T he great Gaon of Vilna once said that the greatest of all temptation for the Jew is the allure of k’chal hagoyim to be like the non-Jews around us and gain their approval and their acceptance. (The Gaon lived in the 18th century; how much more penetrating are his words today!) His comment came to mind during the long ordeal-by-headline of Elor Azariah the Israeli soldier who had shot and killed a neutralized Arab terrorist who had attempted to murder Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint.

What was striking about the entire affair was the behavior of the Israeli left-wing secular leadership — the media academia and liberal legal fraternity — immediately following the arrest of the soldier. They were a chorus howling incessantly for his scalp declaring in effect: See how we are a democratic society. We are not racist. We do not kill at random. We are not a society of murderers. As if shooting a would-be killer is undemocratic or as if killing a terrorist who tries to kill you is racist.

So shrill and persistent were their cries that one could not resist the impression that their zeal to condemn stemmed less from a devotion to justice than from that age-old Jewish insecurity the Gaon was alluding to: the instinct to curry favor with the non-Jewish world to show how civilized and honorable we are. The mind went back to those Warsaw Ghetto Jews who shot and killed Nazi storm troopers who were coming to dispatch them to death camps. Would our oh-so civilized Israeli democracy-lovers overexposed to left wing-ideology and underexposed to Jewish values have put those Jews on trial for murder?

Fortunately the Jewish masses have a bit more pride than the leftist elites. For the large majority of Israelis the arrest of a soldier who acted in the heat of a life-and-death confrontation was itself a miscarriage of justice. And they wondered if that arrest would have a chilling effect on Israeli soldiers who now might hesitate before defending themselves against future terrorists. The more literate of the population were aware of the famous halachic dictum cited by Rashi in his comment on Shemos 22:1 based on Talmud Sanhedrin 72a that “if someone comes to kill you rise up and kill him first.”