Of The Lord’s Vengeance and Human Justice

Of The Lord’s Vengeance and Human Justice

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

This week’s Torah reading, called Shemini, comes from the book of Leviticus, chapters 9-11.  A terrible thing happens in the story.  Immediately after Moses and Aaron offer a sacrifice to God, two of Aaron’s four sons take it upon themselves to do the same thing.  However, their sacrifice isn’t accepted by God, and in fact they are killed by a fire that “surges forth from God’s presence.”  The Torah uses vague terminology to explain what they did wrong. All it says is that they offered “a strange fire.” 

Don’t play with God’s fire, the passage seems to teach us.  A “strange fire” is no match for the fires of God.

Yet what was the “strange fire” which Aaron’s sons offered?

About two thousand years ago, some of the ancient rabbis explained that the two young men were simply intoxicated. Drunk.  Or perhaps, as others suggested, they were drunk with power.  As sons and nephews of the two most powerful men in the nation, they might have felt that they could do anything, and get away with it.

At first reading, we might assume that God is the cause of the death of the two young men.  Yet it wasn’t God.  It was their own overconfidence that brought about their demise.

We human beings have amazing power.  More than any other animal, we have the power to imagine.  We have the power to create.  But we also have the power to hate, and the power to destroy.  We can create life—or at least RE-create life—but we also have the power to take life away, to hate, to maim, to kill.

This week we’ve been watching two trials here in Boston.  One, of course, was the trial of Dzokhar Tsarnaev, convicted of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing two years ago.  The other was Aaron Hernandez, convicted of killing an ex-friend of his.  The cases were of course very different from each other.  The Marathon bombing caused much more than just physical damage, as painful and tragic as that was.  It was an attack on all of us, on Boston, on America as a whole.  Hernandez, on the other hand, carried out a more personal vendetta.  His crime didn’t affect more than himself and his family, not to mention, of course, his victim, Odin Lloyd, and that poor man’s family.

Yet both cases also share a common theme.  Both Tsarnaev and Hernandez thought they could get away with murder.  For a moment, they took justice into their own hands and became judge, jury, witness and executioner all rolled into one.

That’s a lot of power to put into one person’s hands.

Jealousy and hate are powerful forces.  They both come from somewhere very deep within us.  A rage, a crazed fury rises up from the turmoils of our soul.  We hatch a plot, we carry it out.  We don’t stop to think whether it’s the right thing to do or not.  We don’t stop to think who might be hurt by our actions.  It feels right at the moment, and that’s enough for us.

In Shemini, the Torah portion that Jews all over the world read and discuss this week, Aaron’s sons do something similar.  They decide to do something that, deep down, they know is wrong. The instructions were right there, spelled out to the minutest detail by Moses, God’s most trusted servant!  Here is what you do, here is what you don’t do. Yet, suppressing their innate sense of right and wrong, the two young men decide to do what felt right, what felt good, without giving a thought to what might result from such a wrong choice. 

Power, in the wrong hands, is a dangerous weapon. 

Only yesterday, Jewish people all over the world commemorated Yom HaShoah, Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day.  There were many ceremonies to mark the day, including one right here in this temple.  Yom HaShoah is a tough day, especially if you are a survivor or a child or grandchild of a survivor, or even if you just know a survivor.  It’s a day on which Jews focus on a period in our recent history that has shaped our entire existence.  For 24 hours we go back 70 or more years, to the nightmare we call the Holocaust, in which Jews were hunted down, packed into concentration camps and then transferred to extermination camps.  6 million Jews, among them 1.5 million children 13 years and younger, were systematically murdered, many of the killings meticulously documented on paper and camera by the Germans and their willing partners. 

It took massive efforts and the most advanced technology then known to humankind to carry out such a mass murder.

Yet it came from the same dark place within the human soul, the place where hate lives.  Whether it is the murder of one or four people, or of six million, it’s still the result of the kind of thinking that has us believing that we have the authority—the ultimate power—not only to give life, but also to take it away.

But, as the Torah portion teaches us, there ARE consequences to all our deeds.  There is a higher system of justice in this universe. There is an ultimate Judge who, as witnesses, calls upon the victims of hate and oppression.  It is up to this Judge to decide ultimately how justice is to be meted out, and no matter how long it seems to take, this justice does come to be.

That’s why civilization created a court system.  Vengeance is the Lord’s, we read elsewhere in the Bible.  However, for us human beings, no matter how much like God we would like to be, vengeance is not an option.  We have to resort to courts, to justice, a much slower system, at times inefficient, at times so slow as to seem to stop and disappear altogether.  And yet, justice, not vengeance, is the right path.

15 years after the end of the Holocaust, in 1961, Adolf Eichmann of cursed memory, the mastermind of the Holocaust, was captured and brought to justice in Jerusalem, the capital of the State of Israel.  Eichmann was that one individual in whose demonic mind hatched the evil notion of gassing Jewish men, women and children and then disposing of their bodies by burning them in mass crematoria.

Eichmann had the greatest and most dangerous power in his hands.  The entire German military and the most advanced technology then known to the world were concentrated in his hands. Eichmann stoked the fires with an ancient hate, “a strange fire” indeed, and his success outstripped his wildest dreams.

When, fifteen years later, Israeli soldiers put their hands on him, they knew who the monster was.  They knew what he had done.  It would have been easy to dispose of him right then and there.

Yet Israel did not resort to vengeance.  It brought Eichmann to trial, instead.  For 8 months the trial languished on.  A mountain of evidence was brought by scores of witnesses, many of whom still bore physical and emotional scars from the wounds that Eichmann and his henchmen inflicted on them.  In his defense, Eichmann claimed that he was merely a tool of the state, that he was merely following orders.  The judges never bought this defense, however, and Eichmann was convicted of his crimes.

Israel didn’t then—nor does it now—have the death penalty.  Yet this once, for this one case alone, it enacted just such a law.  Eichmann was hanged for the crime of genocide.

Does that mean that Dzokhar Tsarnaev should be executed too?  In the state of Massachusetts, there is no death penalty, and Aaron Hernandez will spend the rest of his days in jail.  But Tsarnaev?  His is a federal case, and the United States of America does have the death penalty in its law books.

In scope, the Boston Marathon Bombing was a small act of hatred.  Yet it was disruptive for our whole society and nation.  It wasn’t only limbs and families that were torn—it was our entire national sense of security.  Yet is this enough to bring about a death sentence?

Before the State of Israel imposed the harshest penalty on Eichmann, it was petitioned by poets, professors and philosophers, as well as by judges, government officials and even rabbis.  “We are not bloodthirsty,” was one opinion. Another was that sparing Eichmann’s life would be seen as a victory of goodness over evil.  Yet Israel went on with the execution.

Was it the right thing to do or the wrong thing? 

To kill another human being is to dip into the secret and deep well of hatred that resides within our human souls.  Is the death penalty justice, or is it, despite everything, still only an act of vengeance?

The jury is still out on that one.  We simply do not know.  We are still struggling with this question today.

That’s why, over the next weeks, months and perhaps years, Americans will be discussing the Tsarnaev case. And even if, years down the pike, after all the appeals are done and the books shut, and Tsarnaev is executed, we will still be asking if we did the right thing.  And that is good.  We should be doing exactly that—asking whether it was justice or vengeance, whether it was moral or immoral, right or wrong.

Some questions have easy answers, others less so. Justice is never simple. I guess that is what is meant by the Torah’s commandment, “Justice, justice shall you pursue.”  Justice is sometimes elusive.  Yet justice is the course we must follow—indeed, pursue—no matter how difficult that might be.

Let us pray, instead, that we might always keep shut within our souls the doors to the furnace of hate, to the fires of prejudice and bigotry, so that we might not be consumed by their flames, as were Nadab and Abihu, the two sons of Aaron who “offered a strange fire unto the Lord,” that justice, not vengeance, be the path we follow all the days of our lives.

Kein y’hi ratzon, may this be God’s will, Amen.

© 2015 by Boaz D. Heilman