Ours is an angry age. Confronted with ever higher levels of violence, with movies and television shows that grow ever more graphic and explicit in their brutality and glorification of cruelty, with neighborhoods no longer safe for a stroll and schools no longer safe for children, we respond to our pain by lashing out. Three strikes and you’re out, while reflecting our rage, is breaking our jails. And we’re too mad to care—let them rot! Our anger at violence in our streets leads us to lash out at innocents, stripping school children of their breakfasts and their parents of health care and job security. Our frustration with Palestinian terrorism results in some Jews opposing reconciliation itself, preferring the short-term gratification of striking back, over the long-term solution of establishing peace.
Ours is an angry age, and vengeance is alive and well in the world. The temptation to lash out, regardless of consequences, is a powerful pull on the human soul. Our tradition knows the strength of the yetzer ha-ra, the evil impulse. We know of our cunning in rationalizing our brutality, of justifying our cruelty, and of ignoring the humanity and the suffering of our enemies.
Because God knows how people work, the Torah is quite emphatic in its prohibition: “You shall not take vengeance.” Today’s parashah contains that law, two short Hebrew words, because the human psyche hasn’t changed across the years; we still want to lash out in our anger, and we still need the commanding voice of God to prohibit that response.
The command to take no revenge is explicated in a list of the Mitzvot by the great Hafetz Chaim, a rabbinic sage of the last century: Revenge means repaying a person who has harmed someone, according to the original act. For example, if one asked a neighbor, “Lend me your axe,” and the neighbor would not lend it, and the next day the neighbor has to borrow something, whereupon one tells the neighbor, “I will not lend it to you, just as you refused me when I wanted to borrow from you.” This is revenge, whereby one exacts vengeance from the other, repaying according to one’s own evil action.
According to this understanding, the prohibition of “you shall not take vengeance” is a prohibition against acting like the one who has wronged us in the first place. Becoming like our enemies is a victory for our enemies. Fashioning ourselves in their image is striking against the image of God we are meant to reflect. Responding in that way, however gratifying it may be, simply keeps the cycle of pain and evil alive. Jews are summoned—in fact, commanded—to do better.
Such a story comes to us from the medieval period as well. One of the great Jewish leaders of the Eleventh Century was a man named Samuel ibn Angela, a poet and the Vizier to the king of Granada. He was a man of great power, and of great insight.
One day, the king overheard an enemy of Shmuel’s curse him and his people. In loyalty to his Vizier, and indignant at such blatant disrespect to one favored by the king, the monarch ordered the tongue of the offending man cut out. He then empowered Shmuel to see that the sentence was carried out. Instead of ordering his tongue chopped off, Shmuel treated the man so kindly that he became the Vizier’s fast and loyal friend.
When the king saw that the man still had his tongue, and that he appeared to be a friend of Shmuel’s, he expressed his surprise that his order wasn’t carried out.
“Your Majesty,” Shmuel responded,” I have fulfilled your command. I have taken away his evil tongue, as you commanded, and I have given him a kindly one.”
What a remarkable story: A Jew powerful enough to get impose revenge, without any negative consequences, and yet so loyal to the words of Torah and so devoted to Judaism’s insistence that all people are made in God’s image that Shmuel risked transforming an enemy into a friend. The Talmud asks, “Who is mighty? One who makes an enemy into a friend.” Shmuel embodied that wisdom, and obeyed the mitzvah by refraining from seeking vengeance even when he might have.
We, too, must retrain our urge toward revenge. For the sake of breaking the cycle of violence and hatred, for the sake of establishing God’s sovereignty on earth, and for the sake of the well-being of our own inner selves, we must seek a higher way.
It may be risky to turn an enemy into a friend. But loyalty to God and Torah has never been easy. It’s hard to be a Jew.
Shabbat Shalom!