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MURDER

Judaism places human life and its preservation at the highest level of spiritual and, social and moral behavior. The commandment “you shall not murder” is the cornerstone of Jewish life. Throughout the ages of Jewish history murder was always considered the most heinous of crimes. Even when killing was necessary and justified, such as in wars of self defense and other extraordinary circumstances, it left a scar on the Jewish psyche.

King David, the greatest and most pious of all of the Judean kings of Israel, was denied the privilege of building the Temple in Jerusalem simply because he had killed people, albeit justifiably and legally.

Human blood spilled was not ever going to be the basis for anyone attempting to build the house of God. It is noteworthy that King Solomon, David’s son and heir who actually did construct the First Temple, is not recorded in the Bible as ever having fought a war. His government did execute criminals and traitors but Solomon himself was never seen by his generation or later generations as being a killer.

There is tradition that Moses himself was punished by God for his justifiable killing of the Egyptian taskmaster. Moses spends almost sixty years in exile from his brethren in Egypt as a penance for this killing. The torah provides for such exile in a “city of refuge” even for accidental unpremeditated killings that occur.

Suffice it to say that the Torah objects to the taking of human life though it certainly allows it on the basis of saving the Jewish people and other extraordinary circumstances.

During the long exile of Israel, Jewish society generally knew of few if any cases of murder in its midst. Violent personal crime was also almost an unknown here in the land of Israel for almost all of the last century. There were unfortunately political killings, ideologically motivated, such as those of DeHaan, Arlazarov and Rabin, but the general Jewish population felt itself safe from cases of wanton murder of Israelis on Israelis.

Somehow this situation has changed in this opening decade of the twenty-first century. The Israeli underworld has grown more powerful, more violent and wealthier over time. Their internal wars have grown more public and more brutal over time with completely innocent victims being part of the collateral damage of their internal wars.

And the police and the courts seem to be badly overmatched in attempting to deal with the problem. There is also hardly a day that passes when a murder – usually a typically horrendous and shocking one – by Israelis against Israelis is not featured in the media. Children against parents, neighbors against neighbors, spouses against spouses, etc. are all the daily fare of killings. Drunken fights by the Friday night pubsters also lead often to murder.

Children bring knives with them to school and stabbings will inevitably occur and again the authorities seem to be at a loss as how to deal with this ugliness and its effect on our society generally. And there seems to be no section of our very diverse society that is exempted from this problem.  

Into this bleak picture there are very few easy or immediate solutions that anyone can propose. Education towards civility, tolerance and non-violent disagreement is probably the only viable long term solution of this problem for our society. Every school in Israel as well as every home and family should stress the imperative that “you shall not murder.” The relative absence of violent personal crime in past Jewish society was based on this type of repetitive education.

It was also based on a much more homogeneous society than is our current Israeli community. The conscious attempt by the early Zionists to create the “new Jew” here produced a much more aggressive personality than the “old Jew” of the Exile. But with this necessary and apparently admirable strengthening of Jewish physical power there also slowly arose a gradual erosion of the prohibition against violence and murder.

Added to this are the difficulties of the absorption of immigrants, many of whom have no Jewish background whatsoever and who come from countries where violence and murder are unfortunately all too common, have also complicated matters. The rabbis of the Talmud warned us that “the day of the ingathering of the exiles will be a most difficult one” and apparently widespread violence and murder is certainly to be reckoned as one of the issues that makes for this difficulty in our society. Our mantra that “you shall not murder” should be constantly drilled into all segments of Jewish society. Eventually it will have a positive effect.