Q&A: The Tragedy in Beit Shemesh
The Tragedy in Beit Shemesh
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I don’t know whether you heard about the horrifying incident this week in Beit Shemesh. The matter has been bothering me quite a bit, and I was thinking about the halakhic and moral aspects of it.
There was a women’s performance in Yiddish for the women there (mainly “Jerusalemite” women). In a small bar-mitzvah hall that was meant to hold 200 people, the organizers brought in 800 (apparently to save money). Of course, most of them had no seats, so they crowded into every possible space, including adjacent rooms designated as a kitchen and the like. Without the organizers’ knowledge, audience members brought in folding tables belonging to the hall in order to stand on them and thus manage to watch the performance.
Many participants came with their babies and small children. One of them brought an approximately month-old baby and pushed his stroller next to her. A table crowded with spectators collapsed in the middle of the show and struck the baby on the head. He was rushed to the hospital, and the next morning he was pronounced dead.
From a legal standpoint, there are rules about how and on whom to place responsibility. As far as I know, the hall owner was detained for questioning under caution.
My question is from a halakhic standpoint. It seems to me that in Jewish law there is no concept of “ministerial” responsibility (I couldn’t find a better definition). Suppose we were trying to determine who would be liable to exile. Would Jewish law search with tweezers for who placed the table there, and who caused it to collapse (“If five sat on one bench and did not break it, and one came and sat on it and broke it—the last one is liable; and Rav Pappa said: such as Pappa bar Abba” Bava Kamma 10), or could it look at the overall picture and place responsibility on other parties, or perhaps divide it among all of them?
In our story, several guilty parties can be found: the hall owners, the producers of the performance, those who brought in the table, those who stood on it (the first ones and the last ones), and the mother who brought her infant into a dangerous place.
From a moral standpoint, can one identify a primary guilty party?
Answer
I hadn’t heard about the incident, but from your description it seems to me that there are many guilty parties here. It begins with Haredi society in general, which is not careful about standards and safety rules because it closes itself off from procedures that come from outside. Beyond that, it does not open up recreational possibilities for women, or in general, and that creates huge pressure on any “kosher” event. Beyond that, perhaps the husbands also bear blame for not staying to babysit the children when the wife goes out for entertainment (perhaps out of concern for neglect of Torah study, though I assume that is not the whole picture).
After that, there is responsibility on the part of the hall owner to enforce the permitted number of people. That is also what the law determines.
And after that there is responsibility on the mother who brought the child to such a table, and on everyone who stood on the table, and likewise on anyone who saw and did not object.
Since there is no monetary compensation for a free person, the question of who bears the primary responsibility does not seem important to me here (that might perhaps have practical significance only for payment for the damage to the table, but the hall owner who allowed it cannot sue, because this would be like an animal that died through its normal use). Everyone needs to do some soul-searching.
Discussion on Answer
First of all, there is no liability to exile nowadays either. But beyond that, I don’t think that in a case like this anyone would incur exile even if you reached the conclusion that he was primarily at fault in some sense.
At first I tried to think in the categories of “this one can / cannot” and “that one can / cannot,” and I immediately realized that it is hard to apply them here. The reason is that there is no direct human act here, but negligence, and therefore it is impossible to define their mutual contribution. I think that a person who placed his child on a collapsing bench, and the child fell and died, would not incur exile. It has to be his act of killing, even if unintentional. Here there is no act of killing, only negligence, or at most indirect causation.
Thank you very much!
The question of who is primarily responsible does matter for liability to exile, doesn’t it?