Q&A: The Letter Mem
The Letter Mem
Question
Hello Rabbi,
How are you?
1. I wanted to ask why the punishment of the stubborn and rebellious son is stoning, if the concern is that he will become a robber and murder someone, when the punishment for murder is execution by the sword.
2. I heard about a kind of conceptual inquiry regarding what a Jew receives execution by a religious court for: is it for the act of transgression itself, or for the corruption of the soul, or because the transgression reveals that there is a severe defect in his soul, and for that he is put to death.
The practical difference would be that someone who wanted to say that the punishment is for the revelation of the defect in the soul could explain why the stubborn and rebellious son is punished by death, because all the conditions he has reached testify that a defect in his soul has been revealed, and therefore he is put to death.
What do you think?
Answer
1. It may be because he turns into a serial murderer in character and way of life, and not just an ordinary murderer whose punishment is the sword. Like the difference between someone who habitually speaks slander and someone who merely stumbled once into speaking slander.
2. I’m not familiar with that inquiry, and I don’t know how to resolve it. Simply speaking, punishment is given for a transgression and not for a state of being. The transgression depends on intent and culpability, not on the outcome (the spiritual damage). The spiritual damage is itself a kind of punishment, and I see no logic in imposing yet another punishment for it.
I also don’t see how this resolves your question about the stubborn and rebellious son. After all, the defect in his soul is like the defect in the soul of a murderer, so why is he punished by stoning and not by the sword? Perforce, it must be something like what I wrote above, and then there is no need to add the assumption you suggested here.
Discussion on Answer
I no longer remember the discussion, but I don’t understand why he should incur stoning if no prohibition was actually committed. The prohibition is creating an electrical circuit. If the bulb is burnt out, no electrical circuit is created because there is a break in the bulb. An electrical circuit is a functioning circuit. It’s like someone who intended to eat pork but ended up with lamb meat in his hand (the passage in tractate Nazir 23a).
The medieval authorities (Rishonim) already discussed this.
Yad Ramah answered that in the end he will rob people, and the trade of robbery involves desecration of the Sabbath, whose punishment is stoning.
Da’at Zekenim from the Tosafists wrote: “It seems to say that since it is written, ‘he does not obey the voice of his father and the voice of his mother,’ it is like one who curses his father and mother, whose punishment is stoning” (apparently, disobedience to parents that will ultimately lead to future acts of cursing father and mother is the issue here).
And the Maharal wrote: “And it seems that in the end he would become liable for death many times, and therefore the Torah was stringent with him” (which is the answer that was given here).
Hello Rabbi,
Thank you very much.
A question became sharper for me regarding what you wrote.
What would happen, hypothetically, if turning on a light with an electric switch on the Sabbath is a Torah-level desecration of the Sabbath, and someone comes to turn on a light, and two people warn him, and he says that he is doing it with that in mind, and he does turn it on, but then it turns out that the bulb did not light either because it was burnt out (according to the view that the desecration is the act itself), or because the switch is defective (according to the view that this is building an electrical circuit), and in practice there was no desecration of the Sabbath in the technical sense. Is he stoned or not?