In early December, YNet reported (in an article Google-translated below) on a meeting of the National Security Committee to which Itamar Ben Gvir and the other members of the Jewish Power political party arrived wearing yellow pins, clearly meant to evoke the image of the yellow ribbon for hostages that Ben Gvir had ignored, now refashioned to look like a noose.
Ben Gvir, YNet noted, was not committed to hanging as the only option for executing terrorists—there’s also the electric chair or anesthesia, he was quick to point out.
Thus far, the movement to impose the death penalty in Hamas terrorists (among others, obviously) hasn’t gotten a tremendous amount of traction. It’s not that the public is opposed—it’s that there are more immediate issues like the Haredi draft issue, this year’s upcoming elections, the possibility of renewed war with Iran, the fact that matters with Hamas and Gaza are stuck and—depending on how one reads the recent meeting in Mar-A-Lago—the worry that it may be only a matter of time until Trump erupts after losing his patience with Netanyahu.
Yet whether it is of immediate legislative import or not, the issue of the death penalty for terrorists is an important one—morally, halakhically, diplomatically, legally and otherwise. Mass murder, rape and more are undoubtedly heinous crimes, and the guilt of most of the terrorists is beyond question.
And the Bible is clear—for crimes such as these, one deserves to die.
But subsequent Jewish tradition has a much more complex attitude to this fraught issue. The Talmud notes that when the number of murderers increased, the Sanhedrin ceased hearing capital cases. Was that because it did not want to execute so many people? We might assume that, but the Talmud (Avodah Zarah 8b) suggests that their reasoning was more complex.
The sages knew that the Gentile authorities would never let them execute so many people, it seems. So rather than issue rulings that they could not act on, it was better just not to hear the case.
Another Talmudic source (Mishnah Makkot 1:10) seems to have a slightly different attitude:
So, what is Judaism’s attitude to capital punishment? What would it mean for Israeli society to enact the laws that Ben Gvir seeks? What would it mean for Israel’s standing in the world, or with Jews in the Diaspora?
We invited one of our regular guests, Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody, to share with us a review of what the Jewish tradition says about the death penalty, and what factors he takes into consideration as he thinks about whether Ben Gvir’s drive to institute the death penalty for terrorists ought to go forward.
Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody is the executive director of Ematai and the Jewish Law Live columnist for the Jerusalem Post. He previously served as the founding director of the Tikvah Overseas Student Institute and co-dean of Tikvah Online Academy, a senior instructor at Yeshivat Hakotel, and as a junior research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute.
Brody’s career has focused on making Jewish texts accessible to broader audiences while applying them to contemporary social and ethical dilemmas. His writings have been cited in Israeli Supreme Court decisions and have appeared in Mosaic, First Things, Tradition, The Federalist, Tablet, Tzohar, The Forward, Hakirah, Jewish Review of Books, and other popular publications.
His first book, A Guide to the Complex: Contemporary Halakhic Debates (Maggid), received a National Jewish Book Award. His second book, Ethics of Our Fighters: A Jewish View on War and Morality, was published in January 2024 and will be published in Hebrew at the end of the year.
A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard College, he received rabbinic ordination from the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, an MA in Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University, and his PhD from Bar Ilan University Law School, where he continues to serve as a post-doctoral fellow. Rabbi Brody has been an invited scholar-in-residence at over 60 distinguished congregations and campuses in the United States, Canada, England, and Israel.
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For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full conversation; below, paid subscribers will also find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.
I always love having today's guest, Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody, on the podcast. I always love talking to him in general because invariably, I learn something that I didn't know before, and I think about things in ways that I hadn't before. I've asked Rabbi Brody in the middle of what's a very, very busy season for him and his organization, Ematai, which is dedicated to helping Jews navigate very complex ethical and moral dilemmas of aging, end of life care, organ donation, and so forth. It's a very busy time for him, but I asked him to come on nonetheless, and I appreciate his doing so, because there's a new issue in Israeli society that's getting batted around a little bit. It's getting batted around mostly in the person of Itamar Ben-Gvir, who, instead of wearing a little yellow ribbon on his lapel, as many people were, is wearing a little yellow, same size, but it's not a ribbon, it's actually a noose. It is rather unsubtle way of saying that he believes that there should be a death penalty in Israel for terrorists. The argument is very simple that when we hold these terrorists, invariably, sometimes, tragically, Israeli soldiers and/or civilians get captured, and then we pay horrendous prices for them, and we end up giving back very, very bad guys, Sinwar, being an obvious example.
Therefore, argues Ben Gvir, but many others with him, by the way, that the way to make sure that we don't do that is just simply to kill them. If we know that they killed Jews, and they're terrorists, and they came here to kill us, and they did kill us, well, then we should just kill them, and we should institute the death penalty, which Israel, of course, has only used one time for Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi mass murderer. So there's really nobody better to talk to us about this issue than rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody, who had a fascinating career here. He was with the Tikvah organization for a long time, and we'll put his exact roles in the written notes for today. He was a senior instructor at Yeshivat Hakotel, a fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. His work has been quoted in Israeli Supreme Court Decisions. The number of publications that he's published is endless. We'll put a whole bunch of them up in today's notes. He's written two books, which actually, I think, converge in today's topic. His first book was called A Guide to the Complex Contemporary Halakhic Debates, which won the National Jewish Book Award in 2014.
In his most recent book, Ethics of Our fighters: A Jewish View on War and Morality, was published in early 2024, just about two years ago. Our conversation today, really, I think, Rabbi Brody going to draw on what you wrote about in both of those books. I'll just note, even though we'll say it, soma cum laude graduate of Harvard College, rabbinic ordination from the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, an MA in Jewish philosophy from Hebrew University, a PhD from Bar-Ilan University Law School. It goes on and on and on. He lives in Modine with his wife and children. Anyway, it's an incredibly impressive career that you've had, and you are always fascinating to learn from. You and I were chatting, I don't know, a month ago or so, and we were saying about how much things had actually changed in the world since the last conversation that we had, because we had a conversation before the ceasefire. We had a conversation before all the hostages were home. We're still waiting, of course, for one deceased hostage to come home, which is critically important. But the world is very different. It's better in some ways and not as much better as we would like in other kinds of ways.
But this issue has sprout up since then. I reached out to you and I said, We should really talk about this. And there's nobody better to hear about this from than you, especially now that people like Ben Gvir and others are going to try very hard to make this a really serious issue. So I guess I would ask you to think ethically and halakhically. In other words, how Jews should think about this issue of instituting the death penalty by the State of Israel for specifically terrorists, terrorists like Nuhba terrorists who come across the border, pillage, murder, rape, kidnap, do all the worst possible things a human being can do. What should we do?
Yeah, thanks so much for having me to have this conversation. It's a fascinating one, which, as you know, Ben Gvir is raised now, and it comes up, of course, because of the recent swaps and all those terrorists that we released. But it's been an issue that we've discussed for several years. I think in many ways, actually, right now, the figure that's really been pushing it politically for many years is a Avigdor Lieberman, who's currently in the opposition. But he's, I think, the actual sponsor of the bill, which made a very initial passing in the Knesset right now. I think to start off, we should separate out what we might call civil or regular penal type of criminal cases of death penalty, and we're dealing with public terror and a threat to the state. I grew up in Texas. In Texas, we had the death penalty. We, I think, have the death penalty. America is very unique in that respect in the West of having the death penalty with much controversy. Much of the controversy in part there is about the human rights and whether governments should put people to death. But the bigger controversy is the fact that we make mistakes. And DNA evidence has exonerated a lot of people sometimes before they're executed and sometimes after they're executed. That's a major, major issue. I have a lot of trouble with the death penalty in those circumstances, but that's not what we're talking about here.
And I'll just add, by the way, if we just interject, I mean, even though we're not obviously talking about the American death penalty, one other issue that people raise is that there are certain subpopulations which are who are typically sentenced to death at a much greater rate than others. If you look at Blacks versus Whites, for example, for very similar crimes, studies have shown left and right that Blacks tend to be sentenced to death more frequently than Whites, which is another moral issue that people raise in America. Nothing to do with Israel. I just wanted to fill that out really quickly.
I know, but it's important to raise that issue because one of the questions we even have in the Israeli system as well is that when you're thinking about enemies, are you going to be more inclined to do something which you wouldn't do against your own or someone else is more privileged where it might be? In the American case, it has to do with also access to proper legal defense of money, whatever it is, plus the biases you mentioned. In the Israeli case, part of the controversy of this most recent bill is that the bill is very explicit. It has to be an act of terror that's against the creation and existence of the state. Part of why they do that, wrote it that way, is that would more or less exclude what you might call Jewish terrorist. In other words, those who've had some incidents like that, unfortunately, much less often, but we have to acknowledge it. By the way, the law was written, which is problematic to some extent, or at least raised a lot of questions, it really basically apply against Arabs or other types of enemies against the state and not against Jewish terrorists.
Just right off the bat, I bet actually it is important to bring up that issue. But once again, here in the United States, and here's a little bit less controversial, but I think it's helpful to make the parallel, you do have the federal death penalty for these types of incidents. One of the critical points here, I think we should think about this for our motivation, isn't just deterrence. It's just due punishment. These people did something really horrible. You could think of the Oklahoma City bombing, the Timothy McVeigh, and the Boston Marathon, and a couple of other of those types of incidents in which the death penalty was brought up, even in the Pittsburgh shooting in the Tree of Life Synagogue, the death has been invoked there as well. Those are types of cases where in the civil realm, those issues wouldn't come up because let's say it would be a plea bargain, whatever it might be, and you wouldn't have a plea, plead guilt, you wouldn't have it. But Here, the point is to say we don't have a question of the guilt here. Maybe they pleaded, maybe they admitted, maybe not. Either way, we think that this is a heinous crime, and people should die for this crime.
That's part of the motivation here. I think that right away, though, that raises a lot of questions for Israel because, well, we have a lot of people in Israeli jails who did really heinous crimes against the State of Israel. How many of them are we executing? Just let's start. Let's think about the numbers here. All those Nuhba terrorists, it's quite a lot. Now, maybe not all of them were found to have done murders and this, that, rapes, whatever it is, but a whole lot of them. So right away, part of the question you have to ask is, are the numbers itself going to be something which is going to become problematic? It's interesting, the sages is actually bringing this up in the Talmud, where they talk about the idea that the entire idea of the death penalty became somewhat not really feasible once the number of murderers increased too much. I think the idea there in part was, can the system handle this? But also, is this really a form of deterrent when we're doing this? It becomes like everyday action. In Texas, where I grew up, we didn't think twice when on the news, you hear about a death penalty case or an execution, and it just happened a whole bunch of times every year. Then it becomes like trivial in some sense, but then what's the point? But of course, in our context, in Israeli context, nothing's going to be trivial. There's no such thing given the tension the world has on us. I think a part we should think about is like, Well, why are we doing this? What is it we're trying to accomplish I think someone like you raise the issue, and we can get into some of the different types of arguments, but right away when you raise the issue of the lapel, the Ben Gvir's lapel. It's provocative. It's meant to evoke, I think, problematically provocative. But one of the reasons why it's problematic besides, is it a desecration of the yellow label, not sensitive to the hostage families, and leaving all those serious issues aside, it also raises a question of, are you doing this because of justice or are you doing this because of revenge? In general, Danny, one of the things I'd say when I talk about military ethics or criminal legal ethics, whatever it is, is revenge is a very bad motivation.
For almost anything.
Yeah. Certainly in this realm, we have to be thinking very level-headed about why we're doing certain things. We actually have a very bad example of this in Israeli history. You mentioned Eichmann as indeed the person who got the death penalty. But in 1948, there was a man by the name of Meir Tobiansky, who was executed under a court martial by the nascent state of Israel, and then later found to be an exonerated, but he was dead. That was part of the politics of '48 and the Etzel, and the Haggana, this, that, and as you know well. That just right away should make us think and say, Okay, What are we doing this for? What is the motivation here? We need to be thinking about this in a very level-headed manner.
Let me ask you a question. Let's talk about Jewish tradition for a second and take this. You mentioned the sages, obviously, which is obviously critical because we're in a Jewish state. There's a certain irony about people like Ben Gvir who represents the most religious persona, aside from the Haredim, in the government. A very big kippah and makes a very big point of making it clear that he dresses in a certain a way. There's a way in which you could argue that the rabbinic tradition is actually opposed to the death penalty. Now, it can't come out and say no death penalty because the Torah talks about a death penalty, and the rabbis, the sages, don't really have the right, quote, unquote, to say, Well, the Torah mandates it, but we're just not going to do it because we think we're more ethical than the Torah. That's not a possibility. But what we do, and obviously, you know this better than anybody, but what they do is they impose a whole series of requirements on the actual case to make sure that we know we're getting the right guy. So there there has to be warning, and the person has to acknowledge the warning, and the person has to say, Yes, I know that I will therefore become liable for the death penalty penalty and so on and so forth, to the point that not only does the Talmud say, as you pointed out before, that they had to stop doing the death penalty because it became so, there were so many people who deserved it. But the Talmud also says that a Sanhedrin that killed one person, was it in a generation or in 70 years, wherever it was, was considered a a killing Sanhedrin, which is to say basically they stopped doing the death penalty. You could argue that there's a current irony here that the person who was most the face of the religious worldview outside the Haredi world in the coalition or in the government is the person who actually seems to be ignoring the sources that he would be encountering if instead of being in the Knesset, which is his job, I'm not taking that away from him, and he was sitting in the Yeshiva somewhere learning Masechet Sanhedrin, the tractate of Sanhedrin, he'd be coming up against all the arguments not to do the death penalty. There's an irony here. How do you begin to untangle all of that?
Well, I think the irony is really this selective use of sources. I'll explain what I mean by that. You are absolutely right. The Bible is full of death penalty. We're literally doing it, but when the rationale is both just dessert as well as deterrence. There's a strong strand in the rabbinic literature which is against it, imposes all sorts of circumstantial evidence requirements. Although even within the Talmud, there's a certain amount of pushback against that. But one of the Tana'ims says back, You guys, you're not eliminating death penalty. You're going to create a murder estate. There is already a little bit of debate of that. But what I actually find most fascinating is that medieval Jewish communities have the death penalty. This has been documented. It's been documented by an historian by the name of Simcha Assaf and others in more recently, Aron Kirshenbaum, who have shown that there have been many times when Jewish communities had a certain amount of autonomy, utilized the death penalty, particularly when they thought a member of the community was a real danger, not just because of the crime they're committing, but also a political danger.
This was where? This was in Europe or this was in the East?
No, mostly in Europe. Spain, you have cases in Spain, particularly, but you have cases in Ashkanazic countries as well.
I said at the beginning, I always learned something from you whenever I talk to you. Here's a case in point. I had no idea about this, to tell you the truth. I mean, I find it fascinating. I find it fascinating from a the law of the land is the law. There's always been, I was always under the assumption that secular Gentiles authorities didn't allow Jews to execute people so that once we were out of our own sovereign situation, it was a theoretical issue only. But you're saying, no, that's not the case.
We have a long Jewish history, and we have different types of situations with the Gentile authorities. Many times they wouldn't allow for our own penal system, but many times they would. They're like, Jews, you take care of this. Take care of your own, whatever it might be. We had reasons to do this, and particularly in order to make sure that we don't have the Gentile authorities who are hostile to us getting involved in our affairs. We sometimes had this power, and sometimes Jews executed other Jews. I mean, it's shocking in some ways, but that's sometimes what happened. Not always, but that is part of the tradition.
I'm just curious. I mean, it's a little bit dark, but I'm just curious, what was the mode of execution? The Talmud talks about four modes of execution. What did they do? Did they hang them?
They was hanging, there's execution, like guillotine. Whatever was in use at the time is what we could use.
Obviously, everybody who's listening is realizing, of course, that the people that we executed in the Middle Ages, which, again, I didn't know, and that's why it's always so fascinating to talk to you, we were obviously executing Jews. I have to guess that there's not a way in the world that the local non-Jewish Spanish authorities are going to allow Jews to capture some Christian Spaniard who done whatever to the Jews and execute that person. Here we're talking about the exact opposite. Here we're talking about the case of executing a non-Jewish person for the crime of attacking Jewish people. Again, I didn't know that, but we had the power to execute very different circumstances.
Exactly. I think that the the rabbinic and medieval precedents are complicated not only because they speak in different voices, which, of course, is common in our tradition, but they're dealing with the reality of the civil penal type of system, which has all sorts of problems with it. But here we're executing an enemy of the state. In my mind, the way we need to think about this is, okay, well, what's the reason for this? How is this beneficial for this state? Part of the The argument is a little bit, well, five seconds before we capture the guy, we're more than willing to kill him because he's a threat to us. Now that we've captured him, he's not a threat. So now the rules change. You have to think about this differently. And then the question is, what is his just desert here? In theory, it's supposed to be, let's say, life imprisonment. Now, that sometimes does happen, and there are people that certainly do die as criminals, as terrorists in prison. But because of all these lopsided prisoner swaps, we've been releasing a lot of these people, and that's where they've been pushing some of this conversation.
In my mind, actually, before we even get to the question about the death penalty, I'd be asking, Well, maybe we should be rethinking about the laws allowing for clemency in these types of prisoner swaps. I mean, this lopsided nature of it, we're going to go and start executing terrorists because we don't know how to deal with that more fundamental issue, which we've been dealing with the last 40 years, but not well. Why aren't we thinking about laws which people like Yair Lapid introduced after the Shalit deal, but never got anywhere with it, which said we're going to limit the number of terrorists that can be released in these types of deals?
Yeah. I mean, look, here I think Ben Gvir would say, and here I have to say, this is not a sentence that I say many times a week, I would agree with Ben Gvir. He would say, You know what? We could pass that law all we want. It's not going to make a difference at the end of the deal because the next time, A Gilad Shalit, God forbid, gets pulled out of his tank and gets held in Gaza five years. Parents were sitting in that little tent in front of the Prime Minister's house, which he doesn't live in right now, but it doesn't matter. They're sitting out there in this very central place on Bramban street in Jerusalem, we're not going to care what law we have. We're just not going to be able to do it. I mean, in an entirely different context. I mean, I have nothing to do with this. Part of it, and I don't want to sound elitist or giving the Jews too much of a pat on the back, but there's things that we're just not capable of doing. In other words, I was talking to a not Wilf who's also just recorded a podcast where she's starting a new political party called OZ, called strength.
When it comes to the Haradim, she has a very simple view. You don't serve, you don't get services. I said to her, Well, that means like what? A 20-year-old guy who didn't go to the army all of a sudden wakes up with a massive headache. They do a scan. They find out that he's got a brain tumor. We say, I'm sorry, you're not covered. Either you fund it personally, I don't know where you're going to get the money, or you're just going to die. She said, Yeah, that would have to be the law. I said to her, it makes perfectly good logical sense, but there's not a way in the world the Jewish state is going to do that. We're not going to do that. We're not going to let Haredi kids go hungry, as enraged as I often am about Haredim, especially when my kid is in the north or my kid is in the south. The Haredim in this very neighborhood, across the street, across Emek Refaim, at the early Yeshiva there, are just loafing around, literally loathing around during the day, not even making a pretense of being in Yeshiva. My blood does boil. I mean, my blood does boil. But for you to ask me, would I have it in me to let their kids go hungry? I mean, I think not. Again, so passing, it's a long winter way of saying we could pass Yair Lapid's law, which again makes perfectly good sense. I just don't think we have the stomach for upholding it.
You might be right. I wish that wasn't the case because then we get into a lot of other problems. Returning here to this solution of the death penalty. Okay, so why are we doing this? We said before, it's for the purposes of the state. So you have to ask, is this just dessert? Okay, you could argue this is just dessert. Now, one of the things that you often ask us, how are we going to decide Which of these terrorists get the death penalty?
Because we're not going to kill all 1,000 Nuhba terrorists.
Presumably not. Not just for diplomatic reasons. Are you going to go through the whole legal process for everyone? It's complicated. One of the immediate questions you have to ask is, how much are you really benefiting from having such a system as opposed to just saying life imprisonment, including, by the way, a question of how cozy the conditions have to be in the prison. I know there's a lot of reports about what Ben Gvir more recently did or didn't do in the past couple of years. I don't know exactly. I think that I don't have a clear picture of what types of luxuries or conditions he's changed there. But I do think that one of the things you have to ask is, is this really practical? The second really question you have to ask is, is this really going to be a deterrent? This has always been the military and intelligence services arguments against the death penalty. These are people who understand very well what these terrorists have done. They have no love for these people, but they're basically arguing that you're going to turn them into a Shahid, you're going to turn them into a martyr, you're going to make them celebrities and models and ways that are just It's going to be not helpful to us.
I mean, these are people who have a little bit of a death wish many times. Now, the counterargument to that, and I want to take this seriously, is we should not minimize how much the Palestine society cares about its prisoners. They have a Ministry dedicated to helping the prisoners. They have the Pay for Slave program where people who are in prisons get supported and money in their families and whatnot. It could be that while we might say, all these people just want to die and have a death wish, actually, they don't really want to die. They actually want to be released and go home and live their lives.
We also know, just to make your point even stronger, we know from hostages that when actually at Ben-Gvir's direction, the conditions of Nuhba terrorists in Israeli prisons were worsened, the conditions of the hostages were worsened. And the army told them, it's what's going to happen. In other words, you start putting restrictions on Palestinian terrorists in Israeli prisons, you're going to make life even more hellish and miserable for the Israeli hostages. And we know from the ones that came out alive and have talked about it that the actual guards told them, We're now doing this because we just heard that Ben Gvir said to do X, Y, and Z in the prisons, which only strengthens your argument.
Right. That's all his question. But there, I actually think that there's a lot of questions we ask about the conditions that we've given to Palestine terrorists in the past. But part of also the problem with Ben Gvir is he does little and says much. I think one of actually someone, Eitan Mor's father, Zvika Mor, Eitan Mor is a hostage. His father, who lives in Kriyat Arba, not really accused of being a left winger, said about, you know, Ben-Gvir, you do things and you don't talk about it. But just as a general aside, this is something which Israeli politicians should learn more about. Talk less, do more. Don't say, We're going to starve them. We're not going to bring any food in when you're not really going to do that. If you're going to do that, don't say you did it. You have to be thinking. But the thing about the death penalty is you can't not make that a public spectacle. It's not something which you can't really control. Here, I find the argument to be very suspect to say that this is really going to be a deterrence. Now, the new head of the Shabach, who came from outside the system, the Israeli Security Services, has reportedly, although I haven't seen him really say this, given his explanation, say he it could be helpful.
Once again, but here I ask in both directions, is this really a level-headed military strategic analysis that's driving that position? Or in both directions, are we being driven by ideology? Whether it's because of human rights factors or your vision of a criminal law system, you don't believe in a death penalty, or do you really think like, No, this really isn't going to be a deterrent? And vice versa. I'm very nervous that the motivation here by some of the players, not all, but some of the players who are supporting the death penalty here is much more about revenge and anger and just like, I want these people to be dead.
Well, it's also political populism, to be quite honest. That's the reason that you say a lot and do little is because you're actually much more focused on what people think you're going to do or you're positioning yourself in the electoral spectrum somewhere, which, by the way, we see in American politics, thank God, too. I say thank God only in the sense that we don't look worse. But there's a lot of that going on in the States, too.
And the populism here is so dangerous because you have consequences to these types of actions, which could be really, really dangerous. In terms of the conditions, well, the conditions It's going to be different? I mean, our hostages were held in horrible conditions no matter what Ben Gvir was doing to the Palestinian terrorists there. I mean, maybe a little bit worse in the days. I'm not belittling that. But that is, I think, a little bit less of a concern that I have as much as just like, Is this really going to be helpful? That's why I'm coming back to the point of this isn't a regular criminal type of case. This is about protecting the state and the broader state interest. What is the state interest here? In my mind, we have a state interest to keeping people in jail, not releasing them, as I mentioned before, and I know I'm against these lopsided swaps. But in my mind We have to be smart about how we handle these cases and not do things that are just going to cause a greater amount of celebration of Palestinian martyrdom. That's something which we can't really afford to be populist about.
Let me just ask by way of beginning to wrap up. Let's imagine we're going to have elections in sometime in 2026. I mean, that's what the law calls for, at least. They may come earlier, they may come as late as October, but barring anything radically unforeseen, we're going to have elections. Let's imagine, either Bibi wins, but he wins and makes a deal with the likes of Lieberman and others, and so he can do it without his far right flank. He can dump Smotrich, and he can dump Tali Gottlieb, and he can dump Ben Gvir, people that are giving him massive headaches these days that he would just love to be done with. But a Bibi is a Bibi restored to the Bibi of old. I don't know if that Bibi is still there, but let's just say, hypothetically, that he is. Or you get somebody like Lieberman, who has never been accused of being a left winger, who's also never been accused of being religious. He's hyper secular, hyper right. You could have Yair Lapid, I think the likelihood of that is very small. But we're a Bennett who is actually himself personally observant, whatever.
You could have a lot of different people. Somebody calls you in and says, Listen, we want you to just whisper. You're an Orthodox rabbi. You care a lot about halakhic issues. You care a lot about Jewish ethics. You've thought a lot about Israel and war and public moral and ethical dilemmas. Bottom line, is this something that we should pursue and examine and take seriously or should be, because of all the complications, just let this thing wither on the vine because there's nothing good that's going to come out of pushing it forward? What would you whisper in this future Prime Minister's ear?
Yeah, that's a great question. Here's my answer. The Jewish tradition brings into the conversation here a number of critical values, the ones that we've been talking about here, both in terms of history and in terms of our ethics and our law. You, as a Prime Minister, need to weigh these types of values, just desert and deterrence and security and dealing with the questions of revenge. You need to analyze in a very level-headed manner, what is the motivation here? I think Jewish law, you can make an argument, can support a lot of the sides here, but that's irrelevant. If you're just choosing one position and saying, I want this is based on Jewish law, you're missing the richness of the tradition. The richness of the tradition here isn't saying, The Bible says kill people, the sages say don't. No, the richness of the tradition is to say we have a number of values here. Let's analyze this based on these values and figure out what we should do, what's the most prudent thing for the state of Israel in this moment. My own read of the situation is that I don't really see advantage to this. I see a lot of risk to this. I'm very skeptical about it. But that doesn't mean you as the Prime Minister were, of course, better sight of what all the different geopolitical and diplomatic and security factors, you should make an analysis based on these values. But do me a favor and don't just grab a little quote from the Bible or the sages and say, This is the Jewish view of something. It's a lot more complex. We saw this with a lot of issues recently with the question of the prisoner swaps and many other things, and many other things. The Jewish tradition is much richer than a sound bite.
Right. I mean, with the redemption of captives, there are a lot of T-shirts walking around. I mean, people were wearing them. There's no greater mitzvah than redeeming captives. But as you point out, there are a lot of counter examples of the Meir of Rothenburg who refuse to be ransomed and so on and so forth. It's all very complicated. The conversation that you're urging us to have, of course, is the conversation that we need to restore to Israeli discourse on everything, from economics to security to education, to how we treat each other in the streets, and so on and so forth. But to hear from someone who's an expert, both in the ethical side and the halakhic side, and who comes to this in the perspective of somebody who thinks a lot about Israeli policy, but is also an Orthodox rabbi, I think, is a really interesting opportunity for us just to get a little bit of a sense of the complexity of the issue and the ways that people are thinking about it and the ways that people ought to think about it. So once again, rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody, thank you very much for taking the time. What we both know is a very, very busy, busy week for you. Wish you tremendous success with all the stuff that you're working on. Thank you for illuminating this issue for us, and I look forward to our next conversation.
Thank you so much.
