Salvation Is Free, Or Is It?

March 15, 2021 - Nisan 2, 5781

Three Scenarios of Forgiveness

Let us imagine a situation in which a person is brought to court before a judge for committing some sort of infraction. The judge looks the person up and down and then in the eye, and decides to waive his fee. The person gleefully leaves the courtroom with his spirit renewed with a great sense of appreciation for the judge and his mercy.

Let us now slightly adjust the situation by introducing another variable. Let us imagine a situation in which a person is brought to court before a judge for running a red light. As in the first case, the judge considers the situation and waives the offender's fee.

Let us now add another variable into the equation to see what happens. Let's take the example of the man who ran the red light, but in this case let's say that he struck another car and killed a family of four. As before he is brought into the courtroom to stand before the judge, and the judge waives his fee.

What is our intuitive reaction to each scenario?

In the first scenario we may be apt to feel appreciation and warmth toward the judge for what seems like undeserved mercy. This is an appropriate reaction when the person's infraction affects only him. However, when we consider the second scenario, in which the person's action was potentially dangerous to somebody other than himself, we may be more cautious when applying mercy. In the third situation, in which the person killed four other people due to negligence, we may consider applying mercy to be a gross perversion of justice. The application of mercy must be determined by the outcome of the event(s).

Is It Really Merciful to Forgive?

The very definition of mercy is to show favor to someone undeserving. Merriam Webster's defines mercy as "compassion or forbearance shown especially to an offender or to one subject to one's power" and "lenient or compassionate treatment." Note that we are not speaking about the judge's right to waive the fee, but whether or not it would bring about the best possible good.

Waiving a fee can only be considered in relation to the offense committed. In the second case above, waiving the fee may be favorable to the offender, but depending on his attitude it will have one of two different effects. If the offender is appreciative of the judge's mercy, it may prompt him to be more careful and to avoid running red lights in the future. If the offender is crass and not appreciative, he may have learned nothing from the experience and may continue to drive dangerously.

Mercy as well has a ripple effect on those observing the case. When people see that the judge unequivocally waives penalties associated with running red lights, they may think to themselves that if they ever get caught running a red light that this judge will be lenient with them as well. In turn this leads people to be less careful while running red lights, endangering themselves and others, culminating in an increased disregard for law and order.

Now let us consider another variable. Let's reason that this judge has earned a reputation for mercy in the public eye. In general the public is said to have a great love and admiration for this judge and therefore actively seek out to avoid committing offenses, such as running red lights. However, the entire set of possibilities available to most people will inevitably lead to committing other offenses, either big or small. In the complexity and dynamics of personal, social, and business interactions, people will find it impossible to avoid committing a range of offenses, even though they may admire this judge. It therefore becomes necessary to impose particular penalties to prevent the greatest amount of people possible from committing offenses. In fact, such penalties would not be punitive in nature, but would set in place to establish order and to prevent injury and death. The core motivation for these penalties is the judge's love for the citizens.

But we cannot overlook those individuals who are motivated to avoid offenses borne of admiration for the judge. Inevitably when such individuals commit offenses and are brought before the judge, he will consider their record and will exercise leniency with them in accordance with their past and with their attitude while in the courtroom. He acts in this way because of a conviction that they will be more cautious in the future, and so he trusts letting them go with either a light sentence or no sentence at all.

However, those crass individuals who have demonstrated apathy and recklessness must receive harsher sentencing in order to prevent them from persisting in their offenses, which harm them and the people around them. This is certainly true of people who show no remorse at all for their offenses, so calloused through repetition or a non-functioning conscience that they experience no regret or shame for their actions. The judge is both merciful and just, and exercising mercy to recalcitrant offenders is to exercise cruelty toward undeserving victims. The purpose of the judge's sentencing is to bring about the greatest sense of good for all involved; both the offender and all related parties, which in certain cases requires the suspension of mercy.

A Real Life Example

A good real life example of this is the case of Gary Ridgeway, known as the Green River Killer, who murdered 49 girls and women between the 1980s and 1990s.

In a video titled The Power of Forgiveness - Gary Ridgway, the father of one of the victims is seen responding to Ridgway in an unexpected manner:

A person capable of regret would have cried during the drawn-out and painful process of reading off a list of 48 names in succession of people that you killed. The well-placed Schindler's List music coupled with the image of a grown crying man does a good job in evincing an emotional response. However, over the ten-year course that this man murdered, raped, and dumped girls and women into the lake, did he stop to cry once? Did he consider for a moment the future that he was creating for himself, and the future that he was taking from these girls and women and their families? Did he think about repenting once or getting help, or was he happy enough concealing his illness and continuing in his revelry?

It was awfully nice of the father of the victim to apologize, but it is the prerogative of the wronged party to forgive, not of people in the periphery, even if they are closely related. It was unsettling to see this father become an accomplice with Rigdway in the murder of his daughter; Ridgway may have killed her body, but her father killed her memory, which is must worse. 

While this footage is heart-wrenching, we can not let emotions cloud our judgment; offering mercy to an individual guilty of repeated, heinous crimes demonstrating no intent or ability to stop a) permits evil to continue, which creates more victims, and b) perverts justice towards for the victims who have already been wronged, extending to their families and friends. Throughout his case, according to Seattlepi.com, Ridgway referred to "the young women he strangled and dumped along the now-notorious river or in wooded ravines..." "as garbage." The fate of the guilty party cannot take precedence over the fact of the innocent, and to do so would not be mercy.

Further, we should distinguish between the example above and the thing that we are trying to compare. In the case above, Ridgway was sentenced even though being forgiven by the parent of one of the victims. In the case of mercy through Jesus, the transgressor is released from sentencing entirely. Therefore the demonstration above is not really comparable, for the judge saw it appropriate to sentence Ridgway regardless of his being forgiven by a relative of one of the victims.

Some of the comments on this video express the type of attractive, yet incorrect, intuition. I wouldn't want the following people ever to be put in a position of presiding as a judge:

1. Christ and God puts a major emphasis on forgiveness and instructed their followers that true forgiveness is vital to a healthy spiritual life. True Christians are supposed to apply this notion in everyday life, other religions may say the same, others say otherwise.


2. That´s the hardest part of being Christian. This guy nailed it. It takes massive courage to do that.


3. Forgiveness is stronger than hate. Forgiveness heals, it liberates, its compassionate but most of all its a sign of Love. Love conquers all.

The following is the type of approach more correct for forgiveness:

I think most people reach a point, where forgiveness, empathy and compassion turn to anger, even if for a while. Especially when the compassion and empathy are not returned. I know a friend whose other friend of 15 years slept with his wife behind his back, in their home the first friend was paying mortgage for, for over a year. And it led to divorce and some serious blues for the first friend. And the cheating friend never apologized, he never showed remorse. How do you just forgive that? Ultimately, the forgiveness in my opinion comes after a long time of anger, internal struggle, etc. and it's done because the forgiving party realizes it will only benefit their mental health.

Conclusion

What we should strive to realize is that forgiveness and mercy are not the same thing. Forgiveness is important as an attitude of the victim and his family, and is central to mental health, but is a perversion of justice and a corrupting force if exercised towards serious and repeat offenders. It may help the recipient of mercy, and it may help you in getting over loss, but it doesn't help anybody else, and everybody else matters, too.

Mishlei says:

"He who vindicates the wicked and condemns the righteous-both are an abomination to the Lord." (17:15)

"It is not good to be partial to the wicked, to subvert the righteous in judgment." (18:5)

Let us remember King Solomon's words inspired by the ruach hakodesh:

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Everything has an appointed season, and there is a time for every matter under the heaven.

A time to give birth and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to uproot that which is planted.

A time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break and a time to build.

A time to weep and a time to laugh; a time of wailing and a time of dancing.

A time to cast stones and a time to gather stones; a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.

A time to rend and a time to sew; a time to be silent and a time to speak.

A time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time for peace.

Koheles 3:1-8

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What time is right to hate if not for those who have committed unspeakable evil on innocent people? Shall we render the above null and void?

When Right Becomes Wrong

July 20 2020 - Tammuz 28 5780

In a somewhat drastic deviation from the content I typically consider in HashemIsBeautiful, I will be using a movie as the springboard for an analysis of morality.

Notice: This movie portrays graphically violent scenes and is not intended for all audiences.

That movie is called Law Abiding Citizen and is about a father (Clyde Shelton, played by Gerald Butler) whose wife and daughter are murdered during a break-in into their home. The actual murder is carried out by the low-life cocaine-addicted Darby (Christian Stolte), while his slightly more virtuous assailant (Rupert Ames, played by Josh Stewart) robs the house and pleads with Darby to “stick to the original plunderers plan.”

When Darby gets off on a legal technicality and pins the murder on his unfortunate partner in crime (who is executed in his stead), the now widowed Clyde loses faith in the legal system and takes actions into his own hands. Being the engineering mastermind that he is, Clyde begins to unleash a coordinated program of terror beginning with the capture, gruesome torture, and killing of Darby. He gradually broadens his ring of blood-letting vengeance to all people directly involved with his case in any way; the judge, the prosecution, the defense, and even wet-behind-the-ears temps working on their first real job, seeking to “topple the corrupt temple” down on its worshipers in true Samsonite fashion.

While we empathize with the unspeakable misery experienced by the abandoned and forgotten Clyde, it seems that the lesson in this movie is that removing all boundaries (can, and perhaps inevitably) turns an otherwise justified cause into something indistinguishable from the evil it sought to destroy in the first place. In other words, everyone roots for Clyde at the beginning, but observes him almost unperceivably and gradually turning into an indefensible murderer responsible for more deaths and destroyed families than Darby.

Further, his transformation cannot be locked down to any specific action or point in time. Instead, it occurs somewhere in the recesses of his mind when he begins confusing the destruction of the corrupt system with the destruction of the human beings required to uphold that system. While it may be justifiable to destroy a system, it cannot be justifiable to kill the human beings that operate it.

The only morally permissible exception I can think of is killing people directly related to operating the specific part of a system responsible for murder. For example, Jewish partisans in WWII bombing "infrastructure critical to the Nazi war effort such as supply trains," even if it cannot be done without killing the train operator, who may have never killed a Jew in his life. In such a case the failure to prevent such wholesale murder may as well be a moral failure. The train operator may very well be the "unfortunate collateral," but such a designation has to be very tightly defined to avoid the murder of innocents, which may defeat the purpose of acting in the first place.

The principle that an otherwise justifiable cause can be corrupted and actually completely destroyed by overstepping boundaries can be applied to any number of situations. Given events more directly relevant to my community, I cannot help but apply it to what I consider to be a misguided expression and aberration of Jewish values in the form of misplaced zeal. I am referring to the intensified focus of a very specific and localized sector of the Orthodox Jewish community to laws of modesty. It should be understood that I support such laws, deeply believe in them, and view them as imperatives on a practical and ideological level. It should also be understood as my view that zealously upholding such spiritually uplifting imperatives at the expense of sensible and compassionate behavior towards human beings, other religious Jews in this case, endangers the purpose for spiritual commitments to Judaism in the first place.

I apply this principle to other areas as well, some more extreme, such as the unwavering commitment to violence against civilians by terrorist groups such as Hamas in the name of adherence to the religion of Islam. The vantage point of my own experiences limits my ability to conceive of other apt illustrations of this principle, although I am sure that most people reading this will be able to think of many others.

At what point does a justified, noble, morally-driven endeavor lose its direction, thus becoming indistinguishable from the wrong it attempted to right in the first place, and is there a way to avoid it?