Yigal Amir, the murderer of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
z"l, justified his despicable deed by claiming that Rabin was a rodef
(pursuer) and a moser (turncoat) who was about to hand over Jews or
Jewish land to non-Jews.
Is there any halakhic justification for what Amir
Shakespeare once wrote that "The devil can cite
Scripture for his purpose" (The Merchant of Venice, I, iii, 93); we now
know that the devil can cite Talmud as well. Amir's interpretation is
a gross distortion of Jewish law and tradition. What he did is
murder, pure and simple, and entirely without legal justification.
There is nothing more sacred in the Jewish tradition than human
life. As a rule, Jewish law posits that since God gave us life, only He
has the right to take it away (Job 1:21; Avodah Zarah 18a). As a result,
murder is forbidden. When Cain kills Abel, God is furious (Genesis
4:10): "What have you done? Your brother's blood cried out to me
from the ground!". When Noah disembarks from the ark, God
commands him the seven Noahide laws which include the
prohibition of murder (Genesis 9:5-6). This prohibition is reiterated
in the sixth Commandment which states (Exodus 20:13 and Deut.
5:17): "You shall not murder!" For the same reason, Judaism is
opposed to suicide (Genesis Rabbah 34:13; Maimonides, Laws of
Murder 2:2; Sefer Hassidim, ed. Margaliot, par. 675). Furthermore,
there is the legal principle of pikuah nefesh which means that one is
commanded to transgress almost every commandment in the Torah
including the Sabbath, Yom Kippur and the dietary laws in order to
save human life (Yoma 82a and parallels, 83a, 85a-b). Finally, the
sacredness of every human life is encapsulated in the warning given
to witnesses in capital cases: Why did God create all of mankind out
of one single person? "To teach you that whoever destroys one life is
considered as if he had destroyed the entire world, and whoever
saves one life is considered as if he had saved the entire world"
(Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5).
Thus, Judaism views human life as sacrosanct and only allows
the taking of a life under four very special and unique circum-
stances. We shall now examine those circumstances and prove that
by no stretch of the imagination can they apply to the case in
1. Capital punishment: The Mishnah allows capital punishment for a
number of very specific crimes (Mishnah Sanhedrin 7:4, 9:1, 11:1).
Relinquishing Israeli territory for the sake of peace is certainly not
one of those crimes. Furthermore, only the Sanhedrin, or high court
of Jewish law, may judge capital cases, and they stopped doing so
around the year 30 C.E. (Sanhedrin 41a and parallels). Nonetheless,
the sages of the Talmud continued to discuss capital punishment
and to oppose it. Indeed, they added so many conditions that it
would be almost impossible to execute a person:
A Sanhedrin which kills once in seven years is considered
murderous. Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah said: once in seventy
years. Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Tarfon said: if we had been in
the Sanhedrin, no one would have ever been killed.. . (Mishnah
This assassination was obviously not based on the laws of capital
punishment. Nonetheless, these laws teach us how reluctant the
rabbis were to impose capital punishment even if it was preceded by
due process of law.
2. Self-defense: The Rabbis ruled: "If someone is coming to kill you,
rise early and kill him first" (Sanhedrin 72a and parallels). This
principle, in turn, was based on the law of the intruder: "If a thief is
seized while tunneling and he is beaten to death, there is no blood
guilt in this case. If the sun has risen on him, there is blood guilt"
(Exodus 22:1-2). Thus, it is permissible for a person to kill an intruder at night lest the robbery lead to murder
(Sanhedrin 72a and
Maimonides, Laws of Theft 9:7-10). Clearly, these laws bear little
resemblance to the case in question, but they establish the basic
principle that one may only kill in self-defense when the act is
carried out without premeditation and when one's own life is in
3. The law of the pursuer (rodef): We have learned in the Mishnah
(Sanhedrin 8:7) that, if Reuven sees Shimon running after Levi in
order to kill or rape that person, then Reuven may kill Shimon in
order to prevent the crime. This law was explained at length by the
Talmud and later codes of Jewish law.
Amir stated that Rabin was
a "pursuer" who was poised to spill the blood of many Jews by
giving up control over part of the West Bank and it was therefore
permissible to murder him. This is a gross distortion of this law.
First of all, the law of the pursuer only applies to a spontaneous act,
whereas Yigal Amir planned this assassination for two years.
Secondly, the law of the pursuer is only intended to save a potential
victim from imminent death. There is absolutely no proof that
withdrawing from certain territories will directly lead to the death
of any Jews. On the contrary, Prime Minister Rabin, over half the
members of the Knesset, and over half the population of Israel
believe exactly the opposite - that it will save Jewish lives.
Lastly, this law does not refer to elected representatives, for if
Yitzhak Rabin was really a pursuer, then so are all his followers and
that would mean that Amir should have killed over half the
population of Israel! In other words, even according to the law of the
pursuer, this act was totally futile and senseless since the peace
process will continue.
4. The law of the turncoat (moser): A moser is one who informs
against his fellow Jews or hands over Jews or Jewish land to non-Jews. In the Middle Ages, Jews were often at the mercy of gentile
rulers. When a Jew informed against his fellow Jew or handed him
over to the authorities, this was considered a heinous crime because
it frequently endangered not only the direct victim of the slander but
the entire Jewish community. The Talmud records two cases where an informer was killed by one of the Sages (Berakhot 58a and
Kamma 117a), and these stories were codified by Maimonides (Laws
of Wounding 8:10). Yet this was the exception to the rule, as is made
clear in Maimonides' code (ibid., 8:11). In actuality, Jews throughout
the Middle Ages did not execute informers. In Germany they simply
excommunicated them, while in Spain such an informer was judged
by a court of rabbis who would pass sentence and hand the informer
over to the gentile authorities for punishment.5
Amir compared Prime Minister Rabin to a turncoat who deserves
death. This too is patently absurd. First of all, Prime Minister Rabin
was not a turncoat; he was simply carrying out his job as the
democratically elected Prime Minister of Israel trying to make peace
with the Arabs. Secondly, the law of moser developed in the
Diaspora when Jews were being ruled by gentiles, whereas Rabin
was the sovereign, elected head of a Jewish State. Lastly, as
mentioned above, Jews did not summarily execute turncoats
without trial. Thus, this argument too falls by the wayside.
Until now we have simply reacted to Amir's twisting of the
Jewish laws regarding murder. But the real tragedy is that Amir and
his ilk have totally missed the entire point of religious Zionism,
which views the State of Israel as the beginning of the redemption of
the Jewish people. The democratic institutions of the State of Israel
are not something to be "tolerated" outside of Jewish law. Rather,
they are part and parcel of Jewish law - and living in accordance
with its laws is as important as observing the Sabbath and keeping
kosher. There are three ways of proving this assertion:
a) The Talmudic sage Samuel, who lived in third-century
Babylonia, coined the phrase "the law of the land is the law"
(Nedarim 28a and parallels), which meant that Jews must obey
the laws of the countries in which they reside. But many
rabbis state that this applies to a Jewish state as well.
Jewish law requires Jews to observe the secular laws of the
State of Israel.
b) Throughout Jewish history, every Jewish kahal, or community,
was governed democratically on the basis of a passage in the Talmud.
The State of Israel is the modern equivalent of the
kahal, and its democratic institutions must be treated with the
same respect and authority as the medieval kahal.
c) Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli, two of
the foremost religious Zionists of the twentieth century, have
explained that, in our day, the democratically elected
government and leaders of Israel have taken the place of the
king and must be obeyed accordingly.
Thus, not only did the assassin misread the Jewish laws of
murder, but he totally misunderstood the significance of religious
Zionism which he supposedly represents.
How did this occur? How could religious Zionism which has
done so much for the State of Israel spawn such a person? Rabbi
Menahem Mendel of Kotzk once said that the Torah warns us not to
turn God's commandments into idols.
Since the Six Day War, some
religious Jews in Israel have turned their love of the Land of Israel
into a form of idolatry which is used to justify all sorts of unethical
behavior. When one commandment takes precedence over all
others, it can lead to aberrations such as Baruch Goldstein and
Yigal Amir. The dreadful actions of these two Jews must force the
leaders of religious Zionism to search their souls and to overhaul
their priorities and their educational system. The Land of Israel is
very important, but so are a host of other Jewish values such as the
value of human life, the State of Israel and the pursuit of peace. One
commandment must not make us forget all of the others. I hope and
pray that this will be a positive result of the terrible tragedy which
has befallen us.
1. This responsum was written on 3 Kislev 5756 as a spontaneous reaction to
the Rabin assassination. My thanks to Rabbi Eliezer Diamond who critiqued
the first draft. After appearing in Moment, it appeared in Hebrew in
Responsa of the Va'ad Halakhah of the Rabbinical Assembly of Israel 6 (5755-
5758), pp. 313-317.
2. The Washington Post, Nov. 12, 1995, pp. A1 and A30.
3. This is the correct reading of this Mishnah - see E.E. Urbach, Tarbitz 40
(5731), pp. 268-284 = idem., Mei'olamam Shel Hakhamim, Jerusalem 5748, pp.
4. Sanhedrin 73ff.; Maimonides, Laws of Murder 1:6-16; Shulhan Arukh, Hoshen
5. Encyclopaedia Judaica, s.v. "Informers"; Maimonides, ibid.; Shulhan Arukh,
Hoshen Mishpat 388:9 ff.
6. Entziklopedia Talmudit, vol. 7, cols. 307-308.
7. Bava Batra 8b. Regarding this passage, see Menachem Elon, Jewish
Law: History, Sources, Principles, Philadelphia and Jerusalem, 1994, Chapter 19;
Ephraim Kanarfogel, Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research
58 (1992), pp. 71-106.
8. Responsa Mishpat Kohen, Jerusalem, 1984, no. 144, pp. 337-338, and Amud
Hayemini, Tel Aviv, 1965, part I, nos. 7, 9.
9. Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, vol. 2, New York, 1948, p. 279.