Each day I wake up and check my phone for the news from Israel. Is this the day I need to prepare myself for a friend’s passing? How many people died overnight? Was it someone I knew? I walk through my day in a daze, unable to give work 100% of my attention, instead filled with dread and knots in my stomach, knowing my home is under fire. I find myself looking for airline tickets. I am sick with worry.
The country which I love with my entire being is under attack. My people, my neighbors, my friends are being terrorized and simultaneously engaged in this military action. The escalation has increased significantly from the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, Gilad Shaar, Naftali Frankel, and Eyal Yifrach, to a revenge killing of Muhammed Hussein Abu-Khadir, an Arab teen, to an all out invasion into Gaza. 30 Israeli soldiers have been killed in this battle. Hundreds of innocent Arabs have been killed. The anguish I feel is all-consuming. I am plagued by questions of what to do with the bloodshed, the pain, and death.
The questions are ever-present. Our tradition says that we shall not kill, that we should protect ourselves against murder. So then, what does it mean to defend? How long can Israel sit and be bombarded with bombs before she acts, knowing there will be collateral damage in the wake? What do we do when people take a situation into their own hands, not consulting a higher power or the laws of human engagement?
In searching for these answers, I realized that this week’s Torah portion deals with just these complex ideas. It defines what רצח, murder is, tells us how to handle the bloodshed that occurs. The parsha even goes so far as to delineate what encompasses a city of refuge, who can go there and why.
Anyone who takes a life sustains some sort of punishment. The parsha specifies, for instance, that only one who murders another intentionally should be punished by a blood-avenger, or a close family member who becomes a state-appointed agent. Only certain objects or means of killing count as 1st degree murder. In Numbers 35:21, the explanation is that “if [a man] pushed [someone] in hate or hurled something at him on purpose and death resulted,” the instigator can be put to death. That insinuates that those people throwing rockets at Gaza, and those doing so from Gaza into Israel deserve punishment.
I think to myself “that cannot be right.” The idea of killing members of the Israeli army for sending rockets into Gaza doesn’t seem like a good solution to me, but nor does allowing Hamas operatives who bombard Israel with rocket fire to continue to do so. Following orders cannot be punishable by death, can it? The parsha doesn’t suggest what to do when people are dying on both sides of the conflict. It doesn’t clarify how to support Israel, while your moral compass is telling you that innocent death is wrong. Nor does it give an option for what to do when the people firing the rockets are simply following orders, not the ones making the ultimate decisions.
We, as Jews, come from a place that maintains the importance of life above all else. That claim is being threatened by the idea of a real-life situation where lives will be lost on a daily basis, on both sides of the conflict. My heart says that Israel must support herself, despite the death count, but then I hear another voice saying that any death is still death. The question then becomes, not how do we define murder, but how do we maintain our morality in this sea of death?
The Torah, as any good teacher does, offers some kind of hope and solution to this moral dilemma. This hope comes in the form of cities of refuge, ערי המקלט. The purpose of a city of refuge is to offer asylum to one who has accidentally killed another individual and is worried for his own life. He can turn to one of these six cities of refuge and be given peace of mind that he is safe and protected as long as he is within the city limits. At the time when the tribe where the murder took place is ready to prosecute, the suspected killer is taken to court and brought to justice. This is our first of two positives offered by the cities: a person gains protection until a court steps in to judge. The second positive we glean is that time is offered to let minds and hearts not directly emotionally involved in the circumstances preside over the trial.
Yet, how does this relate to modern-day Israel. The word מקלט in Hebrew means shelter, specifically air raid shelter. This is where Israelis go every time they hear the air raid siren, marking another rocket being launched at them. Therefore, Israel has a few more than six ערי-מקלט, we have thousands. These shelters literally save lives. They serve their purpose, of housing people from the barrage around them and give them sanctuary for a few minutes. Although these shelters are not necessarily used to shelter suspected killers, we see that the refuge is still imperative.
Were we to consider these cities of refuge as actual cities again, we might still be able to imagine it in today’s escalating skirmish. I know intrinsically that there is not one individual that is firing these rockets into Gaza or into Israel. Rather, many people are responsible for each rocket being sent over the wall. Many of these people are likely the unintentional killers we hear about in our parsha. The intention of their commanders may be to kill, but they personally do not wish to kill anyone. That moral dilemma and conscience weighs strong. This is where the cities of refuge come in. Those who know they have taken innocent lives may search in vain for a way to rationalize what they have done or are currently doing. They are the ones who need the cities of refuge. They need a place to put distance between themselves and their actions, to be judged by an outside party with no revenge to be had.
The Torah delineates six rules of how exactly we go about the process of negotiating a legal decision when it comes to murder. This is supposed to be about what happens when one person commits murder, detailing how the murder should be avenged, or not avenged, and how to bring resolution to the initial conflict. However, we are not told what to do when multiple deaths occur and it is not one person doing the killing, but one people against another. Nor are we given the guidelines for what to do when there are chains of command, with a Commander telling his soldiers what to do, therefore potentially changing the onus from the person doing the action to the Commanding Officer.
Perhaps, when this war is over, a conclusive solution can be reached. The International Criminal Court of the United Nations, a supposedly unbiased body, might be able to try those in the upper echelons of both Hamas leadership and the Israeli military. I don’t want to see my brothers and sisters as killers, but nor do I want to see my neighbors as killers either. I lived and worked with Arabs. I ate lunch with them everyday. I shared gossip with them. They aren’t killers either. Many of them are my friends as well. I want to see retribution, so Israel maintains her right to exist, and so I don’t feel this moral dilemma of who is responsible for these deaths.
Yet right now, there is no solution. At least not one that will leave everyone happy and all parties feeling they have gotten what they ask for/deserve. Each party is currently grieving and feels they are in the right with regard to killings in this Operation. Each party wants to gain justice. But if both sides continue to pursue justice on their own, they will continue to bring death, hatred and pain to the world.
Unfortunately, these six rules for what to do when homicide occur do not have a timeline attached to them. They do not say exactly when we should enact the process and how to carry it out. Especially during times of war when emotions are high and anger flies faster than the rockets in the sky.
For now, we must recognize that there is no easy solution. Yet, there can be a tempering of hate and anger, a conscious effort to fill the world with more love and peace. Although naive, the more love we bring into the world, the more we counter the hate around us. We must recognize that these laws of what to do with homicide were put down for us, as the Jewish people, to bring expiation. If we acknowledge that, we can cease to take life and death matters into our own hands.
How do we bring about this tempering of hate and anger? We must reach out to our Muslim neighbors, engaging them in conversation and friendship. We can give money to Israeli organizations like OneFamily and the Reform Movement in Israel (the IMPJ) who help make life in these places of refuge a little easier. We can write our Congressmen/woman, urging them to suggest respite for both Palestinian and Israeli children caught up in this struggle. We can and must make our voices heard.
This Shabbat, may we gain peace and and understanding with our brothers and sisters. May we merit to live in a place where rockets do not rain down and hatred is not the modus operandi. May this Shabbat bring us compassion and time to consider how we can bring betterment to our broken world.
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