Death Comes Not Only for the Vicar

by R. Gidon Rothstein

Parshat Shofetim

Spotting Providence

Ibn Ezra’s discussion of eglah arufah, the heifer whose neck was broken, 21;7, twice inserts a Divine element. [Side point, independent of Ibn Ezra: in English, a heifer is an animal that has moved from being a calf, a baby cow, to have the physical maturity to give birth but has not yet done so. A parah adumah, the red cow whose ashes we use for removing tum’at met is also a heifer, as the Internet knows. The Torah uses different words because eglah means a heifer under two years old, where the parah adumah must be three or four, preferably not more.]

Ibn Ezra wasn’t the first to wonder why the Torah required the closest city to a murder victim found on the road to atone, when we have no reason to think they were at fault. He answers that unless that city had sinned in a way similar to this, this would not have happened near them.

Two verses later, when the Torah says the ceremony will expunge the fault of the innocent blood from that city, he repeats his idea, innocent people are not killed (in Israel, when we have a Beit HaMikdash and a Sanhedrin functioning fully) if we are acting correctly. He declares this the sod (esoteric secret, not broadcast casually) of sechar averah averah, sechar mitzvah mitzvah, the words of Ben Azzai from Avot 4;2, the “reward” of a sin is further sin, of a mitzvah is a further mitzvah.

[I recently was perusing two books by a longtime friend, R. Dr. Yamin Levy, who makes the valuable point that mysticism need not only mean Kabbalah. Ibn Ezra is giving us a fine example, a sense of an esoteric, metaphysical world, without it being what we commonly call Kabbalah.]

For Ibn Ezra, when the Jews and the Land are operating at full tilt, Providence operates prominently enough that random murder implicates the entire nearby city. More generally, one good path leads to others, bad paths the reverse, for him a metaphysical truth (rather than a psychological one, for example, that if we act well, we will have changed ourselves to tend to act better).

The Court’s Responsibility to Prevent Crime

Sforno to 21;4-7 takes a more practical approach to the same issues. The heifer’s neck is broken from behind, he says, to symbolize how the victim didn’t see death coming, and the crime happened out of sight of people in general. To explain “out of sight,” he goes further than just the stealth of the act itself.

For Sforno, the local judges were obligated to be aware of any known murderers, any people they would expect to commit murder under the right circumstances, and remove that person from their town. There’s two parts to this, each novel: first, he expects (verse five) judges to know their city/town well, the families and individuals, histories and tendencies, to be alert to who might be prone to this. He repeats the idea in verse seven, when the judges assert their innocence, when no one suspected them. Sforno thinks they are to mean we did not allow anyone we knew might act like this to live among us.

 What a provocative idea, certainly open to abuse. In a stereotype, I can imagine (and fear) a local sheriff, loaded with prejudices, who runs people out of town jes becuz he don lak ‘em. I doubt Sforno means that, but he does mean that if we all “know” someone to be the head of a crime syndicate, who orders killings and robbings, etc., the local court is supposed to banish him and his associates.

At the very end, he also assumes what is not yet true, anyone with information about this murder certainly would have come forward. I’ll leave that for you to discuss amongst yourselves.

From Murder to War

The chapter before, the Torah discussed who would be exempted from fighting a war [sadly, in our times I have to mention that Torah study is not included]. On the first verse, Or HaChayyim thinks it might also symbolize our personal wars with our yetzer, our inclination to act badly.

An interpretation of a type I don’t usually share, but for two interesting points he makes.  We might fear this war for two reasons, he says, first, the yetzer is more accustomed to war than we are, it was made to conquer us, and we are not as trained. Second, we are constituted to listen to our yetzer rather than to Torah and mitzvot.

There’s much more I don’t have the space to discuss, but Or HaChayyim reads the Torah to encourage us not to fear this battle. We can conquer ourselves, if we so choose, if we fight fearlessly.

In verse eight, he returns to a soldier afraid of war in the ordinary sense. Sotah 44a records a view that he is afraid because of sins he has committed. Or HaChayyim expands the idea to include a Jew who finds himself afraid, despite not knowing of sins. A Jew who finds himself afraid on his way out to war should take it to signal sins he is not remembering.

Because, says Orach Chayyim, [a lesson with important ramifications], being saved in war always requires miraculous protection from God, and sinners often do not merit such. [Whenever we speak of Providence, we have to equivocate; for example, Yerushalmi Pe’ah 1;1—I”ve heard it quoted many times, always have to look it up—says Achav would win at war, despite his idolatry, because the people were faithful to each other, did not spread slander about each other. Life’s complicated.]

But fundamentally, victory at war is always a miraculous result of Providence, so if we have sins, we should have some fear. Words to remember.

Disobeying the King

Sticking with sin and its consequences, Emet Le-Ya’akov starts his comment to 17;9 with an Ibn Ezra (whom he quotes 137 times that I found, Rashi 179). When the Torah discusses a zaken mamrei, a Torah scholar who rejects the ruling of the Sanhedrin, it speaks of going to the priests/Levi’im and the judge who shall be in that day.

Ibn Ezra identified the judge with the king (part of whose job was to ensure justice, as we know from the famous story of Shlomo and the disputed baby). If so, when the Torah prescribes death for the malicious elder who rejects the ruling of the judge, the judge is really the king!

Emet Le-Ya’akov sees in this a Biblical source for the capital culpability of anyone who disobeys the king; where the Torah scholar who contravenes a ruling of the Sanhedrin must be judged by a court, the king-disobeyer deserves death at the hands of Heaven, says R. Kaminetzky. [The whole topic is of some interest to me, because it seems to me we have forgotten this fundamental idea, there are actions a person can take where s/he deserves death, regardless of whether a court administers it.]

Not only might Hashem kill the person, Jewish law gave the king the right (not the responsibility) to address the issue himself, by killing the malfeasant. It is why Rambam, Laws of Kings 3;8, says both the person is liable for death and the king may kill him/her. Usually, if someone is chayyav, liable, some official body is supposed to execute the judgment. For the king it is a “may do,” not a “must do.”

It explains, says R. Kaminetzky, how David could urge Shlomo to kill Shim’I after he, David, had promised Shim’I he wouldn’t kill him. David’s promise applied only to himself, and did nothing to relieve Shim’I of his liability. David wanted Shlomo to act on it.

Death comes in many ways. It comes because a populace sinned, so Providence sends them a victim who is their responsibility; it comes because courts do not deal with the potential criminals in their midst, according to Sforno; it comes in war because of our sins, even if we do not know those sins; and it comes to those who rebel against the king, even if the king himself chooses not to act on it.