Aviva Lauer
Many modern readers of the Torah point to Deuteronomy 20:19 as the basis for a Jewish ethic of environmental responsibility:
When you besiege a city for many days in order to capture it, you must not destroy its trees, wielding the ax against them. You may eat of them, but you must not cut them down. Are the trees of the field human, that they should withdraw before you into the besieged city?
This verse is frequently cited on Tu b’Shvat, the Jewish New Year of the Trees, which over the past several decades has taken on the character of a Jewish Earth Day. That evolution is itself worth pausing to consider. In its original context, Tu b’Shvat was not a holiday in any celebratory sense. It was a legal marker in the agricultural calendar of the Land of Israel, relevant to tithes and taxation. No tree-planting ceremonies. No ethical manifestos.
And yet, the instinct to turn to this verse when thinking about environmental responsibility is not wrong. Deuteronomy 20:19 is striking not because it speaks about trees, but because it speaks about limits — limits on power, limits on destruction, limits that apply even in wartime.
The question is what kind of ethic the verse is really offering us.
What Does the Torah Mean When It Asks about Trees and Humans?
The crux of the verse lies in the enigmatic phrase “ki ha-adam etz hasadeh,” which translates literally (and poorly!) as “for the human is a tree.” Is this a question? A statement? A metaphor? Unsurprisingly, medieval commentators disagree.
One interpretive strand, associated with Rashi and followed by Seforno, reads the phrase as a rhetorical question: “Is the tree of the field a human being?” (Rashi, Deuteronomy 20:19, s.v. “ki ha-adam etz hasadeh”). The implied answer is no. A tree is not a person. It cannot flee. It cannot fight. It poses no threat. Precisely because it is defenseless, it must not be treated as an enemy and should thus not be destroyed.
Seforno makes this explicit: only someone capable of harming you may be fought (Seforno, ad loc., s.v. “ki ha-adam etz hasadeh”). A tree, rooted in place, is not dangerous. Destroying it is therefore an act not of necessity, but of excess.
Another strand, associated with Ibn Ezra, reads the phrase quite differently. For him, it is not a question at all but a statement: “For the life of a human being is the tree of the field” (Ibn Ezra, ad loc., s.v. “ki ha-adam etz hasadeh”). Trees sustain human life. They feed us, anchor us, allow us to endure beyond the immediate crisis. On this reading, cutting down fruit trees is self-defeating.
This idea appears already in the Sifrei, the tannaitic midrash halakha to Deuteronomy (piska 203): “This teaches that a person’s life stems entirely from the tree.”
These two approaches begin from different places: vulnerability in one case, interdependence in the other. But they converge on the same conclusion. Even in war, not everything may be destroyed. Even in war, some things remain off-limits.
Compassion as a Discipline
Later commentators make the moral stakes of this commandment crystal clear. Shadal (Samuel David Luzzatto) writes about this verse that the Torah was given in order “to strengthen in our hearts the compassion and forgiveness that we do not only take our own benefit into consideration” (Shadal, Deuteronomy 20:19, s.v. “ki mimenu tochel v’oto lo tichrot”). Philo and Josephus, he notes, understood the commandment as a rejection of cruelty.
The point is not only the preservation of resources. It is the modeling of a certain kind of human being — one who does not allow violence, even justified violence, to spill outward indiscriminately toward the innocent.
Earlier on, Rashbam offered a narrower reading, permitting the destruction of fruit trees if they are actively being used by the enemy for protection or escape (Rashbam, ad loc., s.v. “ki ha-adam etz hasadeh lavo mipanecha bamatzor”). Even here, though, the exception proves the rule. Fruit trees are presumed protected unless a compelling and immediate danger overrides that protection.
Across these readings, the Torah articulates a moral grammar that insists on distinctions: between combatant and non-combatant, between necessity and excess, between power exercised and power restrained.
From Trees to People
Over time, this verse became the foundation of the broader prohibition of bal tashchit, the ban against wanton destruction. In the hands of the writer of Sefer HaChinuch (mitzvah 529), bal tashchit is no longer limited to trees. It is about unchecked destructiveness as a moral failure — a habit that corrodes the soul.
The root of the commandment is known: to teach our souls to love what is good and useful and to cling to it… and through this, good will cling to us. And from this, we distance ourselves from every evil and destructive thing.
The problem, according to Sefer HaChinuch, is not the tree. It is what destruction does to the person doing the destroying.
And this is where the verse stops being about environmentalism alone.
If the Torah demands restraint even toward trees, it does so not because trees are more important than people, but because people matter so much that we must guard ourselves against becoming cruel.
Which leads, unavoidably, to a reversal of the verse’s famous question:
If in some sense a tree can be likened to a human being, then surely a human being must never be treated as less than a tree.
Protective Presence and Inverted Values
For years now, many Jewish people — religious and secular, Israeli and non-Israeli — have engaged in protective presence work so that Palestinian farmers could harvest their olives on their own property, most often undisputed, without harassment or violence.[1] This is quiet work. It is deliberately non-confrontational. It aims to prevent escalation rather than provoke it.
It also embodies precisely the values that commentators like Shadal identify in Deuteronomy 20:19: compassion, restraint, and the refusal to let power dissolve into cruelty.
And yet, in recent times, we have seen hilltop youth brutally attack these very people — beating them, burning their belongings, sending them to the hospital.[2]
The question that forces itself upon us is not political but moral.
On what grounds are these individuals treated as enemies?
Protective presence activists are not armed. They are not attacking anyone. They are not laying siege. They are not a danger. To treat them as legitimate targets is to erase the distinctions that the Torah insists upon even in wartime.
What Deuteronomy 20:19 is Really About
Deuteronomy 20:19 is not a sentimental verse. It appears in a chapter about war. Its ethical demand is therefore all the more bracing. Violence may sometimes be necessary. But it is never morally free. It must be bounded, disciplined, constrained.
When Jews attack others who are acting to prevent harm, they are not choosing trees over people. They are choosing unrestrained power over Jewish ethics.
The Torah does not sanctify rage. It sanctifies limits.
It does not teach us to see enemies everywhere. It teaches us to know who is not an enemy — and to act accordingly.
If we cannot uphold that distinction, then we have misunderstood the verse entirely.
[1] T’ruah. “Armed Settlers Attack Rabbis, Other Volunteers Assisting with Olive Harvest in West Bank.” November 4, 2025. https://truah.org/press/armed-settlers-attack-rabbis-other-volunteers-assisting-with-olive-harvest-in-west-bank/
[2] Ynet, “מתנדבים זרים הוכו ונשדדו ע״י מתפרעים ביו״ש, איטליה וקנדה: ‘נמאס מהתוקפנות’ [Foreign Volunteers Beaten and Robbed by Extremists in the West Bank],” December 2, 2025, https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/byw3in311be
Site Operations and Technology by The Berman Consulting Group.