Qedoshim
The Prohibition of Taking Revenge
Michael Rosenberg, 5764
This week's parashah includes one of the most famous passages in the entire Torah: "וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ"-"love your neighbor as yourself" (19:18). Every year when I hear this aliyah in shul, my ears perk up at these three words, called by R. Aqiva the greatest principle of the Torah. However, this year, while getting ready to hear the leyning, I look at the verse in a very different light.
Hopefully, those of you who were in the Beit Midrash Program last summer will remember the way in which these three words are understood by Rabba bar Avuha (Sanhedrin 45a and elsewhere): to love your neighbor as yourself means, "ברור לו מיתה יפה"-"choose for him a good death". That is, when a Jewish court decides that someone's crime requires a specific kind of death penalty (for example, as in that gemara, סקילה/stoning), the court must execute that punishment in the "best" possible way. To love your neighbor means, according to this interpretation, to put yourself in her shoes and execute her in the way that you would want to be executed.
That's a pretty disturbing understanding of the verse, even if it does have a certain moral resonance to it. The words that we commonly understand as telling us to live our lives according to something roughly equivalent to the golden rule are really, according to this reading, an instruction regarding how to fulfill the death penalty.
And yet, Rabba bar Avuha's reading does not come out of nowhere. To take "וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ" seriously is an extremely difficult task. How can we be expected to love someone else as much as, or in the same way as, we love ourselves? Indeed, though I have not seen it myself, a friend in college told me that, according to his professor, the Qumran sect of Judaism read the verse with an extra word-"וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ אֲשֶר כָּמוֹךָ"-"love your neighbor who is like you". The result of this version of the text may be an easier commandment to fulfill, but it leads to an insular community and the sort of thinking that has spawned a great deal of racism in our society.
The Tosafot on our sugya (s.v., "ברור") try to explain how "love your neighbor as yourself" comes to mean something like "avoid cruel and unusual punishment." They provide two interpretations, but in reality, these interpretations are complementary, not contradictory, and I think it is important to share both. The first explanation focuses on the difficulty with the verse. Rather than simply saying that it is too hard a commandment to fulfill according to its plain meaning, the Tosafot cite a contradiction with another halakhic principle-the law that if you can save only your life or your friend's life, "חייך קודמים"-your life takes precedence. (Think of the famous two-people-stranded-in-the-desert-with-only-enough-water-for-one scenario.) Thus, how can we be commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves? The two mitzvot are in contradiction with each other. Thus, the mitzvah of "וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ" must apply AFTER life, i.e., to the carrying out of the death penalty. It merits noting that the sage who rules that "חייך קודמים"-your life takes precedence-is R. Aqiva, the same sage who taught that "וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ" is the most important rule in the Torah.
The second interpretation offered in the Tosafot has to do with the beginning of the verse. We are so familiar with the phrase "וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ" that we rarely pay attention to the fact that it is only one piece of a larger pasuk. The verse in its entirety reads: "לֹא תִקֹּם וְלֹא תִטֹּר אֶת בְּנֵי עַמֶּךָ וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ אֲנִי יְהֹוָה"-"Do not take revenge and do not hold a grudge against those of your people, love your neighbor as yourself, I am Hashem." Tosafot suggest, sensibly, that the end of the verse is connected to the beginning: to love your neighbor as yourself means not to take revenge, and "revenge" for Hazal means execution.
Regardless of how we feel about the connection between love of a neighbor and the death penalty, the connection between the former and revenge more generally in the verse is striking. We are commanded not only not to take revenge, but not even to hold a grudge. Rashi, on this verse, brings a midrash halakhah found, among other places, at Yoma 23a, which tries to explain the difference between taking revenge ("תִקֹּם" in our verse) and holding a grudge ("תִטֹּר"). According to the baraita, if I ask to borrow something of yours, and you refuse, and tomorrow, you ask to borrow something of mine and I refuse, I have taken revenge. If, however, on that second day, I do lend you the object of mine, but I say that I'm lending it "Because I'm not like you who wouldn't lend something to me," then I am guilty of "lo titor" holding a grudge. I think this midrash is powerful because it highlights the great extent to which we are warned not only not to be punitive, but not even to harbor ill will.
To some extent, this baraita can be understood as expressing some of the ideas expressed by Jesus in the Christian Bible. The baraita expects that I will not take this opportunity to express to my "friend" how he has wronged me. So too, Jesus famously says in his sermon on the mount: "If a man hits your cheek, offer him the other one," or as it's often quoted, "Turn the other cheek." My father, who as some of you know, is a Holocaust survivor, has always railed against this "Christian" teaching. It is one thing not to take actual revenge; it is another to expect one to forgive, and, according to his view, leave oneself vulnerable to a repetition of the offense. It is powerful-and perhaps jarring-to see this idea expressed by our Sages z"l as well.
However, I had another jarring experience in preparing for this devar torah. After looking at the classical commentators on our verse (none of the biggies comment on it, other than Rashi, as cited above), I went to look at the Eish Kodesh, a fascinating collection of a Hasidic Rebbe's derashot given in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Shoah. He did not comment on our verse, but something else in the work struck me. The author of the Eish Kodesh died in the war, and thus, in accordance with tradition, rather than being referred to as "Kalonymous Kalman Shapiro, z"l"-using the common acronym at the end meaning "may his memory be for a blessing," his name on the cover of the book is followed by the acronym ".ה.י.ד", which stands for "ה' יִקֹּם דָּמוֹ"-"May Hashem avenge his blood", used for martyrs. And while it is true that the request made by that acronym is that God-not human beings-avenge the death of Jews murdered only for being Jewish, and thus there may be no contradiction with "lo tiqom," which forbids people, Jews, from taking revenge, nevertheless, it is difficult to reconcile our request for God's vengeance with the commandment "lo titor", that we not even bear grudges. It would seem that we have to bear a grudge in order to request God to take revenge!
The issue is complicated further by the gemara on Yoma 23a. R. Yohanan there says that a talmid hakham (Torah scholar), in order to be a true talmid hakham, MUST hold a grudge! ("ואמר רבי יוחנן משום רבי. שמעון בן יהוצדק: כל תלמיד חכם שאינו נוקם ונוטר כנחש - אינו תלמיד חכם"). After a series of challenges, the gemara concludes that a talmid hakham should hold a grudge in her heart, but not act out on it. Thus, we see two very different trends in Torah-the instinct of our verse in Parshat Qedoshim, and the instinct expressed by R. Yohanan (captured as well by the acronym used to describe a martyr).
In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that the verse says that one should not hold a grudge against "בְּנֵי עַמֶּךָ"-"members of your people", so that perhaps wishing for God's vengeance on non-Jews is not prohibited by the verse. However, I believe that for many of us, such an explanation will be viewed as a dangerous or immoral cop-out. This sense that there is a commandment not to hold a grudge or take revenge is not new to us in the 21st century. Indeed, when the Yerushalmi in Nedarim (9:4/41c) asks what precisely the meaning is of the commandment not to take revenge, the Qorban ha-‘Edah (s.v., "היכי עבידי") explains that the question may mean, "How is it that the commandment is limited to b'nei amekha?". The Yerushalmi answers in the form of a metaphor: if a person cut off her left hand, for example, with a knife held in her right, would it be reasonable for her to then cut off her right as a means of taking revenge? Of course not. Since Jews are meant to think of themselves as part of one larger communal body, then, the commission not to take revenge has a special status with regard to other Jews. If we take this interpretation, we see that it is assumed that we should not take revenge on other people; the Torah's verse teaches us something additional, that with regard to other Jews, revenge is not only forbidden, but also self-destructive. In this sense, the beginning of the verse connects once again to its conclusion: do not take revenge or harbor a grudge against another Jew because in the end, you are hurting only yourself.
At the end of the day, though, I cannot help but feel that the reasoning applied by the Yerushalmi may also resonate for us regarding human beings in general. I can't remember where I heard it, but there's a pretty famous story of two war veterans who were POWs. One says to the other, "How long were you in their jails?" "Four years", comes the response. "Have you forgiven them yet?" the first one asks. "No, and I never will." To which the first veteran replies: "Then they've still got you."