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Torah Reading: Numbers 25:10-30:1; Haftarah Reading: Jeremiah 1:1-2:3
It seems obvious that striking back at an enemy is a gratifying but
lower response than forgiving the trespass in the first place. A person
who is able to overlook having been wronged demonstrates a higher form
of moral sensitivity, by setting priorities that preclude a need to get
back at someone else. That line of reasoning was given its classical
formulation in the Christian Scripture, with the mandate to "turn the
other cheek." If someone slaps you on one side of the face, rather than
slapping back, simply offer your other cheek to be slapped. By doing
so, you confront your enemy with the power of love and the depth of
your own humanity.
Such morality has retained its popularity from the time of Jesus
into our own century as well. Mahatma Gandhi was the pre-eminent
exponent of this approach, of returning hostility with passive
resistance. He urged Indians by the thousands to resist the violence of
British officers and soldiers with equanimity, allowing the British
soldiers to beat, maim and often shoot Indian opponents of British
colonialism without opposition.
Through this massive passivity, Gandhi and his followers hoped to
show the British and the world the power of love to overcome hatred and
oppression. In our own country, the great Reverend Martin Luther King,
Jr., the civil rights leader, employed this same passive resistance to
the discriminatory laws which pervaded America. His followers, like
Gandhi's, were clubbed, attacked by guard dogs, and hosed without
struggle - as a way to awaken the slumbering moral conscience of the
Nation.
But what if a nation has no moral conscience? Isn't it possible
that the policy of turning the other cheek can only work with a
democratic government, one in which public opinion recoils from
brutality and is forced to witness its own police and citizenry in
unfettered reporting every day?
In other words, turning the other cheek only works when people are
not as good as they ought to be, and when the citizenry is
fundamentally moral and open. In imperial Rome, they butchered the
people who turned the other cheek. In the Jim Crow South, they were
lynched. Such an approach disregards the enormity of evil in the world,
ignoring the fact that there are people and organizations that
knowingly destroy human lives and families, willfully and without
apology. Hitler could not be shamed out of Auschwitz, and Stalin was
not embarrassed by the Gulags. In such instances, rather than
representing a higher spirituality, turning the other cheek is simply a
form of cooperating with evil.
Our Torah portion addresses the issue of real evil. In speaking of
the Midianites, a tribe which attacked the stragglers and weak among
the Israelite tribes, the Torah instructed our ancestors to "harass the
Midianites . . . for they harass you."
The Torah recognized the reality of human evil -- a malignancy
which goes beyond not recognizing the consequences of one's actions, or
underestimating how much one's policies hurt others, but the reality
that some people delight in oppressing and putting others down.
Such people cannot be won over through appeals to conscience or by
showing one's own weakness. Rather they can only be opposed with a
greater force than they would have used to impose their own will on
others.
An ancient Midrash teaches, "If a man comes to kill you, rise up
and kill him first." No turning the other cheek here. Unadulterated
evil can only be opposed with superior power. There are times when
discussion fails, when persuasion is beside the point. At such times,
as our Rabbis taught, "who begins with kindness to the cruel winds up
being cruel to the kind."
Most people are not evil. Many simply need to see firsthand - and
over a long period of time - the consequences of their own bigotry,
anger or greed. But that predominance should not blind us to evil and
its reality. The example of the Midianites, and the Torah's insistence
that evil must be exposed and opposed, is the natural consequence of a
passion for justice. Mercy is important as a way to temper strict
justice. But as a replacement for justice, mercy results in the
suffering of the victim instead of the wicked.
Our Torah insists on balancing mercy and justice - each with its
own appropriate sphere, each with its own important jurisdiction.
Justice, an insistence that actions have consequences, requires that we
oppose evil with sufficient force to prevent the wicked from harming
the innocent. Gandhi and King notwithstanding, Jews do not turn the
other cheek. We strike back hard enough to prevent any further
aggression.
Shabbat shalom.
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