Posts Tagged ‘terrorism’
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.
Pinchos and terrorism
- A religious zealot who in his determination to rid the world of the wickedness and idolatry of the unbeliever bypasses the rule of law and the judicial processes (even those established by his own religion) and takes it upon himself to impose and carry out a summary death sentence on wrongdoers as a public act of vengeance, following which his god grants him, according to his religion, a reward of a covenant of peace and eternal life.
- A chilling description of the behaviour of certain terrorists acting in the name of Islam today.
- But is it also an accurate description of the behaviour of Pinchos in last week’s parashah and his reward in this?
- Pinchos is a zealot, for which characteristic he is expressly commended and rewarded (B’midbar 25:11). He acts when the established leaders of the Jewish people consider themselves, deeply regretfully, unable to act in accordance with Torah law to suppress acknowledged idolatrous wrong-doing (25:6-7). He imposes and carries out a summary death penalty (25:8). The reward for his violence is a special hereditary bond with God and a promise of peace (B’midbar 25:12-13).
- There are of course a multitude of differences between Pinchos’ behaviour and the behaviour of today’s terrorists acting in the name of Islam. The most significant is that Pinchos confined his anger to those who were directly responsible for performing idolatry in a deliberately provocative, offensive and public manner: the modern terrorists target the innocent along with the guilty. And he acted only because he knew these wrong-doers to have incurred liability in accordance with Torah law for the death penalty, and that Moses and the elders were incapacitated as a result of righteous self-doubt born of Zimri’s sharp accusations about a superficial similarity of Moses’ own marital circumstances with the contemporary idolatrous behaviour. Finally, Pinchos was able to trust that his violence on this occasion was motivated only by a proper desire to preserve the dignity of God because he had trained his instincts so that his normal inclinations were to be a true exponent of the love of peace exemplified by his grandfather Aharon.
- But a striking aspect of every one of the differences specified above is that in each case Pinchos’ righteousness is not apparent on the face of the Torah but depends on a knowledge of the midrashic and rabbinic constructions of the circumstances of his activities.
- There is another striking example in this week’s parashah of a similar notion. God tells Moses to attack the Midianites (25:17 and 31:2). But Moses does not perform this commandment himself, but appoints Pinchos as leader of the army (31:6). The rabbis explain that Moses thought it would be wrong for him to attack the Midianites personally because they had sheltered him on his escape from Egypt (Sh’mos 2:15). But since when was it for Moses to alter God’s commandment because he thought it wrong?! I heard Dayan Lopian explain that because Moses knew that the concept of hakoras hatov (gratitude) is a fundamental part of God’s nature, he understood that any commandment from God to Moses had to be construed in such a way as to make compliance compatible with the principle of hakoras hatov (a little like, l’havdil, the operation of section 3 of the Human Rights Act 1998). Once again, then, the humanity of the Torah depends on giving a construction to its commandments in the context of, and subject to, the fundamental principles of Torah justice as expounded by the rabbis. (As to why the commandment had to be expressed in this way rather than as an express command to send Pinchos, see the Ohr Hachayim on B’midbar 31:6.) (“The spirit of God hovered over the face of the water” (B’reishis 1:2) – in the case of the Torah, often symbolised by water in aggadic literature, one often finds the spirit of God not apparent on the surface but only after contextual elucidation.)
- We can learn two things from this about contemporary inter-faith relations. First, we should remember that the justice and validity of Torah will not always be as apparent to others, who have to rely on the surface text out of context, as it is to us who are able to construe it in the light of tradition and an appreciation of context and background. Secondly, if that is true of Torah it is likely to be true of other religions as well: when terrorists cite as support for their actions blood-curdling passages from the Koran which appear to admit only of a violent and unjust construction, we should be aware that the true clerics of Islam will be as assiduous in putting those passages in their proper context so as to derive a proper meaning from them, as we are in the case of our own religion.
- We enter on Sunday the three weeks of mourning for the Temple. The Temple was a universal structure, open to and used by all humankind. And so it will be again. Different traditions and cultures will come together, as we pray on Rosh Hashanah, under the kingship of God as the final stage of a process which can begin only with each applying the most beneficial and generous construction to each other’s traditions and actions, and each seeking to find and support the best in each other.
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