May 1 2009 - KEDOSHEEM : MY GOD DOES NOT SANCTION TORTURE; NEITHER SHOULD WE

When the scandal over Abu Ghraib first broke, I gave a High Holiday sermon condemning the use of torture. I said that the United States would reap what it had sown in that Iraqi prison. I was convinced that we had besmirched our good name as a nation, and had sullied our image and reputation in ways that would take, perhaps, decades, if ever, to repair.

I was attempting to be neither a prophet nor a seer. I was convinced then as I am now that the United States had chosen the wrong path and had, for whatever good reasons, lost its moral bearings. One cannot stand up and proclaim to the world that your country is an upholder of laws and a defender of decency and, at the same time, mistreat and abuse other human beings through torture…excuse me, enhanced interrogation techniques. It doesn’t matter what level of justification you may have. Torture is simply wrong.

Good people, we come to this Sabbath service and we present ourselves to one another and to our outer communities as people for whom Torah is meaningful. We urge our children to live by Torah’s words, and we claim that the laws and commandments, ordinances, and precepts are active in and integral to our lives. Indeed, the passage Sophie and Sandy will be reading tomorrow sets before us many of those laws we claim are central to us and how we purport to live.

In the Holiness Code, Leviticus 19, God tells us that we must behave differently than others because the Lord God is holy and we are to emulate God’s example. To my mind, then, assimilating holiness and using torture are mutually exclusive concepts.

God has set aside the Jewish people with very specific laws. God expects us, as it were, to exemplify a higher moral standard than the rest of the world. We are to represent these laws because it is the essence of the mission we have taken upon ourselves at Sinai to demonstrate the concept of what it is to be holy. And holiness has some specific parameters.

God, in Leviticus 19, instructs us that we have a responsibility for the welfare of our fellow human beings. Therein does God command us to leave the corners of our fields and the residuals of our vineyards for the poor and the stranger. We are told not to rob or deal falsely with each other or to defraud, insult, or willfully harm those who are weaker than we: the blind or the deaf…and, I must add, the prisoner who is in our charge. We are instructed not to incur guilt because of the acts of others. We are, in fact, commanded to correct those who are incurring guilt because of their behavior. Furthermore, we are admonished not to take vengeance or to bear a grudge, but to love our neighbors as we do ourselves.

No other passage in Torah so richly and clearly exemplifies the way we should treat other human beings. It isn’t the specifics that I am concerned about, although they themselves are uplifting and ennobling. It is the spirit which the Holiness Code conveys which demands that we must treat others as we ourselves would be treated because we all made in the Image of God. And if God is holy, then each human being must be seen as possessing a spark of that divine holiness. We are therein forbidden to abuse that which contains that spark of God. We are prohibited from the use of torture, torture being “’any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person’” to obtain information or a confession. (“When Israel Confronted and Rejected Torture” by SERGE SCHMEMANN Published: NYT, April 30, 2009)

I know that you may be arguing with me with pained “yes, buts” that emanate from our horror over 9-11 and our fear of being attacked again. “Yes, but the enemies we now face know no limits and respect no international conventions,” you tell me. And you would be totally correct. But I am equally certain that Torah was aware of this problem. The impetus to re-act with savagery and brutality arises as one is confronted with inhuman behavior. But I tell you that torture is categorically wrong no matter how justified you might attempt to make it. Torture cannot be the means to an end in any civilized, God emulating society. And the nation which lowers itself to engage in the use of torture will need to find significant ways to atone for it or it will not be able to retain its dignity and stature either to its friends or to its enemies…but, most of all, to itself as it seeks to comprehend its own image and identity in coming days and years.

It is here that I believe history can teach us something very, very important to our future as a country. We Jews suffered under the Nazis like no other group has ever suffered. Directly after the war, Jews confronted the chance to take retribution. Think of the emotionally satisfying effect that taking vengeance might have afforded Holocaust survivors. Think of the Nazi criminals that might have been caught through retributory beatings and recriminatory, harsh interrogations; the treasures that might have been recovered, and the secrets that might have been revealed. And, oh, wouldn’t it have felt so good and right to do so! But Jews, by and large, didn’t take this course. They may have had every justification under the sun to torture their former tormentors now that the shoe was on the other foot, but they reasoned that were they to engage in vengeance, they would be revealing themselves to be no better than their adversaries.

In contrast, we have modern Germany. Here is a country whose present generation is distant enough from the Nazi era to be able to reject collective guilt. And yet, modern Germans cannot seem to shake off the deeds of their forbearers. They wear the guilt of the Holocaust as though it happened yesterday because these crimes have been sown into the fabric of the society and its collective self image. Is this what we and our America is destined for…a crippled, guilt ridden, national psyche? I certainly pray not.

I contend that what underguirded post Holocaust Jewry’s decision not to engage in reprisal and torture were, to large measure, the precepts like those found in the Holiness Code. One cannot attest to a belief in God and torture one’s enemies. Not if that God is a Jewish one and one’s Scripture is Torah. And there is another reason that I say this. It is because I think that maybe the Western world has learned something from us Jews. Following the vast bloodletting of World Wars I and II, the writers of the Geneva Conventions realized that there had to be limits placed on those who would engage in future wars. In 1949, they created boundaries for nations and their armies. They set standards as to what was and wasn’t permissible on the battle field, drawing parameters around warfare, fully knowing that they were trying to contain the most horrifying aspects of human behavior, which involved the sanctioned taking human life. That one’s enemy behaves outside those conventions was deemed reprehensible and punishable by law when the conflict ultimately ended. But, again, what underguirded those Geneva Conventions is the understanding that each human being has value and no army or group has a right to cache’ that essentially valuable creation.

We Jews know better than to attempt to justify the means to an end when we know that the means are sinful and wrong. Not only must we not engage in or ever condone the torture of prisoners, we must publicly revile its use. Torture is and must remain repugnant to any who would call themselves a civilized people, a people which seeks to demonstrate holiness to the world. Parenthetically, we must not engage in torture because it opens our own troops to the same treatment in return. But even more than this is that it negates all that is decent and worthwhile in human existence; and because it stains the hands and sullies the hearts of its users.

I know and acknowledge that America and the West has malicious and obscenely vicious enemies who would stop at nothing to defeat and annihilate us in the name of whatever god they profess to believe in. To some great degree, ours is a world which has gone mad with brutality. However, even…and perhaps especially…in the face of such bestiality, we can answer, as Daniel Pearl did his tormentors, by holding our heads high with dignity, telling the world that we are Jews and we are Americans…and we stand for ideals and ethics that are higher than those of our enemies…that there are behaviors more important than life…and as did our ancestors when they died al Kiddush Hashem…for the sake of the Divine Name, we shall not renege on our principles and upon the lessons of Torah, but we shall live in and through them, though it costs us dearly. For, nothing can cost us more than to acquire the sinful souls of torturers! Nothing.