Q&A: One Who Causes Sin Is Worse + a Pursuer Whom One May Stop Even by Killing Him = Is It a Commandment to Kill Heretics and People Who Incite Others to “Leave Religion”?
One Who Causes Sin Is Worse + a Pursuer Whom One May Stop Even by Killing Him = Is It a Commandment to Kill Heretics and People Who Incite Others to “Leave Religion”?
Question
According to the well-known principle that one who causes another to sin is worse than one who kills him, (since the latter deprives him of life in this world, whereas the former deprives him of life in the World to Come),
and as is well known, in the law of a pursuer in capital cases, one may save the one being pursued even at the cost of the pursuer’s life, and it is a commandment to kill him (!) when there is no other way to prevent him from killing the pursued person…
Accordingly,
is it permissible to kill a person who causes the public to sin and does everything possible to lead people away from Torah observance and from Judaism??
If in the case of a murderer of the body it is permitted to kill him in order to save… then in the case of a murderer of souls (someone open about it, who declares that this is his mission in the world: “to get as many Jews as possible to leave religion”..) all the more so, no??
(See the case of “Naor Narkis”)
Answer
I do not think there is any connection between the two things. One who causes others to sin does what he truly thinks is right, unlike a pursuer who is out to murder. Moreover, the sinner chooses to sin, unlike a murder victim.
As is well known, according to the Beit Yosef, Tosafot and the Rashba disagreed about desecrating the Sabbath for a child who was taken captive and whom the gentiles would raise as a gentile. Is it permissible to desecrate the Sabbath in order to save him? So you see that this a fortiori argument does not necessarily hold.
Beyond that, murder is irreversible, unlike causing someone to sin.
And in general, when they say that this is greater than that, that is not a binding halakhic statement. It comes to emphasize a certain aspect, but it is בהחלט possible that there are other aspects in which דווקא the other one is greater. Like Rabbi Wolbe’s booklet “The Commandments Equal in Weight,” where he brings six commandments that are equal to the entire Torah. That of course cannot be logically true, since each one of them would then be equal to the other five plus everything else. That cannot stand literally. The explanation is that each one is equal to the entire Torah in some particular aspect, different from the aspects of the others. And the same applies in our case.