Retribution or Revenge?

Sermon Shabbat Matot-Masei 5784

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

There are wonderful midrashim, rabbinic legends, that investigate just which is the most important ethical value of Judaism. Some rabbis insist it is love, ahavah, as exemplified by the ideal of divine love, the gracious gifting of which we celebrate in our appreciation of God’s flow of life and energy to the world.  Our share in this ideal is to love God, and to reciprocate God’s gift to us.  Other rabbis insist that the greatest value is compassion, the kindness symbolized in Jewish mysticism by the sefirah of chesed, the emanation of generous care given to us, which we reflect not only by loving our fellow human beings but by having compassion on all living things, and even our precious earth itself.  Compassion, they insist, is the greatest of all motivations. 

But other rabbis insist that the supreme ethical teaching, the highest of the moral high grounds in Judaism, is our insistence on justice, Tzedek.  We are taught in Deuteronomy, Tzedek Tzedek tirdof, you must pursue justice fully.  And throughout the Torah we are reminded repeatedly that we must constantly seek to create a just world, to administer justice impartially, to show no favoritism to the rich and powerful but also to show no favoritism to the weak and underprivileged.  According to these sages, only a society based on a foundation of true justice has any claim to receiving the benefits of God’s compassion, or God’s love.

I think that I would agree with this final group of scholars, particularly insofar as the Torah is concerned, for justice is clearly the central ideal of our greatest text, and how it is to be applied and administered are a major preoccupation of Judaism throughout history.  Justice underlies everything good in this world.

Of course, love is powerful and beautiful; compassion and empathy influence so much of what is best about humanity.  Still, life is more than a Hallmark card or a happy emoji: it requires a foundation of equity and justice to rely upon, or those fine feelings eventually evaporate.  Love and compassion without justice and fairness are bound to end in disappointment, at best, and disaster, at worst. 

As Bob Marley famously sang, “No justice, no peace.”  It is even more than that; for without justice the very foundations of the world are undermined. 

Of course, there must always be a balance between justice and compassion, and that is reflected throughout Jewish tradition.  We understand that we are subject both to the justice of judgment on our own actions and attitudes, and we seek forgiveness and compassion without which we couldn’t flourish in this world.

Still, the bias of Judaism, and the Torah, lean towards justice.

Here in Matot-Masei, the final chapters of Numbers two major aspects of justice are explored, one related to preventing miscarriages of justice and the other to administering retributive justice.  Both relate to the question of revenge, although in quite different ways.  And both illuminate the complex and challenging issue that revenge presents for systems that seek to establish justice, and to create a just world.

The easier aspect explored in our portions involves the creation of the remarkable institution of the cities of refuge.  These were established in a world in which justice was often administered privately; rudimentary public systems for trying and punishing crimes were far from adequate to deal with the problems that occurred in our ancestor’s societies.  An accidental killing could lead to a revenge killing by family members of the original victim.  That could easily begin a cycle of slaughter that would never end.  These kinds of feuds existed not only in antiquity, but throughout history, and still remain a problem in some societies today.  The disastrous feuds of the Hatfields and McCoys of American history and Mark Twain’s literary parallel in Huckleberry Finn, were real in many parts of the world.  They remain an issue in tribal societies today—and among gangs in American and European cities, too. 

Revenge killings are often the “solution” when people die, whether or not the death was intentional.  Only a strong criminal justice system can prevent an accidental manslaughter from being treated as first degree murder.

The cities of refuge were created to prevent someone accidentally involved in a death, or accused of a killing, from becoming a victim before a reasonable trial could be conducted.  It was a powerful effort to insist that justice, not revenge, take precedence, that the moral warrant for the authority of society lay in its ability not only to be certain that real crimes were punished, but that the innocent or the inadvertent were not to be so punished.  Justice, not revenge, was the goal, always.  If revenge killings began, they had to be ended through the administration of justice by the leadership of the people.

Now the second issue and, as Chuck has told you, the more troubling example of retributive justice in our portion is the command, given by God here through Moses, to take revenge on the Moabites and Midianites.  Leaving aside the bloodthirsty flavor of this section—by the way, there is no archeological evidence that such a destruction was ever carried out, and the Moabites and Midianites live on a long time after their supposed destruction here—let’s examine the motivation behind this brutal order.

The Israelites were, in the telling of this tale, fighting a war with Moab and perhaps Midian.  They had offered to pass through the land of Moab peacefully, touching nothing, solely desiring to enter the Promised Land.  The King of Moab instead declared war on them and sought to destroy Israel by a variety of quite devious means.  Those means—including ritual seduction, sorcery and perhaps infecting the Israelites with plague through a primitive kind of biological warfare, and of course battlefield attacks—all failed.  That failure left both himself and his people at the mercy of the triumphant Israelites.  And they took revenge. 

Again, I must stress that this text must be taken with a large grain of salt, a heaping dose of skepticism, if you will.  If all the Moabites were killed and their young daughters taken as slaves, the Moabite nation would have disappeared.  It did not, existing for centuries afterwards; in fact, King David, who lived 250 years later, was descended from a Moabite woman.  The Midianites, too, seem to hang around for a very long time after their supposed annihilation.

But the larger question of whether retributive justice in warfare is a necessity or not is not without its contemporary parallels.  According to the Torah, Moab sought to annihilate the Israelites, destroying them.  That effort could not simply be ignored.  It had to be both addressed among the Israelites so corrupted—that was last week’s portion, and the week before—and by removing the danger posed by such treacherous and evil enemies.

Judaism is always a form of pragmatic idealism.  It seeks, in an imperfect world, to improve matters, to move us closer to ethical goals and moral ideals, always understanding our innate humanity and our limitations.

So how does this apply today?

Last week we learned that the State of Israel had very likely killed—some use the term assassinated—three men.  Two were Hamas leaders, terrorists who planned and executed the atrocities of October 7th, and who rejoiced in the death and destruction and captivities it caused.  One was a Hezbollah commander who had directed the attack last week on a soccer field, murdering 12 children playing sports and maiming 50 more. 

Was this a revenge killing?  Or was this also a form of retributive justice?

It is a hard question, but of course these are hard times.  Israel has been at war with Hamas since October 7th.  It has been in a desultory sort of war with Hezbollah since around that time as well.  It has long stated its priority in this war to execute those who planned and carried out the brutalities of October 7th.

Taking out the leaders doesn’t end the war, of course.  But it was a priority of Israel’s leadership to remove the people who planned October 7th, and they have now done so.

There is no joy in this event; justice is not always something to celebrate.  But we should be clear that such acts, directed at the ones responsible rather than as a form of collective punishment, are an attempt to reassert justice in an unjust region, and of course an unjust world.  Iran will rattle its weaponry again, and claim that it must take action; but the truth is that at some point this sequence must end. 

Judaism does seek retributive justice.  But it precludes revenge.  In these complex days, may we see a return to a time when justice prevails and we can again embrace those beautiful values of compassion and love more fully.