**Update: It came to my attention that I edited out a line that provides some really important context. I know the FBI has since stated that the Temple Israel attacker killed himself, while initial reports stated the guard on duty fired the lethal shot. I don’t trust Kash Patel, so I made a deliberate choice to stick with the initial narrative. You are allowed to feel how you feel about this choice.
It’s no light thing to take a life, even when it is your duty in a dangerous situation, or for a justified cause. Killing another person is complex, and throughout Torah we see that the legal and social consequences can be as nuanced as the cause of the crime. The Torah does not say “you shall not kill”. It says “you shall not murder”. So what’s the difference? Do we know anymore?
The difference seems to be based on intent:
- Murder (retzach) is intentional – you lay in wait for a victim, or plan their demise, or otherwise plan the act of violence. We’re told to punish murderers by court execution.
- Manslaughter (shegagah) is accidental – you didn’t mean to kill the person, but you’re still directly responsible for their death. Say you’re chopping wood and the head flies off and kills someone – that’s all you, my guy. You’ve got to flee to a sanctuary city now! You can’t come back until the High Priest dies.
I also learned the situations in which killing another person is permitted or at times even required, which are probably as unsurprising to you as they are to me:
- Self-defense – You are permitted and at times even obligated to stop a violent attacker (“rodef”, meaning pursuer). “If someone comes to kill you, rise early and kill them first” is from Sanhedrin 72a, and it’s probably the most metal one-liner I’ve ever heard in any of my decades.
- Immediate threats – If a burglar breaks in in the middle of the night, you can assume he’ll kill you if you interrupt him, and kill him first. That kind of thing.
- Court Executions – Also not murder, but the bar for evidence to justify the action is very high. Under modern rabbinic law, it pretty much can never happen, if I’m understanding right.
- War – Also not murder, but it does carry weight and can only be done under strict approval. Apparently King David was denied rebuilding the temple because he had “spilled too much blood.”
While researching this I found one of the most metal quotes I’ve ever heard, and was shocked to find out it came from the Talmud! Senhedrin 72: “If you someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.”
The Golem & The Guard
When I was in my undergrad, I wrote an essay linking the story of the golem with the criminology theory of violentization, and the roving packs of young Jewish men that patrolled the streets of Jewish neighborhoods in Chicago around Prohibition and World War II. They did this to protect the neighborhoods and residents from outsiders with ill intent. I’m not talking organized neighborhood watches – I’m talking teen thugs taking matters into their own hands. I imagine a Gangs of New York or Many Saints of Newark situation, but with more garlic and lox.
(Note: It has been almost 10 years since I wrote this paper. I may be paraphrasing and approximating quite a bit.)
These gangs formed in response to violent actions from non-Jews and hostile governments. A Russian pogrom around 1920 started a wave of antisemitic attacks across the world, and the first of these teen gangs started to defend against the threat of local antisemites getting funny ideas. A similar wave of antisemitism rose during World War II, with a similar response from teenage Jewish boys in the ethnic neighborhoods.
Violentization is a criminology theory developed by Lonnie Athens, and describes a multistage process by which people transform from being nonviolent citizens to violent offenders. Athens poses that it occurs in five stages:
- Brutalization, or violent subjugation, wherein authority figures coerce the subject or there’s an element of personal horrification (like maybe watching your neighborhood get bombed or your friends and neighbors put in camps.)
- Defiance, when the subject realizes they are being brutalized, and try to seek help for their crises
- Violent Dominative Engagements, where the subject begins using aggression, intimidation, or superiority to establish dominance
- Virulency, which is a marked willingness to use violence to attack another with minimal provocation
- Violent Predation is the most intense stage of this process, and is marked by a lack of remorse and focused intent to harm the target. Personality disorders with violent behaviors can fall into this.
It seems kind of obvious to me to have the stages laid out like this. You witness repeated violence against yourself or your community, you start acting out to try and ease your suffering in other ways and when it doesn’t work, you escalate to more aggressive means. The longer that those means are ineffective, or the brutalization continues, your violent anger increases and increases, and eventually you’re desensitized to it.
So how does the golem come in? It was a creature made specifically to do violence – a Jewish construct that wasn’t a Jew. In a way the Jewish gangs, violentized as they were by the antisemitic policies and actions, were golems. The golem wasn’t a murderer, because it only harmed those who would harm the Jews. I’m sure they were not considered the most adherent of Jewish boys, likely giving up Jewish values or observances, maybe in order to do the work of protecting their neighborhoods when the police would not.
The guard who killed the Temple Israel attacker was not a murderer. At that moment, he was obligated to protect the staff. But that does not mean the act was without weight – I sincerely doubt the guard is a sociopath. He was likely traumatized just as the staff and students and community were. But perhaps he was a bit like a golem – not Jewish, per se, but an instrument of our protection, and a damn fine one. The act was appropriate – he did what the Sanhedrin quote suggested and shot first to avoid having himself or the people in his charge killed. Lives were saved by this violent act, as much as we abhor it.
A very important figure in our story was also a killer – Moses! This year while reading the portion, there was a line that struck me – right before he kills the taskmaster, he looks around. He checks for witnesses. That’s an element of premeditation. It’s literally murder. But it does not stop him from being a powerful instrument of G-d’s power and presence. It doesn’t stop him from being a leader that the entire community turns to for guidance. It doesn’t stop G-d from explicitly choosing him for a great task that would lead an entire people out of slavery. But maybe it did stop him from being permitted into the Promised Land. While paying your debt to society may mean that you lose certain privileges, like dying in the Promised Land for Moses, or being separated from your family and community for a prison stay – it should not also mean that you are only ever seen as your crime.
The Inmates
All this brought me back to the men housed where I work. We definitely house many people who premeditated their crimes. We also house people that have long, long histories of crimes of increasing violence. But we also have people who didn’t have good options at all, and who were victimized in many ways themselves.
I had a library clerk for a few months who told me that when he was young, around 8, his mother taught him to use a hand gun. She worked two jobs and could not afford childcare, and was forced to leave him alone with his 3 younger siblings, in a neighborhood where break-ins and drive-by shootings were commonplace. He grew up with pressure to join gangs because it was often the only form of safety for young folks in a community that was targeted by police, who ostensibly are meant to protect us, and at risk of victimization by older kids in equally desperate circumstances.
They had nights where there was no food. Or nights where their mother bought two large McDonalds and split it among the four kids, but eat none herself. So when my clerk was old enough (around 11 or 12, he said) he started running for local drug dealers to help pay for groceries and school clothes. By fifteen he was selling the drugs himself. He entered the prison system at seventeen when he killed a member of a rival gang in a drive-by shooting. My clerk told me that that gang had been driving through neighborhoods and menacing them for some time before it escalated to this level.
I don’t pretend to understand the finer points of growing up in that kind of existence, where violence is constant and expected, and it would be foolish to think that people don’t leave out some incriminating details when telling you their life’s story. But it really makes me wonder: What kind of choices do people really have, when we allow members of our community to live in neighborhoods that are overpoliced, bombed, or underfunded? When you need to feed your children, but there are no jobs in your area since the factory closed or relocated to Mexico, sometimes selling drugs is your best bet. What about when they’ve watched their friends and families and places of worship be repeatedly firebombed or used like human shields?
As Much of a Conclusion as is Possible
What I like about Parasha Vayikra is that the Torah does not say “if someone transgresses” it says “when.” It just knows it’s going to happen, because of course it’s going to. We’re human! Some of our mistakes are very bad and very ugly, but we are going to make them. At one point in Vayikra we are told that people who cannot afford to bring an offering of animal can bring an offering of a choice flour. It takes into account the circumstances of the transgressor when deciding the punishment or reparation, and I believe that a merciful justice system would do the same.
Prisons now do not treat inmates like humans have made mistakes. We treat them like meat to be warehoused, whose only label is the crime they committed. Through funding and political avenues, social-emotional education and programming opportunities are regularly denied to high level offenders due to being “the worst behaved” – and they are. Believe me. It’s like working in a warzone some days – but they are also statistically more likely to be illiterate, to be from tumultuous homes, to have behavior health concerns, to be outright mentally ill, or to just never have had a trusted authority or adult figure in their life to teach them better skills. To provide a truly just system, one that made people better and actually equipped them with skills to make their lives better for themselves, instead of traumatizing them in the name of punishment, our duty as society has to shift to recognize that prisons are used as a threat for social control – it can’t actually be a place that helps you under the social structure we have now, which is essentially conform or we’ll throw you in this hell hole. You’ll eat slop. You’ll get raped by your bunk mate. The officers will degrade you and abuse you. You won’t have any privacy. The minute the cell door slams behind you, you stop being a human in many ways.
What would happen to our justice system if the attitude shifted to “you have acted poorly – what caused it? What support can you be given long term that prevents this from happening again?” What could happen to the world if we shifted from viewing one another as enemies, and started to think about what might be causing the bad behavior – and how we can remove that hindrance.
