20:10-12, 
1. When you draw near to a city to wage war against it, you shall call out to it for peace.  
2. It shall be that if it responds to you in peace and opens for you, then the entire people found within it shall be as tribute for you, and they shall serve you.  
3. But if it does not make peace with you, but makes war with you, you shall besiege it.  
4. ...and you shall smite all its males by the blade of the sword.  
5. Only the women, the small children, the animals, and everything that will be in the city---all its booty---may you plunder for yourselves.
The enemy back then was given the opportunity make peace.  Those who accepted this offer were required to pay taxes, perform national service, and if they were going to remain in the land, accept the 7 Noahide Laws of Behavior. Evidently it was a new way of thinking for many.

In 1864 the Geneva Convention was signed by some major European powers.  Nations came together to accept practice in War and came to positive international  humanitarian laws called "international treaties on the laws of war.  The opposite of positive laws of war was customary laws of war.  Some of these were discussed in the Nuremberg War Trials.  .  

The Hague Convention of 1907 was accepted by all civilized nations for about 50 years, and were part of the customary laws of war and binding on all parties whether the party had been a signer to the treaty or not

Decisions of laws of war:

1. Wars should be limited to achieve political goals that started the war; territory control, and should not include unnecessary destruction.
2. Wars should be brought to an end as quickly as possible.   WWI lasted from 1914 to 1918; WWII lasted from 1939 to 1945; Korean War lasted from 1950 to 1953, Viet Nam War lasted from November 1, 1955 to August 15, 1973 with it really being over April 1975; Gulf War of Desert Storm last from January 16, 1991 to February 28, 1991-43 days; January 29, 2002-March 19, 2003 Iraq War when Iraq, North Korea and Iran were called the Axis of Evil by President Bush.  
3. People and property that do not contribute to the war effort should be protected against destruction and hardship.  (refugees and their homes) 

Acts of Kindness

Being Good includes doing acts of kindness.  This is when we may even have to exert ourself on behalf of another. Even if this results in our inconvenience or to the injury of our interests, we are to show humanity and love for our fellow mortals.  We are taught in the  Torah, "And you shall love your neighbor as yourself in  (Lev: 19:18).   Hillell said:  "what is hateful to you, do not do to others."  We call this the Golden Rule.

 1. We are taught to extend the hospitality of one's home for food and lodging as the need arises.
 2. We are to visit a person who is ill as soon as possible when you hear about the illness.
3. Orphaned girls should be helped to marry.
4. If you find something that isn't yours, you are to return it to its rightful owners.
5. You are to help keep  money or property of another from being  lost or damaged.
6. If you see a neighbor whose life is in danger, you must go to every trouble and expense to help him.  "You shall not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor." (Lev. 19:16).
7. If you hear of a conspiracy against another human, you must tell him to reveal the danger. "You shall not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor."

We see so much of what is mentioned here as still being enacted in warfare today.  We can count our civilization having existed already for 4,000 years.  Surely the idea of good and evil must be recognized as being important if we are to continue living together.

Evil is when Iran is busy making uranium with the purpose of making an atomic bomb to drop on Israel.  When Prime Minister Netanyahu was speaking with Prime Minister Enrico Letta yesterday,  "He noted that many countries in Europe, North America and Asia have nuclear energy with neither centrifuges nor plutonium and added that Iran is insisting on centrifuges and plutonium in order to be able to produce enough materials for a nuclear bomb.'"  Evil is also being demonstrated by the world ignoring this fact.

We are told  to turn away from evil and in its place to do good.  We cannot turn away from evil by ignoring it.  I hope we are all on the same page as to what is evil and what is good.  Such use of uranium is for evil as its purpose is to destroy and to kill.  
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Resource:  To Be a Jew by Rabbi Hayim Haleavy Donin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_war
http://www.auburn.edu/~allenkc/noahide.html
http://www.warchronicle.com/iraq/news/timeline_two_wars.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia