State Mandated Rape

This week's parshah presents one of the most difficult topics in the Torah. Soldiers, who were weeded out for their spiritual caliber, and fear of God, were allowed, in a volitional war to act in a way deemed ever so immoral in the modern age. In no uncertain terms, they were allowed to rape a woman in the heat of war. 

There are, as most know, two dichotomous interpretations about the series in which these events would unfold - some say the woman could be raped on the battlefield, and others say she had to be brought back to the soldier's home and only after a month moratorium, could she then be ravaged by the man, but that nowithstanding, the main current in rabbinical thought is that war is so macabre and dreadful that one loses control of his very will to some extent and so were certain deeds to not be sanctioned they would be executed in contravention of the law. 

I spoke today to two former soldiers, one who fought in the Yom Kippur war, and the other in the First Lebanon war. My question focused not on the ethical underpinnings but rather, de facto, what level of cohesiveness, professionalism, and ability to stay focused on the goal of conquering the enemy can be achieved were the general to allow the satisfaction of such self-centered urges. 

The Yom Kippur veteran said, "What women? We were in tanks - we didn't see a thing - I wish there were women. Women in the middle of the Sinai?!" 

The other, a veteran of "Operation Peace of Galillee," who went deep into Lebanon, who boasted about the blonde-haired French women he saw in Beirut - "and they really were beautiful," he reminisced - couldn't fathom allowing something like that. About himself he attested, "How could I have been busy with women? Every second, I was in fear, a bomb, subterfuge, a decoy." In civilian life, he later became part of the Israel Police Bomb Disposal Unit, serving fearlessly, and neutralizing a few bombs that undeniably, in his own words, would have taken multiple lives. 

On the one hand, a fearlessness mandated from Israel's soldiers and police units, on the other, a moral caliber, ethic, and mettle that few of us could attain, or even hope to attain. 

The latter police veteran - a sergeant (the first became a captain) - told me that women were raped in Shalom Ha'Galil; both of the aforementioned seemed to relate to such as eventualities, hopefully the exception, rather than the rule, but not something that can be controlled for, or entirely uprooted. Every year there are American marines who in highly publicized scandals are returned home, if not for rape, for crimes no less serious. 

What then is the aim of the Torah? Could it be likened to the concept of "pat be'salo?" The Talmud states that a man succeeds in abstaining from relations with his wife when she is forbidden to him because of "pat be'salo," literally, bread in his basket; he knows that if he waits the necessary time, his wife will then be permitted. Likewise, the Talmud uses the same reference to the man designated to throw the sacrificial lamb off the cliffs of Azazel on Yom Kippur; given the heat, duress, and strain of the journey, the man is not only allowed to eat, but is constantly offered food at every rest station. The Talmud states that never did he eat, but the knowledge that were he to want to eat, he could, gave him the strength to carry on and make it to the cliff, by some estimations, as many as 9.5 miles (or 15 kilometers) from the Beit Hamikdash. 

Could it be that rape was permitted to take away from its lure and appeal, in keeping with the verse in Mishlei (Proverbs 9:17): "Stolen words are all the sweeter"? 

Any other approach seems too hard to accept.