Veiled vengeance – an insidious menace that has plagued humanity since time immemorial – lay at the core of the death penalty bill making its way through the Knesset.
This truth recently reared its tragic head in these very pages in an op-ed titled “Israel should enact the Ben-Gvir death penalty law.”
Author Alex Sternberg wrote that this legislation “is motivated by aims such as deterrence, avoiding prisoner exchanges, retributive justice, and reinforcing national security messaging.” Sternberg subsequently admitted that “there is little evidence, however, that executing terrorists deters others.”
Regarding the other points on Sternberg’s list, this writer has written extensively in this publication and elsewhere about why such a bill would only further endanger Israelis and how, instead of “reinforcing national security message,” it actually would increase national security threats against Jews everywhere.
Removing these other erroneous fallacies from the equation leaves but one remaining factor with which to contend: retributive justice, which – in the context of capital punishment – is, without fail, code for revenge.
Vengeance fails to bring closure
Regarding such masked vengeance, Sternberg writes that “retributive justice offers victims’ families a sense of justice by affirming the worth of the victims’ lives. Since murder is a more severe crime than those that do not involve loss of life, the punishment should be proportionally harsher.”
On social media, where writers are less inhibited, underlying motivations become more transparent, unsheathing the true thirst for vengeance that lies at the core of such so-called “retributive” justice efforts. True to form, in response to one of my recent Facebook posts opposing the death penalty, comments quickly became unhinged.
“If I were in charge,” said one individual, “the method of execution would be slow, tortur[ous] death.” “Put it on television and make it a public spectacle,” wrote another, to which a third responded, “desecrate their dead bodies. Bury them in pig blood and slaughtered pigs.” Each of these derisive comments yielded many positive replies from other readers.
Putting aside for a moment the obviously grotesque nature of these outbursts, a tragic byproduct of the reactive emotional response that promotes vengeance is the tendency to overlook how more killing invariably fails to bring closure.
Regarding the death penalty, copious studies reveal that the drive for lethal retribution actually interferes with the ability to move forward. The hundreds of murder victim family members that comprise the inspiring death penalty abolitionist group Journey of Hope: From Violence to Healing offer powerful testaments to this fact.
They regularly devote themselves to public education about the needs of crime victims, and specifically the needs of family members of murder victims.
By centering the voices of those who have lost loved ones to murder, Journey of Hope provides a unique perspective and much-needed voice in the effort to abolish the death penalty and replace it with effective, constructive solutions that build upon restorative justice practices.
The shadow of the Shoah
It is essential to reiterate that the thousands of Israeli and Diaspora Jews who comprise the group L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty – which this writer co-founded – would never deign to speak for victims of the unimaginable terror that Hamas perpetrated on October 7.
As a hospital chaplain myself, I regularly counsel mourners that they should feel permission to experience the whole gamut of human emotion while grieving, including rage, and even the desire for vengeance where applicable.
Let no one ever judge anyone in such a position. If I myself were to lose a loved one to murder, or if my own children were brutally ripped away like nine-month-old baby Kfir and four-year-old Ariel Bibas, and countless others on October 7, I could very well find myself advocating for the execution of my loved one’s killers, just as some of the loved ones of the victims of Hamas murder and rape understandably do in this moment.
A civilized society has a responsibility to protect and honor all such mourners, while also upholding the most basic human rights upon which this world stands. Fundamental to these, of course, is the right to life itself. This realization was one of the reasons that death penalty abolitionist Elie Wiesel himself famously said of executions: “Death should never be the answer in a civilized society.”
It is likewise the reason for the rising groundswell of Jewish opposition to this bill in Israel and across the world.
And yet, I still can speak as someone who once did unwittingly operate under revenge’s cunning spell. As a third-generation Holocaust survivor, I used to experience the natural desire for vengeance against those who murdered my ancestors in cold blood.
For years, that overpowering feeling contributed to my support of capital punishment. If I could not carry out that reprisal with my own hands, then I felt the state should do so by proxy against other murderers. “They should take ’em out back and shoot ’em,” some family members suggested; “eye for an eye,” the Torah reinforced.
I was not alone among Jews in the wake of the Shoah who harbored such feelings. Many certainly overcame rage and the urge for retribution, notably death penalty abolitionists such as Wiesel, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, and Eva Mozes Kor. Other survivors and descendants like me held on to the pain and anger that grew from direct and intergenerational trauma.
Unveiling vengeance on death row
My vengeful impulse shifted once I started working as a Jewish prison chaplain in Canada with individuals whose murder convictions would have rendered them eligible for execution in certain United States jurisdictions. I saw firsthand how the horrors of life imprisonment constituted punishment enough for such individuals.
What I experienced certainly was not the lavish “prison war college” that Sternberg describes in his essay. If what I witnessed in Canadian prisons was harsh, I can only imagine what a life sentence means in the facilities of the Israel Prison Service, where the established Jewish press has long documented that Palestinians face “conditions unfit for human beings.’
My experiences as a prison chaplain unveiled my unconscious bias toward retribution via execution, and I began to see that desire more clearly for what it was: an understandable wish for payback. In part to help break the cycle of violence into which I was born – and which I had been inadvertently perpetuating – I decided to launch into activism for death penalty abolition.
Since then, I have joined many fellow members of L’chaim in directly communicating for years with scores of condemned Americans – many now executed – as well as some of their victims’ loved ones. I have experienced the impact of government policies that shroud the collective appetite for vengeance in the form of psychologically and physically torturous state-sponsored executions.
This pattern invariably repeats, even when murder victims’ family members expressly call for mercy. Machiavellian political leaders submit to the will of death penalty advocates, many of whom – like the social media commentators above – harbor the mentality of “the more suffering, the better,” even when available execution methods constitute unconscionable Nazi legacies.
Israelis and Jews around the world cannot let this pattern repeat on our watch. The death penalty bill in the Knesset must not be permitted to pass.
It is well past time for the cycle of violence – and the scourge of vengeance – to end.
The author is a cantor (MSM, BCC), a member of Death Penalty Action’s advisory committee, and co-founder of L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty.