Learning from the Light of the Menorah

Rabbi Joel Fleekop

Friday, December 23, 2005

Having just kindled the Sabbath lights, many of us are already anxiously awaiting our next chance to say a blessing over candles. That opportunity will arrive in just 48 hours with the beginning of Hanukkah.

That we are excited is understandable. Hanukkah is a really fun holiday. For eight days we get to put our diets on hold and fill our bellies with delicious latkes and sufganyot. During Hanukkah there is the chance to win big playing dreidel, and of course the guaranteed jackpot, receiving presents. Even the stories we tell on Hanukkah are fun, celebrating the victory of the underdog Maccabees against their Goliath of an enemy, the Greek Assyrians. And of course there is the story of little drop of oil that simply refused to burn out, lasting a miraculous eight days.

Hanukkah, as we celebrate it today, is eight days of fun. But there is a darker, sordid side to the holiday. In the book of 2nd Maccabees we read horrible stories of torture inflicted upon the Jews. First we are told of the torture of a 90 year old man, Eleazar, who is beaten to death on the rack. Then, in even more horrific detail, we are told of the death of seven brothers, tortured and killed one by one as their mother watched in horror. Ultimately the mother, who tradition tells us was named Hannah, is killed as well for refusing to embrace the King’s foreign religion.

These examples of depraved torture and death help us understand the fire that fueled the Maccabee revolt. But sadly they are not the only occurrences of torture in our people’s history.

As we are reminded each Yom Kippur with the reading of the martyrology, Eyleh Ezkarah, our ancestors also suffered torture at the hands of the Romans and the Inquisitors of the Iberian Peninsula. More recently, but certainly no less horrifically, Jews have known the sting of torture and humiliation during the Pogroms and the Holocaust.

Melissa Weintraub of Rabbis for Human Rights asserts that

While we cannot draw equivalencies between our suffering—its unique depths and horrors-and the suffering of any other people, past or present, we can, in our humiliations, weave empathy from pain. We know, from the inside, what it can mean to be abandoned to powerful governments with lofty aspirations. We know what it can mean to be dehumanized, blamed, and punished collectively for the misdeeds, real and imagined of the few.

This knowledge and this empathy motivates, and I dare say obliges us, to join the debate over how our nation should treat prisoners during this War on Terror.

As illustrated by the gridlock that consumed Washington for weeks, this debate is not about party politics but rather our commitment to human rights and our need to secure the homeland. It is an important debate, one with more nuances then the 90-9 support for the McCain amendment would suggest, and so we turn to our tradition for guidance.

In the fifth of the Ten Commandments we are taught Kibud Av VaEm, to honor ones father and mother. Elsewhere Judaism instructs us to be respectful of the elderly, of scholars, and of the community. In each of these cases honor and respect is shown to an individual or group because of their merit. But Judaism also teaches us about kvod habriot, an unqualified, universal respect, owed to all human beings, independent of age and wealth, race and religion. Honor that is due people whether they are a tzadik, a righteous person, or a rasha, one who does evil.

The Rabbis teach that Kvod HaBriot is such an important value that fulfilling this commandment is to be give priority over all rabbinic injunctions and many found in the Torah. This teaching and many others found in our tradition call upon us to demand that detainees held by our government in prisons, whether at home or abroad, whether they are insurgents, Saddamists, criminals, or terrorists, should not be subject to humiliation and degradation. As the Mishnah in Masechet Baba Kama teaches, “Our obligation to treat others with dignity is not conditional on what sort of person stands before us.”

Jewish tradition is clear that prisoners, like all human beings, must be treated with dignity. But what about the ticking bomb scenario? What if the prisoner has information that could prevent an attack and save innocent lives? Doesn’t Pikuach Nefesh, the teaching that all commandments except for prohibitions against murder, idolatry, and incest can be violated to save a life, come into play? What about the teachings about self-defense, about being able to defend ourselves against a rodef, one who is pursuing us? Doesn’t this justify torture if doing so can save innocent lives?

The answer to these questions is Yes!! In theory there could be a situation in which torture is justified. The rodef principle, which allows for actions to be taken against one subjecting others to imminent harm might, as Melissa Weintraub concludes, “release an interrogator from liability if he were to resort to torture spontaneously in a moment in which he had probable cause to believe the prisoner before him was a perpetrator with knowledge that could save lives in immediate danger.”

We see an acknowledgment of this in Israeli Law. In 1987 then Supreme court Justice Moshe Landau wrote that “moderate physical pressure” was defensible in cases in which an interrogator committed an act immediately necessary to save lives from grave harm.” With this said, the court, in a 1999 ruling, asserted that the government and its security agencies may not establish directives authorizing the use of any physical coercion, only that the interrogator could use the precedent of the rodef to defend himself against future criminal charges.

This limitation is consistent with Jewish tradition, which asserts that the rodef defense applies only to a spontaneous act.

Our tradition places other limitations on the ticking bomb scenario as well. The Talmud, through a debate preserved in Masechet Pesachim, makes it very clear that one life cannot be sacrificed to save that of another. From this we learn that torture against a third party is not allowed, even if that party has committed crimes, even related crimes, in the past. The ticking bomb, or rodef, justification of torture is only viable when the threat posed by an individual is visible and imminent.

This is perhaps the most important limitation in addressing the treatment of detainees held at Abu Ghraib, Guantantamo Bay, and elsewhere around the world. To say that torturing them is wrong we don’t have to believe that the detainees are innocent. We don’t even have to believe that there is anything decent about them. So long as they are not personally in the process of causing us imminent harm, Judaism teaches torturing them is wrong, whether the decision to do so is made by a high ranking official at the Pentagon or an interrogator in the field.

In just two days time we will celebrate the victory of a small band of Jews who stood up to a military and a government that wanted to strip them of their rights and their humanity. This Hanukkah, let us be the not so small band of Jews who join with the majority of our fellow Americans in demanding that our government, one that has historically been a beacon for human rights, never again condones or even turns a blind eye to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. This Hanukkah let us, guided by the wisdom of our tradition and the miraculous light of the menorah, speak out against torture.

Shabbat Shalom