Vigilante Justice (Shoftim 09/07/24)

Vigilante Justice

This past Shabbat, our Bar Mitzvah celebrant, Ethan K., gave the D’var Torah. I think his message is powerful and timely. Enjoy.

My Torah reading was from Parshat Shoftim. It’s all about Law and Order – which is a great show, by the way!

The parsha starts by saying:

“You shall appoint judges and police for your tribes in all the settlements that your God is giving you, and they shall govern the people justly.”

The Torah requires we implement an orderly law system: the police keep the peace and make arrests, and the judges determine the sentences.

However, later in the parsha, we see what appears to be a form of frontier justice: people taking the law into their own hands.

For instance, at a work site, someone wasn’t careful, and because of their negligence, a worker died. A relative of that worker had a right to avenge the death of his kin.

However, if the murder was truly accidental, the murderer could flee to a sanctuary city. Even still, if the killer were to leave his safe haven and be discovered by a relative of the deceased, the relative would have a right to kill him.

Likewise, in the implementation of capital punishment, the family was involved. The Torah says,

“If, however, a man who is the enemy of another lies in wait and sets upon the victim and strikes a fatal blow and then flees to one of the sanctuary towns. The elders of his town shall have him brought back from there, and they shall hand him over to the blood avenger to be put to death.”

So, the Torah’s system of Law and Order seems to have room for the vigilante. The Torah says there must be Police and Judges, but there’s also a place for the “blood avenger,” someone just from the family.

Nowadays, our law system is not fond of vigilante justice. But there have been times when commoners have participated.

In the 1970s, when crime and fear were rampant in New York City, the Guardian Angels, led by Curtis Sliwa, helped New Yorkers feel safer.

Likewise, many smaller communities have a citizen patrol monitoring homes and parks. And a few years ago, some people dressed up as superheroes to make citizen arrests.

Perhaps the most outstanding example of taking the law into our own hands occurred after the tragic Parkland High School shooting. When state and federal officials wouldn’t make any changes to gun laws, these teens organized rallies in the hundreds of thousands in major cities and in front of Congress. Feeling that their government had failed them, they took matters into their own hands, hoping their politicians would see the will of the masses

(let’s hope something changes after this last shooting in Georgia.).

Perhaps this is the eternal message of the Torah. Indeed, we need police enforcement and a judicial system, but we also need the involvement and participation of the commoner. The Law and Order part of our nation should not be so separate as to feel indifferent to its citizens, and the commoner, in addition to relying on the law enforcement system, should feel that they, too, play a valuable role.

The Torah was written more than twenty-five hundred years ago, but its insights into human nature remain relevant today.

Shabbat Shalom,

Ethan K.