A non-Jewish friend e-mailed me to ask what he should say if someone argued that Yishai Schlissel, the man who killed the sixteen-year-old girl at a gay pride parade in Jerusalem, was emulating the Bible’s Pinchas who killed Zimri, the prince of the tribe of Shimon, for a sexual relationship forbidden by the Torah.
I did not know quite where to start. The list of answers is very long. So I suggested, in no particular order, a few of the answers he might use.
First, the question bases itself on a child’s understanding of Judaism and a distortion of the Pinchas story. Before I explain why, let me establish a crucial principal that should be shouted as loud as eardrums will bear.
What have the stories in the Bible (Including the one about Pinchas) to do with Judaism?
No, don’t be shocked; I am very serious.
As Lord Jacobowitz, z”l, once pointed out in a letter to the Times of London, Judaism is averse to a literal understanding of the Five Books of Moses. He cited the example of the famous statement in the Chumash of “an eye for an eye.”
Jewish law is derived from the Five Books of Moses and the Talmud. Only once a verse has been dissected, analyzed, and rigorously discussed in the Mishnah and Gemara does a conclusion emerge. That conclusion becomes halacha, Jewish Law.
In the case of “an eye for an eye,” the discussion is in Bava Kama 83b and 84a. The conclusion is that the Chumash means the financial value of the eye – i.e., medical costs, loss of income during recuperation, damage to future earnings, etc. – has to be paid in compensation by the person who destroyed the eye.
Halachas are applied by the giants of each generation as it “fits” that generation. Payment for the loss of an eye at the time the Torah was written would probably have been universal. Today, huge differences would apply (think of the damage to future earnings of a mechanic compared with those of an airline pilot).
If we apply that to the story of Pinchas, Rashi cites the Talmud that says Pinchas first asked the leader and king of the Jewish people, Moshe Rabbeinu, before he acted. Only then, having been handed a warrant by the king, did he execute Zimri.
The murderer of Shira Banki had no authority or warrant. There was no due process.
Second, Zimri was actively engaged in a capital crime when he was executed. This young girl was not.
Third, the girl was only sixteen and not liable to the death penalty either at the hands of the Heavenly court (20 is the age for that) or for several other reasons a rabbinic court here on earth.
Fourth, the Talmud (Makos 7b) says a beis din that executes as infrequently as once in seventy years would still be categorized as bloodthirsty. Rabbi Akiva declares that were he in charge, the death penalty would never be carried out.
There is no rabbi or rabbinic court today with the authority to issue a death sentence.
That authority was lost two thousand years ago. Let me emphasize and repeat that:
Judaism has not practiced capital punishment for two thousand years. Additionally, there has been no one in two millennia with the authority to permit its reintroduction.
One last point. Rabbi Avraham Grodzinski, zt”l (who was burned to death by the Nazis), writes that anyone who executes a human being, even at the instruction of a properly constituted halachic authority, but does so partly to satisfy his own anger or hate, is no longer an executioner. He is a murderer – just like Yishai Schlissel.