The tales of Yogi Berra’s malapropisms are legion and legendary.
Here is one that is never included by chroniclers; as a childhood
fan of the New York Mets, for whom Yogi coached and occasionally
managed, I recall the event. The Mets were playing the Reds at the
old Crosley Field in Cincinnati, where the concrete outfield wall
had a metal fence extending upward from its top for two or three
feet. The rule was that if the ball hit the concrete it was still
in play, but if it hit the metal it was a home run. Ron Swoboda of
the Mets once hit a shot off the metal that the umpire mistakenly
called a live ball, good for only a double.
Yogi ran over to the umpire from his position as first-base
coach to protest, and shouted: “If you can’t see that, you’re
deaf!” And so it is with many political matters, where the
intellectual choice needs to be powered by ears that are open to
the plight of ordinary citizens slogging their way through life’s
minutial exertions.
A law nearing passage in the State of Florida has
drawn the ire of liberals the world over for ostensibly moving the
society in a more violent direction. This law would allow a citizen
being attacked with deadly force to respond in kind without first
bearing the obligation to investigate possible avenues of escape.
Yes, the statute currently in force says that if someone pulls a
knife on you and you respond by swinging some handy implement at
his head, you might wind up in maximum security for aggravated
assault while he nurses his booboos in minimum security for
attempted assault. The conservatives, so-called, who are
shepherding the bill across the rocky political steppes, are
hearing the people and seeing with clarity.
This matter holds a particular interest for me because of my
years studying Jewish Law in Yeshiva. Under that legal system, a
series of fascinating legal categories obtain, with peculiar points
of overlap.
The first is the law of the home invader, based on the verse in
Exodus (22:1), which reads, “If a burglar is discovered in a
tunnel, and he is struck and dies, he has no blood.” Having no
blood is a way of expressing that the householder is not liable for
taking the life of the burglar. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 72a) explains
that this law is based on a presumption of danger, even if no
weapon has been sighted, since a burglar comes prepared to kill the
homeowner if confronted. This is taken to be the source for the
principle of self-defense, which the Talmud encodes in the phrase:
“If he is coming to kill you, kill him first.”
The Common Law sees this permission as more narrowly tailored to
the case of the illegal entry, under the premise that a man’s home
is “his castle” and the breaching of its walls are a sort of
declaration of war. But it does not echo the Talmud in
extrapolating to other confrontations outside the home. This is
where the State of Florida is trying to take the right of
self-defense with this bill.
Jewish Law also permits a third party to defend the victim of an
attack by killing the attacker. However, one clause is mentioned,
that if breaking a limb would stop the assault as effectively as
killing, that should be the method employed. One of the early
commentators on Maimonides’s legal code was the “Assistant To The
King” who wrote circa 1600. He quotes an opinion that clarifies:
only a third-party savior (usually called the Good Samaritan in
legal parlance) must determine first if to wound or kill. The
victim himself or herself need not be so finicky and may lash out
with the deadliest force once life has been threatened.
Again, the State of Florida is catching up with these
common-sense categories and deserves our applause. In my Israeli
Army training we were taught that in confrontation with a lone
attacker we should shoot to wound if possible. I remember standing
there when receiving this instruction, recalling the Talmudic law
as developed in the aforementioned texts, and saying to myself:
“Not a chance. I’ll shoot for the heart and worry about the
court-martial later.”
It is fashionable for liberals to paint such views as betraying
some blood lust that lurks right beneath the black heart of the
American landowner. Somehow the very act of retaining property is
thought to feed a warrior spirit that threatens to destroy the
comity of the American landscape. In fact, quite the contrary is
true. My right to overwhelm your incursion is intended to keep you
on your side of the fence, to seek peaceful solutions to our
differences. In a word, normalcy. There’s a famous quotation that I
think goes like this: “What’s good for general modus is good for
operandi.”
