Chapter 28Kingship
The Wars of Hashem
The war that matters is against a false account of who owns the world.
Rambam’s halachic-historical language, and the Chassidic reading of milchamos Hashem as birur. Both, held carefully, and neither turned into fantasy.
Rambam includes among the Messianic criteria that the king will fight the wars of Hashem. The phrase is literal in its original context and refers to defensive and mandated warfare within a halachic framework that is highly constrained — a framework that specifies when war may be declared, who is exempt, what must be offered before a siege, and what may not be destroyed.
It is worth stating plainly that this is not a licence, and that the constraints are the substance. A tradition that requires an offer of peace before a siege and forbids destroying fruit trees during one is not producing a theology of conquest.
The spiritual register
Chassidus reads milchamos Hashem primarily as birur — the sorting and elevation of the world’s raw material. The war in this reading is against the condition in which things present themselves as belonging to themselves.
אֲשֶׁר קָרְךָ בַּדֶּרֶךְHow he happened upon you on the way.
Read also as kor — cold. The achievement was not victory but the reduction of temperature.
How he happened upon you on the way.
Read also as kor — cold. The achievement was not victory but the reduction of temperature.
Amalek, in the same reading, is not primarily an ethnic designation with contemporary application — halachically that lineage is regarded as lost — but a name for a specific posture, treated at length in the next chapter.
The enemy in the inner reading is not a people. It is the proposition that the world is self-owned.
Why both registers must be kept
Drop the literal register and the tradition is being edited: Rambam wrote what he wrote, and a Moshiach whose criteria are entirely interior is not falsifiable, which was the whole point of the criteria.
Drop the spiritual register and you have a religion of conquest, which the sources on the Messianic era conspicuously are not — they culminate in swords becoming agricultural tools and in the earth filled with knowledge, not in dominion.
Held together, they describe something coherent: a historical process that includes conflict, aimed at a condition in which conflict has no remaining function. The end-state described by the prophets is agricultural, judicial and educational. Nothing in it is martial.