My friend Sharon Stone got into trouble a while back when she
reminded the Chinese after an earthquake that what goes around
comes around. You can’t expect to jail dissidents and harass
Tibetans with impunity. It turned out that whole stoic,
inscrutable Charlie Chan thing is out of style in the modern
People’s Republic, and
Dior had to drop her as their spokesmodel for the region.
They told her to go away and not come around. Bad for business,
too, because people who are losing a lot of face need more
cosmetics.
Of course, Sharon was absolutely right, and she paid a temporal
price for speaking eternal truth. If anyone needed a
demonstration of this principle closer to home, the case of O.J.
Simpson provided ample illustration. Outside of a dozen
California jurors, most of the country thought he belonged in
jail and sure enough, eventually, he managed to work his own way
behind bars. This column predicted
that verdict was coming around long before O.J.’s go-round in
court.
All these comings and goings are gratifying to a degree, but one
thing is annoying. For a nice Jewish family like the Goldmans to
describe Mister Simpson’s fate as “karma” is sad. (Stone, by
contrast, used the phrase in an Asian setting, where the Hindu
and Buddhist familiarity renders it appropriate.) There is no
reason anyone needs to go beyond the Biblical and Talmudic
tradition to understand this denouement.
THE VERSE IN EXODUS (21:12,13) is fascinating. “If one strikes a
man and he dies, he should be put to death. If he did not stalk
him, but the Lord delivered it into his hand, I will assign for
you a place where he may find refuge.”
The sentence of exile (akin to prison) was reserved for someone
who killed by criminal negligence, what we might call
manslaughter. The question arises: why does the verse say that
the Lord brought the situation about? The tradition teaches that
this is explained by the verse in Samuel I (24:14) when David
refuses to kill Saul despite having a clear shot. “As the
primordial parable says, evil comes from evil men.”
This is explained to mean as follows. One person had committed
murder without witnesses and deserved the death penalty. Another
person had committed manslaughter without witnesses and deserved
to be exiled. Neither one could be apprehended. So God makes the
latter fall off the ladder in the presence of witnesses and land
on the former. The murderer is killed in the accident, receiving
a death penalty. The witnesses get the impression that the faller
mounted the ladder dangerously, so he is convicted of
manslaughter and sent to prison.
Thus the Bible, the “primordial parable”, when read carefully by
a King David, reveals the principle that bad people can be used
as a vehicle for bad things to happen, with the added irony that
those seemingly bad things have a good purpose of their own.
In a Talmudic story that Alan Dershowitz is fond of quoting, the
great scholar of the Second Temple period, Simon-ben-Shetah,
witnesses a man brandishing a knife chasing another man into a
building. Simon runs to help, but by the time he gets through the
door he finds the one man holding a bloody knife with the other
stabbed to death on the floor. Since Jewish law does not allow
circumstantial evidence in capital cases, the man could not be
prosecuted. Simon feels thwarted by the law until, some time
later, he hears the news that the killer was himself killed by a
snake.
As to the human behavior by law enforcement, the judge and the
jury, this too has a Biblical basis. When King David is on his
deathbed at the beginning of Kings, he summons his son and
successor, Solomon. He tells him to see to it that
Shimmi-ben-Gerah gets what he deserves. Shimmi had been abusive
and threatening to David when he was dethroned in a revolution
and running for his life (Samuel II 16:5-13). David passed up the
opportunity to kill him then and again later (ibid 19:19-24) when
he retook the throne. This was done to show that he could rise
above personal vindictiveness to think of the needs of the
nation. Still, Shimmi deserved punishment.
“Do as your wisdom dictates,” David told Solomon. Just make sure
he gets what is coming to him. Solomon put Shimmi on a short
leash, forbidding travel outside Jerusalem. When Shimmi violated
this order “to recover some property,” he was finally put to
death. It is fair and reasonable to give very little leeway to
someone who got away with one. Even a much smaller crime the
second time will evoke major penalties.
There was once a time, not very long ago, when most Americans
knew those stories and understood their lessons. When fate
accomplished justice, they knew what they had seen. But that
seems to have gone around somewhere; hopefully it will come
around again soon.
