oh, this is just too feckin’ much. i’ve long been aware of the ideological excesses of rabbi yitzhak ginsburgh, but his disciple rabbi yitzhak shapiro of the west bank settlement of yitzhar has really done it this time. according to the left-leaning israeli daily ha-aretz:
Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro, who heads the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in the Yitzhar settlement, wrote in his book “The King’s Torah” that even babies and children can be killed if they pose a threat to the nation.
Shapiro based the majority of his teachings on passages quoted from the Bible, to which he adds his opinions and beliefs. “It is permissable to kill the Righteous among Nations even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation,” he wrote, adding: “If we kill a Gentile who has sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments – because we care about the commandments – there is nothing wrong with the murder.”
basically, if this is true, then it’s one of the most disgusting things i have ever heard, a true desecration of the Divine Name.
according to the failedmessiah.com blog, both ginsburgh and possibly shapiro himself are members of chabad, an organisation that, generally speaking, i have a lot of time for because they are prepared to go that extra mile on behalf of jews everywhere and help in ways that others aren’t, but one which i keep at distinctly arm’s length from because, well, to put it bluntly, i am not sure i trust their theology. i wonder if this, after the scandal of the last rebbe’s elevation to messiahship, will finally prove to be the undoing of this behemoth of outreach?
anyway, i’m going to be asking some very pointed questions of any chabad rabbi i encounter any time soon. stuff like this, quite apart from being the sort of thing that laid the groundwork for the murder of yitzhak rabin and presumably provides spiritual sustenance for the likes of jack teitel, undermines the sort of sensible, humane, rational, tolerant and open-minded position that ought to be halakhically mandatory. it is, quite simply, the foundation stone of terrorism.
13 Comments
What is it with these maniacs?
They have the religion bug. And it’s contagious.
Well said, bananabrain.
good lord, is that *the* bob from brockley? you do get around, don’t you?
b’shalom
bananabrain
When civilians, including children and infants, are frequent casualties of armed conflicts, the question of responsibility and justification cannot be avoided by anyone involved. Israel’s enemies often deliberately target and kill Jewish civilians, and Israeli retaliation often wounds and kills Arab civilians. It should be remembered that Yitzhar has lost several women and children who were cruelly murdered by extreme Arab nationalists.
Western religious leaders are notably silent about the civilian casualties inflicted by their side in the wars that the West engages in, beyond expressing general regret and calling for effort to avoid them. They certainly do not track and analyze individual actions, or hold anyone to account when such casualties do occur. Whether in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq or the Balkans, there have been many cases where the standards expected have not been upheld, and even so general silence followed.
I don’t know for a fact what Rabbi Shapiro really intended in his book, published a short while after Operation Cast Lead, but I wouldn’t rely on Haaretz to present his opinions accurately. Most suspect is Haaretz’s transliteration “…there is nothing wrong with the murder”. No Rabbi would advocate or justify murder (retzach) since murder is forbidden by God’s Commandment. Shapiro probably used the word lehamit, to put to death.
A Rabbi saying that it is permissible to kill children and infants who threaten Israel, might actually mean that children and infants, who by definition cannot threaten Israel, may not be deliberately targeted.
I am not sure what you mean by this, Ben. Are you suggesting that it is permissible to accidentally target women and children, if they may not be deliberately targeted? If this is the case, please can you explain how one may accidentally target anything, when the notion of target at least implies some concious intention to so do?
please can you explain how one may accidentally target anything, when the notion of target at least implies some concious intention to so do?
Good point. The word “deliberately” looks redundant.
That said, the construction still looks like a peculiar and elliptic way of dealing with the issue of collateral damage, if in fact an “impossible negative” was intended.
Consider the statement: “it is permissible to eat kosher pork”. Since pork by definition can’t be kosher, the issue of permissibility here is moot, and so the general prohibition on pork still applies. So far so good. But is the statement “it is permissible to eat kosher pork” an at all useful way of really saying “eating pork by accident is no big deal”?
There’s more to the story here, for sure.
“…Good point. The word “deliberately” looks redundant…”
I accept that.
“…That said, the construction still looks like a peculiar and elliptic way of dealing with the issue of collateral damage, if in fact an “impossible negative” was intended….”
Argument by “impossible negatives” is quite popular among the religious. From what we have been told in the Haaretz article, there is not enough information to figure out what the Rabbi meant.
So, is this what you meant?
A logician writes:
Incidentally, presumably an impossible negative statement would look something like “It is impossible that not p is the case” (~M~p); and this can be rewritten as “It is necessary that p is the case” (Lp) – as in any normal modal logic (one that deals with possibility and necessity, that is), it is the case that Lp = ~M~p.
Consequently, as any such “impossible negative” proposition may be so rewritten as a necessary proposition, then one would be arguing that religious people dealt often in necessary truths – and that would be very controversial a stance to take (as well as plausibly deeply counter-intuitive).
In the particular case, it would suggest that the sentence would rewrite as an assertion of the right to kill innocents as some sort of necessity. Leaving aside the intriguing consequences of logic, this is a highly dubious moral position that I would find it hard to believe would be shared by any right-thinking religious of any faith, let alone anyone else.
So, in short: No.
The term “impossible negative” seems suited for use as a descriptive term for a certain style of syllogistic argument popular among the religious, as in the example we are discussing.
The premise is that children and infants threaten nobody. The premise is unstated.
The thesis is that (only) infants and children who threaten Israel can be killed. The qualification “only” is also unstated.
The synthesis is that it is wrong to kill infants and children. Again, the synthesis is unstated.
The omission of qualifications, axiomatic assumptions and logical consequences, it being understood what they are, is commonplace in Jewish religious discourse.
We still don’t know what the Rabbi meant. We won’t know until someone more reliable than the Haaretz correspondent goes and reads what he actually wrote.
Thanks for your elucidation of that point, Ben. If you want entirely devoid of logic (let alone rationality or coherence) you might like to try some of the finer points of Islamic fiqh!
I think what I was trying to point up was the critical importance of the moral perspective. Perhaps in a too round about way.
Thanks again.
I think what I was trying to point up was the critical importance of the moral perspective.
Absolutely. Which is why I find these kinds of circumlocutions more than a little dodgy.
The point is the (qualified, hedged, conditional) excusability of collateral damage, not its permissibility. It is never really permissible, in the sense of a sanction extended; it is only at best excusable, as a prohibition relaxed; so couching the rule in terms of the former word is gratuitous obfuscation. (And we would have to hold ourselves to an assumption of good faith not to suspect bad faith! Why speak in riddles?)
I agree with that, qidniz.
Thank you for, once again, so succinctly stating the case.
well said, qidniz. it also seems somewhat unlikely given that these types of rabbis are not given to circumlocution on behaviour of which they disapprove. they have no problem using words like “stupid”, “evil” or “forbidden” when it comes to women in tallits, yasser arafat or sabbath elevators to pick three random examples, so i hardly think it can be argued that they find the protection of the lives of women and children to be less baldly presentable.
b’shalom
bananabrain