Question

The death penalties carried out by human hands—by a religious court when the Temple stood. Given that the religious court knows that each year there are 1,000 people who ought to be executed, but their knowledge is not based on witnesses—for example, based on their own understanding, or as we might know today based on experts from a university, for example statisticians. My question, then, is whether the religious court must labor and strive to find witnesses through whom these people would be executed. Let me sharpen the question: if law and order prevail throughout the country as they should, and the traditions of the Torah are being transmitted excellently, yet experts inform the religious court that apparently there are about a thousand people liable for death for various prohibitions for which the Torah instructed execution—should the religious court view it as a failure that they did not succeed in executing those 1,000 people? Even if they did succeed with 500 of them, because there were witnesses who met all the rules specified in tractate Sanhedrin. But for the other thousand there were none. I will conclude by citing the verse: “Blood cannot be expiated for the land except by the blood of the one who shed it.” In Rabbi Akiva’s view, a religious court that executed once in 70 years is considered a destructive court.