I didn’t want to do a political sermon on the First Day of Pesach – I get it, we were all up late last night and everything before that. And I wasn’t – looking at the passage of this new piece of legislation in Israel – right up until I was reflecting on the last line of the Seder.
So … here we go.
I didn’t want to do a political sermon on the First Day of Pesach – I get it, we were all up late last night and everything before that. And I wasn’t – looking at the passage of this new piece of legislation in Israel – right up until I was reflecting on the last line of the Seder.
So … here we go.
Three days ago, a bill, championed by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir passed its third reading in the Knesset, 62-47, with Prime Minister Netanyahu voting in favour. Ben Gvir was seen jubilantly handing out champagne to those who voted in its favour.
I’m not sure how much of the detail of the Bill registered with those in this country.,
It mandates death by hanging as the default punishment for West Bank residents convicted of deadly terrorist acts committed by a person who “negates the existence of the State of Israel”. While judges can opt for life imprisonment under ill-defined “special circumstances,” the death penalty would otherwise be mandatory and be carried out within 90 days of sentencing. There is no right of appeal. And the death sentence requires only a simple majority of judges on the military court panel – there’s no jury, no need for a unanimous decision and the ‘judges’ at an Israeli Military Court of First Instance need only include one legally trained judge.
The Times of Israel reported the vote this way,
“This is a day of justice for the victims and a day of deterrence for our enemies. No more revolving door for terrorists, but a clear decision. Whoever chooses terrorism chooses death,” said a jubilant Ben Gvir, sporting the golden noose-shaped lapel pin he and other advocates of the measure have donned to symbolize their campaign for the death penalty.”
The best that can be said for the Bill is that it’s a response to the anger felt by those who have watched prisoner swaps where the release of Israelis kidnapped and taken into Gaza has forced Israel’s hand into freeing, in some cases twice, terrorists who have attacked Israelis. Over 1,000 terrorists were released by Israel in the deal to free Gilad Shalit in 2011, including Yahya Sinwar, who planned the October 7th attack.
It remains true that decent, peace-abiding Israelis are and have been threatened by terrorist violence and that they have a right to live in the freedom we all sang about last night. And that the ensuring of this freedom requires, again, in the language of last night, a Yad Chazakah, a strong hand. Turning the other cheek is not a way to negotiate with terrorists. I know that. My mind goes to the Open Letter that Martin Buber wrote to Mahatma Gandhi in 1936, in the midst of the Nazi surge towards the Holocaust.
Ghandi had called on Jews to oppose the Nazis with Satyagraha – non-violence. Buber responded,
When a voice that he has long known and honoured, a great voice and an earnest one, pierces the vain clamour and calls him by name, he is all attention. Here is a voice, he thinks, that can but give good counsel and genuine comfort,” But ...
And the letter continues with a juddering ‘But’
But what he hears - containing though it does elements of a noble and most praiseworthy conception, such as he expects from this speaker - is yet barren of all application to his peculiar circumstances. These words are in truth not applicable to him at all. They are inspired by most praiseworthy general principles, but the listener is aware that the speaker has cast not a single glance at the situation of him whom he is addressing, that he neither sees him nor knows him and the straits under which he labours.”
I get it’s hard in Israel, I get it’s hard to oppose terror nicely.
But this Bill is a disaster.
It’s unethical – in that it focuses only on Palestinian terror. What of the terror of West Bank settler Jews, responsible for death, arson, and, yes, seeking national elimination of the Palestinian people as a people? There is a wave of violence in the West Bank that is Jewish and is all but entirely unrestrained by legal process. You can’t, ethically, target only criminals of one ethnicity or religion in the attempt to bring an end to violence. It’s in Bedmidbar 15 and Vayikra 24, and Shemot 12
תּוֹרָה אַחַת, יִהְיֶה לָאֶזְרָח, וְלַגֵּר, הַגָּר בְּתוֹכְכֶם
You shall have one law for the citizen and the stranger dwelling strangely in your midst.
It’s misguided – in the faith it puts in the taking of life, God help us all, the excitement seen on the faces of the Bill’s proponents at the prospect of the taking of life.
You should terrify witnesses in a death penalty legal case, warns the Mishnah in Sanhedrin, because it’s not like a monetary case – you can’t pay back what you have taken as a punishment. When Cain killed Abel, God responds the, ‘Bloods of your brother call out to me,” – Damei Aicha -the Hebrew is in the plural to teach us that it’s not just the person killed, but their descendants and generations until the end of the world.
Rather, the entire direction of Rabbinic engagement with the deeply challenging question of how to deal with horrific acts perpetrated by one human being against another human being has been in the opposite direction.
When the Torah says, an eye for an eye, Rabbinic Judaism insists that is to be understood in terms of financial payments, not bodily violence.
When the Mishnah discusses the protections for death penalty cases, they ratchet up the protections, the number of judges who would ALL unanimously need to agree on a sentence to 70. Three on a majority split is inconceivably narrow-minded. The Talmud determines that any Court that passes a death penalty even once in 70 years is a bloody Beit Din. That’s not meant as a good thing.
And then there is this. In Sanhedrin 41a,
We read that forty years before the destruction of the Temple, this has nothing to do with the destruction of the Temple, the Sanhedrin exiled itself from the one place in the Temple precinct where it was held possible to judge a Death Penalty case. They moved away from the Chamber of Hewn Stone so as not to be tempted into thinking that justice and death penalties can be partners.
And the idea that you go around wearing a gold noose lapel pin, cheering on a full-on embrace of death penalties with virtually no safeguards when it could not be more clear that this is motivated by an abnegation of Palestinian rights is chilling, it’s unethical, it’s un-Jewish, and it’s not going to help.
The thing that works, as we Jews have learnt from our own experience of genocides – from Lavan to Pharaoh to … well, it’s a long list, is hope. Hope is the thing that allows us to see a world which is more than an inevitable promise of only the escalation of violence.
I understand that it can feel like we live in a world where justice might feel nothing more than, “you hit me so I will hit you, so you hit me back, so I hit you back harder.” But this is not true, it’s not true of the human soul, and it’s not a true reflection of how even the most intractable geopolitical problems of humanity have been eased and even solved.
It’s terrifying and deeply depressing to see Israeli legislators excited about an escalation of violence wielded by Jewish hands, for the angel of death does not, and can not be allowed to have the last line. The last line belongs to God, who comes and offers a solution on the other side of death.
A recommendation – follow, support and seek to amplify the message of those Israelis and lovers of Israel who are opposing this Bill – it still faces a Supreme Court challenge. I recommend Rabbi Gilad Kariv, the New Israel Fund and Yachad. Don’t let the angel of death have the last line.
Chag Sameach
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