Shalom, Rabbi Jonathan Ginsburg of the Jewish corrugation Skokie. This video is about capital punishment. Just reading in today’s headline about how increasingly people are expressing sets of discomfort with capital punishment. What is the Jewish view? Well, first of all, we always start with the Torah, the five books of Moses are holy is text and there are more than three dozen situations of crimes in the Torah that are punishable by death.
Including my cut(ph) issue make Mogue from exodus of someone comes this strike you and then kill someone and so as pre meditated murder, you can kill that one. Now the 10 commandments do say law to exact, do the murder but it is not the same, that is a word forbidden, to murder. It is not the same as the saying that the society does not have a right to kill people who commit violent in vicious crimes.
Now when you get to the Talmud which is about 1,300 years after Moses, the oral law which is find and written down. There is a discussion about capital punishment extensive discussion. In the main paragraph in the mission, which deal with us, the first part of the Talmud, this is written down by the year 220 of the Common Era. There is the following, when we hear by I said if there was one capital punishment in a brain of 7 years of the son Hadrian there is a bloody of son Hadrian.
The next rabbi said, if there was 170 years, it was a bloody range. So, those two rabbis were saying that the son Hadrian which is the highest Jewish Court made it virtually impossible to execute someone. That the third Rabbi said something that pro capital punishment supporters would agree when he said, if you have that added two thing and multiply the shatters of blood. In other words if you have no capital punishments, then people will have last fear of the law, you will do more murder.
Now why did the Rabbis make it tough to convict someone? Well you needed to have two co-show witnesses, a reliable witnesses who sue all the crime about to be committed, who warn the first the crime there about to commit was a capital crime, and then the person have to do that anyway. Circumstantial evidence was not permitted in capital cases, assume in a situation where you see somebody running into a cave with a knife and chasing a fellow.
And then the fellow with the knife comes out later with the blood a knife. You go into the cave and see him there with a knife wound. Can you convict that guy the capital crime? The answer is no, because you to know happened in the cave maybe, the fellow change is mind, the other one attacked him and he tried to kill him and it was self defense, the other guy fell, you do not know of the situation is.
Now, the case in a voluntary man slaughter, the Torah provided a kind of safe haven of 6 cities, of refuge where you grant to live to avoid blood feuds . But any case, the Talmud clearly tries to restrict the number of capital crimes. For example, one of the death penalty capable crimes in the Torah is suffer of a rebellious child, well who has not felt that at some point or trouble stubborn and rebellious, because the rabbis and the Talmud said, there has never be the case like that and then one Rabbi followed with one case by who knows , what that kid did and we could imagine a kid committed mass murder or something about teenager.
But any case. by large Judaism said yes and there is a capital punishment, but you have to have absolute overwhelming evidence and it has to be for very limited cases and very rare. And so again Judaism is a pro-life bias religion, respecting life in taking it only under the most severe degrees, but it is strikes the middle ground again, as it does in most cases that when the extreme views of never capital punishment and regular capital punishment.
Then Hitler deserve to die and I think people who commit Genocide and treason in the time of war and other situations may forfeit their right to life as the Bible teaches, and certainly it should not be done and you have to be very careful given the problems in the current administration of the legal system can make sure that is absolute overwhelming evidence. That would be I think a fair statement and summary of the Jewish prospective.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services