Question

The death penalties carried out by human hands—by a religious court in Temple times. Given that the court knows that every year there are 1,000 people who ought to be executed, but this 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 diligently try to find witnesses through whom these people can be executed. And to sharpen the question: if law and order prevail throughout the state as they should, and the Torah’s traditions are being transmitted in an outstanding way, yet experts reveal to the court that apparently there are about a thousand people who are liable to death for various prohibitions for which the Torah instructed that one execute, is the religious court supposed to view it as a failure that it did not manage to execute those 1,000 people? Even though it did succeed with 500 of them because there were witnesses who met all the rules set out 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 through 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.