One broken tooth looks a lot like another

Yesterday was a profoundly sad day. Since October 7th we have had many dark and difficult moments, and the return of the Bibas children in coffins was another black day of mourning for the Jewish people.

Our parasha, Mishpatim, deals with another very difficult topic. How to respond to acts of violence? In the previous chapter Moses was given the Ten Commandments, and we were inspired by their timeless ethics. Keep Shabbat, honour your parents, don’t steal, don’t kill, there’s only one God….. these are laws to keep for life.

But now in Mishpatim, the problems begin. For what do you do when someone hits out, when someone fights and injures someone, even when someone kills someone? What is the rule? What is the law? What is the response?

Exodus 21 tells us clearly – if you kill someone, you should be killed. If you kill someone on purpose – it’s the death penalty. If you do it by accident, or unintentionally, it’s social death – you can flee for your life to a city of refuge. But the principle of justice is stated clearly: “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.”

Now the rabbis were quick to interpret these verses as referring to material compensation. If someone punches you and you lose an eye, you don’t take out his eye in revenge. Rather the guilty one must pay you compensation for your missing eye. And such laws of damages we know very well today, and there is a whole insurance industry that has built up around the concept of “damages”.

But I want to go in a different direction. In Mishpatim we are introduced to a legal code – and indeed Exodus chapter 21 seems to have been inspired by the Hammurabi code from ancient Babylon. And as was put most brilliantly by Robert Cover in the opening of his essay, “Violence and the word”,: “legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death”. Legal interpretation and violence cannot be understood apart from one another. Law is essentially violent; it permits acts of violence. With a death penalty it gives permission for premeditated murder. Violent punishment is acceptable and even necessary to uphold justice. And this is true even today, even without the death penalty: the courts allow the guilty to be imprisoned, locked up even for life. Lex Talionis – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth…

I don’t say that punishment is wrong. But I do think that Exodus 21 reminds us that justice is violent. If we end up killing a murderer, it’s violent. If we end up imprisoning them, it’s violent. But perhaps it is necessarily so.

Just after a while, things can get confused. One side is committing a crime, and the other one is administering a punishment. Clearly it’s the criminal who is unjust, who committed a violent act.

But people get confused. They start to blame the victim. Think Russia and Ukraine. Think Gaza and Israel. One side attacks and the other is forced to defend itself. But just acts of violence can look a lot like unjust acts of violence, and the world doesn’t always want to see the difference. One broken tooth looks a lot like another, especially when one only has one eye…

For Rene Girard, violence is at the heart of sacred narrative. And if we consider the Torah, many of our stories contain acts of violence. From Cain and Abel to Noah’s ark, from the Akeda to the smashing of the tablets, there is anger and there is jealousy and there is destruction. How to deal with violence is an open question in our texts, as it is in our daily lives. The school bully, the raging partner, the angry parent, the boss who shouts at you – very few of us have lived lives untouched by anger and violence.

The laws of Mishpatim remind us that there is and must be justice. That children cannot be murdered without retribution. Even unborn babies are mentioned in Exodus 21 – they count too. Justice permits violence. And the rabbis work to limit that to financial compensation, so that we don’t find ourselves in interminable wars and cycles of violence without end.

It’s traditional to finish with a nechamta – some words of comfort when things feel so bleak. And I think that we need to take courage from the ceasefires that are currently in place, both in Gaza and in Lebanon. Our most fervent wish is for shalom – for peace. We know that sometimes we need to fight for it. But we also know the vision of the prophet, Isaiah, that one day swords will be melted down into ploughshares, that never again will they train for war. One day the wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard lie down with the sheep. The calf and the young lion will play together. And it will be a little child that will lead them.

May the memory of the Bibas children be a blessing. May Shiri; their mother, and all the hostages be returned soon. And may the vision of Isaiah come true, and we find a way to end this seemingly endless cycle of violence, and let there be peace.