A Jewish meditation on anger and the death penalty

In December 2023, together with Cantor Michael J. Zoosman, I published online and in print in Alabama’s best and most historic newspaper, The Montgomery Advertiser, an essay called “Jews must speak out against Alabama’s planned nitrogen gas executions.” Subsequently, in April 2024, I published another essay, this time in The Times of Israel, in which I insisted that “Good Jews Must Actively Oppose the Death Penalty” no matter how it is carried out, asserting that “state executions” are “the opposite of righteous Jewish action.”

At present, I want to expand on how anger and retribution, which underpin the death penalty, are perversions of the soul and therefore incompatible and directly adverse to the teachings of the Zohar—which the website “My Jewish Learning” (www.myjewishlearning.com) calls “the most important work of Jewish mysticism and one of the central sacred texts of Jewish tradition,” and which Dr. Eitan Fishbane, a professor of Jewish Thought at The Jewish Theological Seminary, describes as “[the] most significant pillars of thought and creativity in the entire history of Jewish civilization.” (At the same time, I want to direct my brothers and sisters of the Christian faith to the recently published opinion called “The death penalty is not justice for Charlie Kirk’s killer” by Demetrius Minor, a preacher and the executive director of “Conservatives Concerned.” Minor explains that “[t]he Christian faith teaches us that vengeance belongs to God, not to us. Even in moments of anguish, we are called to remember that every life—including the life of someone who commits a terrible act—retains its dignity and its potential for redemption.”)

Recently, in its learning series “A Year of Zohar,” Rabbi Ebn Leader, formerly a teacher for two decades at the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College, wrote about the danger of anger and how, “[a]ccording to the Zohar, failure to control anger is a profound spiritual danger, supplanting holiness in the soul and turning the body into a temple to foreign gods.”

Isaiah 2:22 reads “Desist from humans, who have put a breath in their nostrils – of what worth are they?” And Rabbi Leader explains that “the Zohar reads the word ‘desist’ as a call to distance oneself from people who have defiled their divine soul by serving other forces, forces that contradict holiness. Like the presence of God in the Temple, the divine breath, the holy soul of a person, can be forced out, leaving a dark and empty shell behind.” Explaining the Zohar’s warning about the danger of anger, Rabbi Leader comes to the conclusion that “[w]hen a person gives in to anger, they turn their body into a temple for the foreign god of anger.” Therefore, Rabbi Leader says that “[t]he verse from Isaiah thus becomes a warning to beware of a person who has traded their soul for anger, turning their body into a temple for a terrible, foreign god.”

In “Engaging Capital Emotions,” published in 2008 by Northwestern University Law Review, law professors Douglas Berman and Stephanos Bibas (now a judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit) wrote that “[t]he most successful foes of the death penalty speak the language of emotions. Defense attorneys and reformers counter the emotional demands for justice with equally emotional pleas for mercy and for appreciating human fallibility. Rather than bemoaning emotional reactions, reformers should acknowledge emotion as the legitimate battlefield of criminal justice.” My quibble with this—on Biblical grounds and by reference to the Zohar—is whether anger can ever be a “legitimate battlefield of criminal justice” upon which equitable and ethical sentencing policies can be rooted.

That’s one reason why I have before, in my anti-death penalty writings—such as why “We must be honest about the death penalty’s repugnance”—addressed the subject of anger and “the blood of vengeance to which death penalty proponents cling.” It’s also why, a few years ago, in an essay I called “My unforgettable college stabbings (Reacting to violence: A personal history),” I urged “it is our reaction to suffering and to violence, our desire to root out its causes and prevent its reoccurrence, not the exacting of punishment for it that will determine our humanity.”

When as a society we continue to execute people who have committed the worst crimes despite our ability to incarcerate them, the risk of executing innocents, and the overwhelming proof that mental illness, poverty, and racism infect capital punishment at every turn, we are doing so as the Zohar’s reading of Isaiah 2:22 contemplates: because the fog of anger perverts our souls.

Finally, I want to close this Jewish meditation on anger and the death penalty with some advice given to me by the righteous Jamaican reggae legend Don Carlos after his soul-stirring performance in Solana Beach, California, in 2017. (Interestingly, the first reggae legend I interviewed, in the summer of 2016, David Hinds, lead singer of the famed band “Steel Pulse” told me he thought the death penalty is wrong because it’s racist in practice and because “the killing of any human being is wrong; it doesn’t matter who does it.”)

Don Carlos said, “you see, for me, I don’t carry any grievance. I want my heart to be light like a feather.” When we continue to execute people out of anger—and out of retribution—our hearts are not kept “light like a feather.” Instead they are hardened and weighted down in a calcifying pattern of hatred. This is not a proper way for Jewish people—or for anyone—to live.