Q&A: To Beat People Up Properly Because of the Rebbe’s Honor
To Beat People Up Properly Because of the Rebbe’s Honor
Question
It is commonly accepted that someone who dishes it out may get it back.
Someone who shows contempt for another person may get hit.
Maybe that isn’t something admirable, but reality shows that this is the reality, and you have to take it into account in advance.
If a certain Hasidic group thinks that someone from another Hasidic group showed disrespect to their Rebbe, and according to their style it seems fitting and honorable to them to carry out a lynching and riots against the other Hasidic group (and not against the specific person who, in their view, acted disrespectfully toward their Rebbe) — is that entirely worthy of condemnation?
Or is that reasonable within the framework of hitting back?
(In places where violence is not considered shameful.)
Answer
What is this nonsense?
Discussion on Answer
One more piece of nonsense and this thread will be deleted.
If someone hits me, I’m allowed to hit him back. (And some say it’s even a commandment.)
He hit me with that understanding.
In places where there isn’t a culture of looking for the specific individual who committed the wrong and hitting specifically him, but rather the accepted culture is collective guilt — meaning: if a Hasid from some Hasidic group hit my Rebbe, then the Hasidic group to which the attacker belongs has attacked — attacked whom?
Not the Rebbe, but my Hasidic group, meaning the collective.
So am I, as part of that collective — which basically means that they hit me — allowed to hit back any individual from that attacking Hasidic group who happens to cross my path?
After all, this is the whole principle that if someone hits me, I’m allowed (and it is a commandment) to hit him back double. Only here it isn’t one individual against another, but one community against another.
And the principle that this is community against community and not individual against individual is also accepted by the side that struck first — that is, he struck with that understanding.
If so, then it’s completely legitimate to beat up any random Hasid from the opposing group, since they beat up my Hasidic group.
Does the Rabbi agree?