Q&A: A Platonic Approach in Jewish Law and in Reality
A Platonic Approach in Jewish Law and in Reality
Question
Hello, Rabbi Michi, and have a good week. In light of the difficult fighting in Gaza, and the existential danger we have gotten into, a question came to mind that caught my attention. It grew out of the emotional calls I hear from both right and left. I hope this is not considered a nuisance for you. These days I’ve been thinking about a Platonic approach in Jewish law, and the question is: to what extent can one relate in day-to-day life on two completely different planes to the same person.
This caught my attention as a kind of trigger, both because of the repeated cries from the radical left about innocent people, and about captives who must be brought back at any price, and also because of cries from the right about the sanctity of every Jew—secular, atheist, religious, and traditional—simply because he was killed in what is now being called a second Holocaust, something about which you wrote a sharp and piercing article in the past, disagreeing with the prevailing view.
1. Jewish law seemingly asks, even demands, of the public a very high standard of separating one’s personal day-to-day attitude toward a certain person—who may be objectionable—from the help and assistance one should give him, provided he is now behaving properly. And yet it is clear that in most cases we do not manage to make such a total separation. After all, it would be hard to demand that a husband whose ex-wife robbed him in the past and cheated him during the divorce should send her and her children from a new marriage a holiday donation of gifts for the poor, even if she repented of her actions, and even if she and her children are God-fearing, and even if that husband serves as the charity officer in the community where she lives. It would be hard to ask a bereaved father whose daughter was murdered by a despicable robber to send his daughter’s murderer a book to prison about the laws of repentance, even if that robber truly did repent, and even if the father is a rabbi who heads a department for religious inmates, and so on.
2. And that brings me to the following question: what should a person do who bears some kind of mark of Cain, harmed people in his past, and wants to repent? As a result, he has to integrate into religious society and into Jewish society generally in order to be able to properly study Torah, pray, arrange matches for his children, and so forth. Is it permissible according to Jewish law to conceal one’s identity? To change one’s name? To deceive people who knew you from your past and claim that you are someone else? The same question also in the opposite direction: if someone has undergone shame—a woman who was raped in the community she came from, and sometimes the rape even created for her an improper halakhic status (the wife of a priest, a woman who was violated against her will by a gentile, and the like)—and even though this is improper on the personal level, is it also permitted to lie even to relatives? To your wife, and conceal her past from her? What about sincere converts who in the past were rejected by a religious community, whether out of concern that they were known from childhood not as converts but as children of mixed parentage—a Jewish father and a gentile mother—and now they switch identities in a new community: is that a permitted act? Seemingly there is major deception and misleading here—but one cannot live a religious life without integrating into a commandment-observant community.
3. As for harm to the collective, also from that angle: today, publicly, following the fighting, it has become customary to start imposing collective punishment on Israeli Arabs, and justifiably so, because of fear of support for terror, and because of expressions of support coming from there. In your opinion, should one: a. after the collective sanction, examine by certain means who among them is acceptable and exempt him from it; and b. do you think the Arab himself, the Israeli Arab at present, has a special obligation to declare that he does not belong to the terror-supporting collective, even if he has no such past?
Answer
The fighting in Gaza, meanwhile, is not really that difficult (for us). Nor do I see any existential threat (to us). Maybe you wrote your opening sentence from the point of view of the Gazans…
2. If there is no harm to anyone, then there is no reason to reveal that information. Usually there is no misleading here either, because that information is not owed to them. Misleading, as distinct from lying, is concealing information that the other person is entitled to. Otherwise it is just a lie.
3. The wording is garbled and also full of periods. There is no justification for collective punishment, and there is no collective support for terror there either. On the contrary, data are being published showing that an overwhelming majority of Israeli Arabs condemn and dissociate themselves from the terrible acts of Hamas. And even someone who identifies with Hamas does not deserve punishment for the identification itself. A person’s opinions are his own business. Only if he does something that endangers someone does he deserve punishment. I don’t know what is meant by obligations to make declarations. It’s a vague and undefined question.
Discussion on Answer
And I forgot—
of course I do not think it is theoretically possible, nor practical, and certainly it is also reprehensible on some level in principle, to punish someone for merely holding vile opinions of support for terror and sadistic murder. But my point is that since reality shows that many among those who support Hamas online and publish words encouraging its actions also carry these things out in practice several years later, it is fitting to punish them in that respect in order to prevent future crime that endangers human life.
Unlike, for example, a fanatic Muslim who declares that his dream is that Jews will be a protected but humiliated minority under the Mahdi, but that it is forbidden to act violently nowadays—such a person is of course no different from an ordinary fundamentalist Christian, and… unfortunately, no different from many of our own preachers.
Rabbi Michi, thank you for the response.
And I’ll clarify my intention where it wasn’t understood. I understand your answer, and I’m not coming to argue with it or correct anything in it, but rather to explain what in my words may not have been understood—
1. Regarding the matter of deception and misleading, including on the level of manners and basic decency, my meaning is this: just as I would not push my way into, for example, a conference of the Hadash party, if they declared there that anyone who does not support a state of all its citizens / a binational state is a fascist and a racist,
in order to recruit votes, for whatever reason—even if I am “using” Hadash for one of their specific goals that I identify with (better roads)—I would not see it, from my perspective of basic decency, as polite to be in a place where I, as a Religious Zionist, pro-settlement person, am considered someone undesirable. And on the halakhic side, even if there may be no formal problem, perhaps there is something here akin to flattering the wicked and the like. So too, if I were, God forbid, theoretically, a mamzer / the wife of a priest who was raped, and I tried to get a blessing / good wish / Torah study from a rabbi or community members who, in their view, are forbidden to teach me Torah or let me participate in prayer—perhaps from their side because of a slippery-slope concern, perhaps out of fear of leading to sexual prohibitions with female or male members of the community, which in these cases is even more forbidden, and so on. And similarly, if I were theoretically a sincere convert from the rabbinical court of Rabbi Druckman, I would not rush to cause a Haredi rabbi and his community, who in their view do not regard my conversion as a conversion, to stumble—since from their perspective drinking wine with me, eating with me in the same café, counting me for a minyan, and perhaps even saying hello to me, would be causing them to transgress (in their view).
(And here perhaps comes in the issue of the slippery slope between a white lie that harms no one and harm, on another level, to someone else.)
(When I say that I personally would not do it, I of course do not mean only a purely personal inclination, but rather a sense that probably no person ought to act that way.)
2. And regarding collective punishment: these days the police tend to arrest every Arab who posts something suspicious on Facebook. There was also the detention of an Arab student dormitory in Netanya because of one member there who was discovered to support terror. At this point I won’t get into the question whether collective punishment is justified on safety grounds (statistics of assistance to terror and the like, since that is a very long discussion that in my opinion has no decisive resolution either way). But I’ll clarify what I mean regarding a declaration of non-support for terror: this could be an explicit statement online, or in other forums—citizens, academics, and so on—disavowing hostile demonstrations in areas where there is clear support for such things, like Hawara or Umm al-Fahm.
And regarding existential danger, I mean both in the long term—the harm that many estimate could come later without deterrence—and in the short term, the chance of an escalation into violent conflict with terror organizations and surrounding Arab states, as well as an uprising in Judea and Samaria and by (some of) Israeli Arabs. Even though, “here and now,” thank God, we are not there.