V’Chai BaHem. When the Torah gave us its set of laws it commanded us to 'Live by them' (and not to die by them).
This is the biblical command in that suspends its laws when a human life is at stake. All Torah law is then suspended except for murder, adultery (defined exclusively as sexual relations with a married woman other than one’s wife) and idol worship.
One of the most important Mitzvos in the Torah is Shabbos. Violating it by design if witnessed by two valid witnesses who give a proper warning requires Beis Din to apply the death penalty. The particular penalty is stoning, which is one of the more painful types of execution. But if a life is in danger, this very serious law is suspended and we violate Shabbos to save a life… what ever it takes to do that… we are required to do. And this is of course true of any Mitzvah in the Torah.
The question raised in recent weeks was whether Torah law is suspended in all cases where human life is at stake, or is it suspended only for fellow Jews. In his now infamous column in the New York Times, Professor Noah Feldman maintained that while there is no practical difference between saving a non Jew and a Jew, there is a moral difference. Jews he tells us are to be saved because that is what the Torah requires. It is a moral imperative. Non Jews on the other hand are only to be saved for practical reasons... because if we don’t save them, they will not save us when we need them to do so. He refers to that as something like ‘the good relations’ clause. The very strong implication is that non Jews would otherwise be left to die when it requires violating Shabbos.
As has been stated many times by many commenters in these past few weeks, this was a gross distortion of the Halacha and its genesis. This seemingly inconsistent moral standard is based on a Gemara taken entirely out of the context of the times. And no one has put that into better focus than Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. I in fact alluded to this in my very first article on the subject. Here is Rabbi Boteach’s money quote:
The Talmud was written at the time of the vicious Roman occupation of the Holy Land. The unbearable cruelty of the Romans led to two Jewish rebellions that were quashed so mercilessly by Rome’s mighty legions that millions of Jews were slaughtered in cold blood. Indeed, the utter ruthlessness of the Romans is something clearly evident to any non-Jew through the horrible and gruesome death by crucifixion they inflicted upon an innocent Jesus and approximately 250,000 other Jews.
The Talmud's discussion, therefore, centered on whether brutal, gentile oppressors like Roman centurions, who were the principal non-Jews with whom the Jews had contact at the time, ought to be saved on the Sabbath. It is in the context of the fate of deadly, sworn enemies of the Jewish people that the Talmud's debate must be considered.
This was followed by:
Rabbi Menahem Genack, one of American Orthodoxy's leading lights, who recently shared with me something very similar said by the great talmudic exegete Rabbi Menahem Meiri (1249-1310): that the Talmud's reference is to a pagan defiler of the faith.
This quite clearly shows the importance of temporal context. Are the mortal enemies of the Jewish people to be given moral equivalence to the Jewish people themselves? Certainly the view that they should not be considered our moral equivalents should be taken in the context of those times. And in spite of the typical idolatrous non Jew of the times, Jews were still commanded to violate Shabbos to save his life in any case. In practice there was no difference between Jew and non Jew even in those brutal times.
All this relates to the issue of what our attitude toward non Jews in general should be. There are some among us who look down at all of humanity that are not Jewish. And they cite numerous quotes from all kinds of sources to prove their point. But as can be seen here, their 'proofs' are anything but that. They are taken out of the context of the situations and of the times.
As Rabbi Boteach points out and as I have repeatedly said, the Torah considers all of mankind to be created in the image of God. And they are to be treated that way, with love and respect. Some people among us will point to supposed loopholes in Torah law that makes them think they can treat a non Jew with less honesty or respect than he can a Jew.
But this is not what the Torah intends nor what our sages demanded. It is far more important to be a light unto the nations than it is to gain an unfair advantage through a perceived loophole in Torah law. It is far more precious in the eyes of God for Jews to act in ways that will gain praise from the nations to Him and His people than it is to gain advantages for oneself. And only by treating our fellow man as our equals in all areas of life can we accomplish this.
