Don’t Kill Tsarnaev

I wrote this piece in 2015, on the two-year anniversary of the Boston Marathon terror attacks, which, as you’ll see in the essay, struck very close to home. With Friday’s Supreme Court announcement reinstating Tsarnaev’s death sentence, I returned to it and I’m re-posting here. I think it still holds up, and I’d be glad to hear your responses.

April 19, 2015

As we approach the anniversary of the Boston Marathon terrorist attacks, I’m thinking back to where I was at that fateful time.

After watching the early runners go past our home earlier in the morning, we set about our errands for the day. Most important was buying a suit for my son, who was becoming Bar Mitzvah in two months’ time. That’s where we were—in the suit store—when word started to spread: “There was a bomb at the finish line.”  Suddenly, the all the strangers in the store—customers and employees, adults and kids—were weirdly bound together as a community, straining to get details as they came through in real time, as happens once in a thankfully rare while when the world’s news are so powerful or so local that it makes everyone stop in their tracks.

The recent guilty verdict and the impending sentencing of Tsarnaev, as well as tomorrow’s Marathon, spark these memories and also prompt the question of whether this terrorist deserves the death penalty.

Opposition to capital punishment is one issue where consistent liberals sometimes waver. Despite the well-known facts that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent, and despite the fact that it costs the state exorbitant amounts of money, many people find they cannot harbor any  mercy for perpetrators of the most vicious crimes.  And anti-death penalty advocates simply must understand that and take those feelings into account.

I remember being a freshman in college during the Dukakis-Bush presidential debates in the fall of 1988, when the Bush camp was effectively painting Gov. Dukakis as a wimp. At one of the debates, Dukakis, an opponent of state executions, was asked how he would feel if it his wife had been raped and murdered. (Nice question.) Dukakis hemmed and hawed, and many pundits agreed that he lost the debate and showed he was out of touch with the American mainstream.

I remember even then, in my dorm room, jumping up and down and saying “Let me answer that question!”  The answer should have been:  Of course I’d want him dead! Of course, of course—a thousand times over! But: There’s a reason why in our judicial system, and any fair judicial system, the victims of crimes don’t get to determine the sentences of the convicted. That’s because victims naturally (and humanly) want more than justice; they want vengeance. And vengeance often runs counter to a society that strives to be marked by justice.

So where is Judaism on the death penalty? At first blush, the Torah seems to endorse capital punishment. There are many crimes—not just murder—in which the plain reading of the Torah calls for the criminal to be put to death.  (The Shabbat violator is put to death. So are witches. And incorrigible children!) The Talmud, in tractate Sanhedrin, describes the four different methods of execution that the Torah endorses:  stoning, burning, being slain by a sword, and strangling. (Never, it is important to point out, did ancient Israel employ crucifixion.)

However, if you really want to know what’s Jewish about a certain idea, you can’t just quote verses from the Torah. You have to look at the history of how that concept got interpreted and filtered in Jewish sources throughout the ages. The Torah, for instance, says that an incorrigible son must be put to death (Deuteronomy 21:18-21). The Talmud, however, wrings this notion dry. The law of the incorrigible son (ben sorer u’moreh) remains on the books; the Torah, after all, is G-d’s law, but its interpretation is given to human beings. And the Sages proceed to define the set of circumstances in which a person might fit the punishable category of “incorrigible” so tightly, so narrowly, that they can triumphantly declare that no such verdict “ever happened or ever will happen;” it is one of the laws that was simply given to us for the Mitzvah of studying it and learning from it (Sanhedrin 71a). They read the law out of existence!

In my understanding, they do the same thing with the death penalty. First, we must acknowledge that Talmudic law is religious, not civil, law—and thus, no Jewish religious court has executed anybody for anything in 2,000 years, since the days of sacrifices when the Temple stood (Sanhedrin 41a).  Furthermore, there are many crimes, such as violating Shabbat, for which the Torah may ostensibly permit the death penalty, but the Rabbis forbid it—saying, if G-d wants to execute, let G-d be the one who sheds the blood! (There’s a great midrash in Pesikta d’Rav Kahana 11:19 where Rabbi Yehoshua ben Korcha tells his colleague, a would-be executioner, that rather than kill a killer, “You should flee to the end of the world and let the Owner of the garden come and weed out His Own thorns!”)

Most telling of all is a conversation that is recorded in the Mishna (Makkot 1:10):

A court that puts one person to death in 7 years is called a murderous one.

Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah says:  Even once in 70 years!

Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva say:  If we had been in the Sanhedrin, no death sentence ever would have been passed! To which Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel objected, saying: If so, you would have multiplied the number of murderers in Israel.

A serious passage – it shows that even in the days of these sages (about 1900 years ago), the death penalty was controversial. These aren’t incidental; each of them, especially Rabbi Akiva, is a dominant figure in Jewish history.  And Rabbi Akiva himself, that great sage and political revolutionary, found that a human court could never raise itself to the threshold that justifies putting a defendant to death.

There are many reasons to oppose the death penalty. I agree with those who say that eliminating state executions puts us on the side of civilization. The death penalty cheapens and coarsens our entire society, and puts us on the wrong side of history, in the company with the likes of Iran, Iraq, Somalia, and Syria. It is demonstrably racist and classist. And The Innocence Project has shown us, time and time again, that we get it wrong—and I concur that it is better to let 99 guilty men to go free than to kill one innocent man.

I suppose the most Jewishly authentic policy (Rabbi Akiva’s policy) might be: have the death penalty on the books, but never use it.  But that ideal might be too subtle and nuanced for our times; instead, let’s do away with its archaic barbarism completely.  Let Tsarnaev live—with all his infamy and disgrace. 

On the Anniversary of the Terrorist Attack in Pittsburgh

On the one-year anniversary of the Terrorist Attack at Tree of Life Synagogue in PIttsburgh, I sent this letter out to the Babson College community:

In Jewish tradition, which values memory so preciously, a yartzeit—the annual anniversary of a death—is a significant milestone. And in the next few days, we’re coming up on a significant yartzeit, as we mark one year since the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

I’ll always remember where I was on October 27, 2018: in another synagogue, celebrating my cousin’s bar mitzvah in Chicago. I don’t carry a cell phone on Shabbat, but that morning before the service my aunt leaned over and showed me her screen, which already was carrying reports of the shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue by a white nationalist. 

Do you remember how you felt that day? I recall all the conflicting emotions…

I remember feeling profound sorrow for people who were murdered simply for being Jews, doing Jewish things, celebrating Shabbat and the bris of a baby boy that morning, in a sacred space where they were supposed to utterly safe.

I recall the feelings of vulnerability and fear, and the questions that Pittsburgh raised: Just how safe are we as Jews here, really, in this land of so-called religious freedom? And the constant drumbeat of antisemitic attacks around the country in the past year hasn’t made those feelings dissipate.

And anger. Anger is a valid, human emotion; the biblical prophets were often enraged when they observed injustice and the abhorrent abuses of power all around them. I felt (and still feel) a lot of anger towards the perpetrators and enablers of hate, both before and after Pittsburgh. Not to mention the anger born of frustration when it seems, from a yartzeit’s perspective, that not so much has really changed when it comes to guns, racism and antisemitism, and the mentality of us-versus-them.

But I also recall some other feelings, such as a sense of unity and purpose. I recall the amazing outreach that came my way from my multifaith community of friends and colleagues. I remember standing in Glavin Chapel with Christian, Muslim, and Hindu neighbors, all sharing their sense of sorrow and compassion. It makes me realize that there are far more allies out there than there are enemies, and it’s nice to be reminded of that periodically.

Most of all, Pittsburgh reminds of how proud I am to be a Jew. To be a Jew is to be part of a family that is both ancient and modern; that has obligations [Mitzvot] to build lives of holiness; and that is called upon to be a perpetual voice of justice and peace. If that threatens hateful people, so be it; we’ve been there before.

It’s a sad time, to be sure, but that should make us more grateful than ever for being part of a dynamic and caring community that stands with one another.

Look, It's about White Supremacy

No, the terrorist attack in Pittsburgh is not “incomprehensible.”

I write from the suburbs of Chicago, where I’m visiting for the weekend – not far from Skokie where, forty years ago, a band of Illinois Nazis sought to march in full regalia. Why Skokie? Because in the 1970s it was not only densely Jewish, but also because it had the highest concentration of Holocaust survivors of any other municipality in America. Sticking their hate in the faces of Shoah victims was a tactic for noxious, evil people to most provocatively display their message—one that keeps surfacing since the 2016 political campaign, and Charlottesville, and now Pittsburgh: “You (Jew) will not replace us.”

The massacre of Jews at prayer at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Shabbat morning was first and foremost a crime against Jews: the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. Victims do not appreciate having crimes against them universalized. This attack was specifically against Jews, in a Jewish place, marking a moment in Jewish time (Shabbat; and the bris celebrating a baby boy’s arrival into the covenant of the Jewish people).

It is crucial to understand that antisemitism is not “generic bigotry.” It is specifically anti-Jewish hatred, incubated throughout the centuries and always ready to take root in the fertile soil of the far left and the far right.

In the taxonomy of hate, antisemitism has specific characteristics. Similarly, Islamophobia has its own unique expressions, and Muslims’ experience of bigotry is uniquely their own. So, too, for anti-black racism. And homophobia. And all the other special hatreds that the human soul has devised for itself.

However, there is a line that connects modern American hate together, and that line is white supremacy, which has plagued this country from its founding to today.

It’s a thread that runs from the days when Americans owned people of a certain color skin. It was enshrined in a Constitution that considered such a man 3/5 of a human being. It is self-evident on the slobbering faces of white celebrants at lynchings.

It was there when an antisemitic mob murdered Leo Frank in 1915. It runs through the internment camps in which Japanese-Americans were imprisoned during World War II. It was on the MS St. Louis which was turned away from Florida’s shores, bringing its doomed passengers back across the Atlantic to the clutches of the Nazis. It lingers in Quran-burnings by hypocritical preachers, and in vandalized mosques.

It was there in Skokie, and in the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Miami. And it’s there in the denigration of refugees as something less-than-human.

The perpetrator of the Tree of Life slaughter made his motivations perfectly clear (no, the crime is not “incomprehensible”). He despised Jews in general, and in particular for their perceived role in protecting refugees from seeking sanctuary in America. He called out HIAS (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), and claimed a last straw to save America from invading armies of dark-colored immigrants, as manipulated by sinister Jewish forces.

He told us why. It’s not incomprehensible. Just evil.

White supremacy, white nationalism, whatever you want to call it: it’s the moral rot eating at American democracy since the beginning.

The only peace I can find is that another parallel line likewise runs through the American soul. From the unique experience of a specific group, we can come to partially and incompletely come to understand the suffering (and, I hope, the aspirations and joys) of another group. This is empathy, the greatest of human virtues. Occasionally we confront fellow humans who are completely lacking in this trait. But the gatherings and the vigils of the past few days tell me that it’s possible, at least, that a coalition of decency can arise.

Jonathan Greenblatt said it quite eloquently: You have to have zero tolerance for this.

If your candidate is attacking George Soros or the “globalists,” or a member of Congress from your party is embracing Holocaust deniers, you must stand up and tell them to stop.

If your allies in a range of social justice causes either explain away the anti-Semitism of the Nation of Islam by citing the good work they may do or justify demonizing the Jewish state of Israel and its existence, then they need to know that they can no longer be your ally.

If your favorite social media platform continues to refuse to remove anti-Semitic garbage from its site, then vote with your clicks and deactivate your account.

When we consider this horror in the days and weeks to come, we should keep that in mind. It is about the poisonous sprout of white supremacy – and those who would enable it with their silent nods and coded dog whistles.