A Torah Ethic of Political Assassinations

Presidential candidate Donald Trump is helped off the stage after an attempted assassination attempt on Saturday, July 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

On Shabbat of the 14th of Tamuz 5784 (July 20, 2024, parashat Balak), I gave the following derashah at Congregation Ohr Torah in West Orange, NJ. Like my previously posted derashah, one congregant told me that this derashah also felt like a minefield that I decided to walk through. Several congregants asked me to share this derashah publicly, and I am doing so here with some minor stylistic edits. I must also note that I am indebted to the most recent Halacha Headlines podcast, specifically the interviews with Rabbi Dr. Yitzchak Breitowitz and Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody, on which I based several of my ideas. 

Ever since I turned on my phone this past Motzei Shabbos, I couldn’t stop thinking about political assassinations. Exactly one week ago, at 6:11 PM, Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to kill former President Donald Trump, merely wounding him but murdering a former firefighter named Corey Comperatore in the process. Ever since Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinkley Jr. in 1981, this is the first time a president was injured during an assassination attempt, making this the first nearly successful presidential assassination of my lifetime.

It was such big news that some of you may have missed the latest news in the Hamas-Israel War: an IDF air strike fell in the Southern Gaza Strip on the same day, killing Rafa’a Salameh, the commander of the Khan Younis Brigade, and almost certainly killing Muhammad Deif, ימח שמו וזכרו, the commander of Hamas’s entire military wing. After seven previous attempts to neutralize Deif, the IDF has been understandably reticent to officially declare that he was killed. Nevertheless, it’s looking increasingly clear that one of the masterminds behind the October 7^th atrocities has met his Creator, and is currently wallowing in the deepest pits of hell.

It would be inappropriate for me as a rabbi to comment on politics, first because that’s not my area of expertise, and second because I assume that everyone here understands these issues better than I do. What I am interested in, however, is the Torah. Does the Torah have perspectives on political assassinations? Are there categories in halakhah or hashkafah that can help us formulate an ethic of extrajudicial killings, beyond the context of a trial, a jury, a court ruling, or even a specific legal charge?

I believe there are three such categories, and I’d like to discuss them for the next few minutes.

The first and possibly most obvious is the law of rodef, literally a chaser or pursuer, running after a potential victim. If a person is an active threat, the Torah gives us permission to kill them, but that comes with many caveats. First, if the rodef can be stopped by attacking one of their limbs, say, by shooting them in the leg, then it is nothing short of an act of murder to kill them. Likewise, if we know that a rodef won’t kill their victim, it is also forbidden to kill them. The Mishnah in Sanhedrin discusses the case of a בא במחתרת, a burglar who tunnels under and into someone else’s house. The gemara assumes that such a person is always a rodef because since they know that people will fight to protect their possessions, they are prepared to murder anyone they encounter. One exception to this rule, however, is a parent who tunnels into their own child’s house, because the gemara assumes that no father would ever murder his son.

I don’t believe that either the attempted Trump assassination or the IDF air strike can be justified using the category of rodef. For someone to be a rodef they must be an active threat, putting a specific human being at risk in the next few seconds. A sleeping terrorist, as evil as they might be, is not a rodef.

The second category is the law of milchamah, or war. In war, we’re less concerned about neutralizing active threats and more about defeating the enemy as a broader category. Israel is currently at war with Hamas, and the IDF kills them not because each Hamas fighter is an individual rodef, but rather because the sick and twisted ideology of Hamas has constituted them and their supporters as a general אויב – an enemy. Thus, when Israel neutralizes their fighters and commanders, even while they sleep, that is a legitimate act of war.

With the attempted Trump assassination, however, I don’t believe that America is at war with itself, at least not yet. We might be at the start of a Second American Civil War, and we see many troubling signs of civil unrest that might push us in that direction but thank God we haven’t reached that point yet.

Finally, we come to our third category: קנאים פוגעים בו – the idea that when someone does something sufficiently evil, blasphemous, or detrimental to society, zealots may rise up and take their life. If those zealots asked a halakhic question beforehand about whether they may take those violent measures, the answer would always be no. Only after the fact, and in very rare circumstances, will halakhah admit that in hindsight they had done the right thing.

The first instance of this principle in practice comes from the end of our parashah, where Pinchas rose up to kill Zimri, a chieftain of the tribe of Shimon, along with Cozbi, the daughter of a Midianite of similar standing. They were publicly sinning in front of the entire nation and the Ohel Moed, and Pinchas killed them both with a single spear. Our parshah ends on a cliffhanger; it doesn’t tell us whether Pinchas acted correctly or not. Only in next week’s parashah will we learn that he acted honorably and nobly, stopping the plague against the Bnei Yisrael, and earning not a Nobel Prize, but a Brit Shalom – a covenant of peace – from no less a Figure than God Himself.

The gemara in Sanhedrin adds many caveats to Pinchas’s actions. If Zimri had so much as paused his sin, Pinchas would have been executed as a murderer. Also, ironically, Zimri had every right to turn around and kill Pinchas first; Pinchas was, at that moment, an active rodef.

So does this category of קנאים פוגעים בו apply to the assassination attempt of President Trump? In my opinion, for a laundry list of halakhic and social reasons, absolutely not. Murderous political violence in a democracy, where the citizens themselves elect their leaders, can never be tolerated. Even in a dictatorship, there isn’t a carte blanche justification to assassinate the supreme leader.

I imagine, however, that some might think that the actions and inactions of Trump, his rhetoric, policy decisions, and the way he runs his government constitute a threat to our society, possibly even to the extent that an attempt on his life can be justified. Indeed, I heard some of my friends express regret that he wasn’t killed. Others here see things very differently, perhaps even viewing the American political left as disturbers of the peace, breaching rights, causing violence, and infecting society with evil, dangerous, and undemocratic ideas.

For the time being, I’m less concerned with our opinions on those issues, and more concerned with how we speak to each other about them. Is it possible to disagree vigorously, vehemently, and vociferously on issues of the greatest import but still believe that the person you’re talking to is a fundamentally decent, moral, and worthwhile human being? Is it possible to recognize that they came to their conclusions through a valid and intelligent thought process, considering the same issues we consider, and possibly even sharing the same values we do? In short, can we still be friends even if we support different candidates?

Of course, some issues are non-negotiable and worth losing friends over. Each of us will think about this differently, and I can’t decide what those issues are for you. You’ll have to probe the recesses of your heart and soul and work out what they are on your own. By and large, however, those issues are rare, and shouldn’t come up in every conversation.

As a society, what’s our default? Is everyone who disagrees with us either a Nazi or a Marxist? Or is there more room for us to engage in a broader conversation?

When an assassination attempt occurs, it doesn’t just happen because of one lone nutjob; it comes down to the temperature of political conversations everywhere in America. I’m not immune to this myself; I was in college in 2016, and I remember those elections. The lounge was more packed for those debates than it was for the 2016 World Series (when the Cubs won for the first time in over a century), the 2015 World Series (when the Mets won a pennant for the first time I can remember), or the Super Bowl. Election night was explosive, arguments in classes, over meals, and in the dorms were brutal, and I even lost friends over political disagreements. We all have room to grow in this area, and I HOPE that with the threat of impending violence over all of us – especially us as Jews – that we can emerge from THIS election cycle far more civilly and with more friends than we did from the previous two.