War Games

Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 22 May 2023

As both Seth and Leo pointed out in their divrei Torah this morning, in this week’s parashah we read about a great census of the Israelites in the desert that is taken primarily for a military purpose. They have already been attacked during their time in the wilderness, and there is a real need for defence.

And in reading that this week – of each of the tribes of Israel  camped under their military banners – along with war being so much in our headlines, I have been thinking about the question of how we teach our children about war. How do we prepare them for the reality of a world in which people kill each other in a professionalised and legalised way?

One common way of teaching is through games and play.

I recently saw a war-based board game that I desperately wanted to play, it look incredibly absorbing, interesting and exciting. That was until I realised that, in order to actually sit down and play the game, one of the players would be fighting on behalf of the Nazis against the Soviets in the battle of Stalingrad. I do still kind of want to play this game, but that fact is very much holding me back.

Obviously there is a big enough market of players out there for this kind of game. The Battle of Britain version is coming out this summer. And I am sure that a huge amount of historical research goes into them. But I couldn’t play as a Nazi – and I probably wouldn’t have much fun playing at defending myself against one either.

For some, perhaps engaging in science fiction and fantasy war games is less problematic – when you’re not playing as “real” combatants, it’s not such a problem to be killing this band of fictional aliens or bringing down this troll as part of a military conflict.

Others love historical war gaming for its creativity. They see the creation of military narratives almost as a form of historical fiction. The story of the real history is simply conceived as a backdrop onto which can be projected all kinds of smaller stories that be imaginatively reinterpreted as part of an enjoyable social experience.

And this reflects quite a profound truth about war itself. Once you know who the people are that you are cheering on or having to gun down, once you know their names and their faces, once you know they are also real human beings, war becomes much harder, much more difficult to conceive as a game.
Following the Second World War, board game designers in Germany sought to create games that avoided direct conflict and focused on rewarding players for good strategic and economic thinking. This created generations of games that centred on each individual player winning their own victory points rather than pursuing the objective of crushing their opponents. This culminated in the worldwide success in the 1990s of a game that all of us will probably have heard of if not played: Settlers of Catan.

Catan’s gentle race to be the one with the most resources on a fictional island is very different to the games that became the most popular in the Allied countries after the war: Monopoly and Risk are two that spring to mind. Both involve aggressively eliminating one’s opponent in order to win the game. This is the difference between the winners and losers in real life conflict reflected in the kind of games they create and play. And yet in many ways it is the Eurogame that has won in the world of board games – with the worldwide success of Settlers of Catan, most games that come on to the market today are incorporating some of their elements.

But, as well as moving attention and focus away from armed conflict, play and gaming can also make us more acutely aware of the human cost of war. In the 1970s, Virginia-based educator John Hunter invented the World Peace Game. The object of the game was to give children the opportunity to get inside the process of international politics and the resolution of international crises. Over the course of a number of days, participants in the World Peace game, aged 6-10, are given specific roles on the world stage. Teams of children are given control of fictional countries, and they inherit situations that need to be resolved – whether those are wars over water rights, famines, environmental disasters. They are told they have a number of interlocking crises that need to be resolved before the game can be won. The whole group will lose if any country is less well off than it was at the beginning of the game.

As the teacher and facilitator of the game, Hunter’s role was never to tell students how to solve any of these crises, but simply to ensure that they understood the impact of whatever decisions they made within the game.

In a case in which his 10-year-old students would send their fictional troops into war, if casualties were sustained, Hunter would instruct the president of the country that had sent their troops into battle to write a letter to the parents of those who had died, explaining why they had felt it necessary to send their sons and daughters into harm’s way.

Despite its name, the World Peace Game was never meant to teach children that war is wrong in every case. Of course, military action has its time, and can be the necessary course of action. And as many have pointed out in the past, there are worse outcomes than war. But John Hunter was intent on teaching children the real consequences of sending other people into war with the knowledge that they may never return.

It is also the human cost of armed conflict to which the Torah is pushing us in this passage about the census. As well as numbers, this portion contains names – names humanise, they reveal that the person on the other side is real and has concerns and loves just like we do.

That human face of conflict reminds us of our responsibilities – prevents us from shying away from the consequences of action, the consequences of the decisions we make.

Roger Fisher, a famous expert in negotiation and conflict resolution, writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Sciences: My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, “George, I’m sorry but tens of millions must die.” He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It’s reality brought home. When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, “My God, that’s terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President’s judgment. He might never push the button.”

As though war is something that would ideally be practiced by those without any feeling, any emotion, any humanity. As though war is best executed by hard calculating machines. How strange that a 9-year-old could understand this, but grown adults, many of whom had seen war, had witnessed its horrors, could not.

Contrast this with former president Donald Trump’s disparagement of the war dead as ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’ – expressing his preference for those who survived war, as though it was anything other than luck, and the decisions of those higher up (often civilians) that determined who lived and died in war.
But even machines might be able to work it out. In the film Wargames (1983), a computer simulates the effects of nuclear war as if it were a game, and come to the realisation that there can be no winner, and that ‘nuclear war is a strange game, in which the only winning move is not to play’.

In a sermon given during the War in the Falkland Islands, our own Rabbi Colin, then preaching at Southgate and District Reform Synagogue, said, ‘A widow in Buenos Aires does grieve as much as a widow in Portsmouth.’ This was in the wake of calls for the resignation of a director of BBC’s Panorama who had made just this claim. As though war permits us to dehumanise and to discount the pain inflicted on the families of the dead on both sides.

Again, I am not arguing against war in all situations. As we read in Ecclesiastes: ‘There is a time for war, and a time for peace’ (3:8). And Jewish history is full of examples of times in which war was probably the best course of action open to us, and to others.

Despite the evils of Stalin’s regime in Soviet Russia, thank goodness that they Soviets kept fighting at Stalingrad and did not allow the Nazis to emerge victorious in Europe.

But our Jewish tradition can also remind us that war in itself is not a game – that its face are those of real human beings, whose lives hang in the balance. And so when we read more and more of war in distant places, whether it is the Ukraine, Sudan, Israel and Palestine, when we hear the numbers – the weight of the explosives, the number of rockets, the volume of casualties – let us reach beyond that to the names, to the faces of those who have been affected. Because often that is hidden behind the numbers on the dice.

Alyth’s first president, Rabbi Dr Leo Baeck, was a military chaplain for the German army in the first world war. Toward the end of that war, he wrote: ‘The human always penetrated everything that serves to separate, and all particularity and difference only strengthened this sense of commonality. Though the nations stood distant from one another, the human beings soon came close to one another.’ Let us strive to make that closeness a reality.

Shabbat Shalom.