Posts Tagged ‘state’
Provocation in crime
- This week’s parashah opens with an account of Avrohom eulogising and crying for Soroh who has just died. The word “and to cry for her” is spelled with a small letter chaf.
- The Baal Haturim offers a primary explanation that because Soroh had lived such a full and long life Avrohom’s grief was less extreme than had she suffered a tragically early death. Then he adds a secondary and alternative explanation: when Soroh challenged God to judge between her and Avrohom in the matter of her desire to expel Hagar from their home (Bereishis 16:5) she in one sense called down a judgment upon herself, as a result of which she was responsible for her own death – and we do not eulogise a person who is responsible for his or her own death.The first of these explanations makes immediate sense. The second is bewildering: how do we know that Soroh’s death was connected with her demand for Divine judgment (Soroh did not die until very much later, and when the same matter is next discussed between Avrohom and Soroh she receives express and unequivocal Divine approval (21:12))? And how does this fit with the many rabbinic assertions that Soroh died without sin (see, in particular, Rashi on 23:1 and the Malbim on 23:3)? And in any event, the prohibition cited by the Baal Haturim is the prohibition in eulogising, but it is a letter of the word “and to cry for her”, not of the word “to eulogise her” that is diminished.
- An explanation designated expressly as a second alternative is sometimes so designated because it is indeed problematic but is nevertheless capable of teaching an important idea.
- In this case, although it may be difficult or impossible for us to discern how or in what sense the point applied to Soroh, we can learn the general idea that it is both natural and acceptable for a person’s conduct to affect my emotional reaction to what happens to him or her as a result of it. The reason for not eulogising someone who is directly responsible for his or her own death (and the halochoh applies only to direct responsibility) is that the responsibility changes the nature of our emotional response to the death from a relatively straight-forward sense of loss, that can be marked and to some extent alleviated by recounting the deceased’s virtues, into something which may be more or less intense depending on the case but which in any event either is or should be more complicated.
- Amnesty International this week published the results of a survey in which about 25 per cent of those who responded thought that victims of a certain crime are “partly to blame” for the crime if they have behaved in a manner that might objectively be thought to increase the risk of their being targeted. Amnesty describe the results as shocking.
- I find the results disturbing not so much because they reveal malicious or wrong thinking but because they reveal confused thinking (on the part of those who compiled the survey as well as those who answered it). In particular, the results suggest that too many people fail to distinguish between their feelings about the perpetrator of a crime and their feelings about the victim.
- The commission of a crime is always a moral wrong, of a greater or lesser degree depending on the nature of the crime and the mental and other circumstances of the criminal. The wilful murder of a person who stands already condemned to death is no less a murder. Theft is no less wrong because the victim behaved unattractively and unwisely by flaunting his or her wealth.
- But what we feel about the victim, as distinct from what we feel about the criminal, will be affected by how he or she has behaved. The person who walks through a deprived area deliberately and ostentatiously displaying jewellery and other expensive accessories commits the wrong of placing a stumbling-block before the blind. His or her wrong does not excuse someone who then mugs him or her, and is not in itself a reason for treating the criminal more leniently. But it may, reasonably and constructively, affect how I feel about the victim and whether I feel the victim, and society in general, should have modified his or her behaviour.
- If we are as a society troubled by the levels of crime of all kinds, our thoughts as to how crime can be reduced should be as broadly-ranging as possible; and we should be prepared to examine our own behaviour and consider whether, without offering it as an excuse for criminals, we could sensibly be doing more to reduce temptations to crime, both immediate and indirect, and to assist either actual or potential criminals to recover or retain proper paths of behaviour. To coin a phrase, “tough on crime and constructive on the causes of crime”.
The end does not justify the means (1) – Anti-terrorism
- With much political attention being paid to anti-terrorist measures, two thoughts arising out of last week’s parashah (I wanted to send this issue out last Friday but encountered technical problems) indicate the Jewish attitude on particular aspects of the issue.
- Hashem creates people to rule over the natural world (Bereishis 1:26). Rashi points out that the word for to rule has an alternative possible root, the verb to go down. If humans are worthy, they will control the natural world. If not, they will descend beneath the level of the natural world and become controlled by it. We can use our intellect to use the natural resources of the world to perfect it for all. Or we can use our intellect to pursue individual self-gratification at the expense of others and become wholly controlled by the animal instincts inside us.
- It is tempting to apply torture to terrorist prisoners (perhaps helpfully re-labelled as moderate forms of coercive punishment) in order to elicit information capable of saving innocent life. But to do so – or to allow other States in effect to do so on our behalf – is to lower ourselves to the level of the terrorist, allowing the end to justify the means. I have no right to depart from the path of rational, sensitive and humane treatment of prisoners, even in order to protect my own life or the lives of others. The Torah confers a right and duty to kill an attacker before he can kill me or someone else, but not to torture him or otherwise to indulge in behaviour which when we describe it as bestial we wrong the animal kingdom in ascribing to it what is in fact a purely human form of cruelty.
- But there will be times when in order to protect innocent life I am obliged to do things which, while not inherently wrong or falling short of the standards required of humans created in the Divine image, nevertheless have undesirable consequences. The rabbis famously describe Adam as having committed the first sin for the sake of heaven. What is meant is that the first sin is not to be understood in the same way as later sins. We sin by using the free-will gained when Adam ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil in order to choose to gratify our animal selfishness rather than to serve Hashem by keeping His laws. Adam sinned by doing that which God had already predicted that Adam would do (as is clear from a careful reading of Bereishis 2:16 & 17) with the primary purpose of acquiring free-will which can be used to demonstrate love of the Divine attributes and thereby to serve Hashem as he has commanded, but which had the inevitable consequence that the same freedom would sometimes be abused, causing pain and suffering for the innocent victims throughout the world and throughout the centuries.
- In Jewish thought, the end does not justify the means in the sense of enabling them to be disregarded or in the sense of making undesirable means inherently desirable. But we are required to be realistic, and to recognise that undesirable consequences will frequently flow from actions which are necessary in order to secure their primary purpose. When a terrorist is imprisoned, his or her family will suffer. When a terrorist is deported, he or she may suffer in the destination country (despite our compliance with our international obligations). These sufferings are not unimportant, nor are they to be in any sense welcomed as a form of deserved punishment: but they are to be accepted, with sensitivity, as the necessary and unavoidable consequences of taking reasonable and humane action to preserve the safety of the citizens for whom this country is responsible.
Hurricane Katrina – law and order
- The brutal anarchy reported from certain places affected by Hurricane Katrina, particularly in shelters resorted to by those displaced from their homes, vividly and horrifyingly illustrates the warning of the rabbis in pirkei ovos (3:2) that we should pray for the welfare of the state machinery because without it each person would swallow his neighbour alive.
- This striking piece of imagery is chosen, says the gemoro (avodoh zoroh 72) to create a picture of the strong bullying and exploiting the weak in much the same way as the larger fish in the sea habitually swallow those smaller than them: without either compassion or active hostility or dislike, but merely as an instinctive product of an all-absorbing self-interest.
- That instinctive self-interest is entirely natural to the animal world: and it is entirely natural to man but can be modified by discipline. One form of discipline is that imposed by the rule of law, the state machinery in its widest aspects, for which the rabbis exhort us to pray.
- But the rule of law is always fragile: quite how fragile, we have seen in the reports of behaviour during this most recent disaster in America. Its effectiveness depends entirely on the strength of those controlling the law, and their ability to restrain a partly reluctant population, many of whom are aware that the forces constraining them are themselves vulnerable to many greater forces, both natural and unnatural. When one of those greater forces intervenes to prevent the enforcement of law and order, chaos erupts.
- For this reason the Maggid of Kelm stresses that in this morning’s Torah reading the injunction to appoint judges and policemen (Devorim 16:18) is phrased in the second person singular, not plural. He therefore reads it as including a requirement for each person to develop methods of self-discipline, which will regulate, condition and train his or her selfish instincts more effectively and permanently than can be achieved by the imposition of outside constraints.
- A society that wishes the weak to be protected, and that wishes to see expounded in practice the Torah principles of kindness, sharing and caring, should see the forces of law and order only as a secondary line of recourse; the front line of the enterprise should be the task of educating and encouraging people to discipline themselves in matters of civic and community responsibility.
- In England today citizenship is a compulsory part of the curriculum for secondary school students. If taught imaginatively and creatively it can cause young people to think of themselves and others in an entirely new way. An urgent message of the lawlessness seen in America in the past two weeks is that too many people are being allowed to reach adulthood without acquiring a sufficient sense of citizenship to act as a control on their animal instincts of selfishness once the physical constraints of law and order are relaxed.
- Let us as Jews, with a mission inherited from our father Abraham who taught the whole world a concept of kindness based on the monotheist vision of all people as brothers and sisters created by a single God for a single purpose, resolve not merely to pray for the continued power of the forces of law and order but also to do whatever we can to provide an example of responsible citizenship and to encourage others to emulate it.
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