TJS S4 Interlude: Vengeance, an conversation with Thane Rosenbaum

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Revenge is an act of passion, says author Samuel Johnson. Vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged. Crimes are avenged. Well, I'd like to keep as far as I can from both crime and injury. And though I believe that vengeance belongs to the Lord, I can also feel the pull of its power. Because I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Season 4 Interlude The Power of Vengeance Now, before we dive into our topic today I want to make one little addendum to my last podcast and say a thank you The addendum is this Last podcast I told everybody heading here into the month of Adar not only are we increasing our joy we're also increasing what we do joyfully and the piece I forgot to mention in my last episode was that one of the best ways we can do more with joy is by giving gifts.

And especially if you feel that you might not have gifts to give, you're either strapped for cash or all tapped out for emotional energy or simply too busy. That's the time when digging deep and doing a little bit more can bring real joy to others. I want to thank a listener. I'm not going to put her on the spot. But who sent me a fantastic gift this past Rosh Chodesh Adar from Prohibition Pickles, My dear friend Chaim Davids, who's leading the Ashkenazi soul food revival, sent some amazing kiddish treats, herring, relish, pickles. If you're interested, go to Prohibition Pickles. You don't even have to send the gift to me. Send it to someone else, although I will be happy to eat it in your honor. And I want to thank that fantastic woman, the listener out there, who made that happen.

Now, if you want to do that, by the way, you can also send me an email, robmikefoyer, gmail.com, or a message at Facebook. You can always be in touch if you want to be generous. Meanwhile, back to revenge. When I think of revenge, I personally think of Nazis. It's almost inevitable. It's because of my upbringing and because of the generation in which we live. And that brings to mind sort of catastrophic, almost divine-scale vengeance. Like Inglourious Bastards style, if you've ever seen it. I also happen to think of En Modantes and the ice-cold appeal of vengeance at its most precise, applied ruthlessly and with unlimited power. If you've never read The Count of Monte Cristo, not only are you missing out on a literary masterpiece, but you don't really know what vengeance is about.

And I debate the moral, ethical question of applied vengeance within society all the time. This question of the access from the just court to the vigilante can be explored really from now until midnight. And when I do, I still come down with my heart on both sides of this supposed divide. I also, when I think of vengeance and vigilantes, think of comment books. And here's a place to give a little shout out to another listener, Michael Wolfe, who sent me a really beautiful email after my episode on the fairy A. And he called me out on the importance of comic books after I was focused on fairy tales. And so rightly observed that fairy stories, only one expression of the stories we're inspired to tell.

When we notice that we're living on the vast and intricate edge of an incredible universe. And my comic book heroes were all vigilantes in one way or another. They were pursuing right even beyond the bounds of the legal. And they served as an important role in my moral universe. And I know that I was highly unique in this for an American kid growing up in the 70s and 80s. And I also know that these comic book heroes, these vigilantes who pursued justice outside the bounds of the law, continue to serve at least a cathartic purpose through the comic book hero movies for me and for society even now. There's a reason why the Avengers are called such and why questions of justice, power, and violence lay at the heart of their breakup, if you've watched the series.

If not, hamevin, yavin, as they said. When I think of spiritual, sorry, when I think of vengeance, my spiritual practice also comes up because every morning I find myself saying the following line, El nekomot Adonai, el nekomot hofia O God of vengeance, God of retribution, appear! And it says, rise up, judge the earth give the arrogant their desserts. And then that passion how long will the wicked O Lord, how long will the wicked rejoice? Well these are great lines from the 84th Psalm. And they happen to fit into part of the morning practice of the traditional liturgy. And the Holy Ari, the mystic of Sfat from the 16th century, says that when we say this line, we're gathering the sparks from the world of Asia, if you're familiar with his mythic mysticism.

Every shard of holy light that's been trapped since the days in which the Asara Horge Malchut, the ten martyrs who were killed by Rome in the three Roman Jewish wars in the first and first half of the second century of the Common Era, were gathering up every shard of holy light that's been trapped since their days until the Mashiach. Let it be soon, let it be now. Meaning that it was our crushing and dispersion by Rome who made us who we are right now, cast in every corner amongst the nations until the Mashiach comes. And when God takes final vengeance on this world of conquest, which was built really by Rome and on the shards of those who dismantled it, and truly sets us free, then that work will be done.

God's vengeance will really set the whole world free. And some add to this that we should be thinking of the 600, sorry, the 6 million holy martyrs of the Shoah. Those souls who demand even now a cleansing vengeance of the world that was built on their ashes. These are two very important points for me that perhaps will come up in our further discussion. They hold a certain standard of the expectation which vengeance holds for us. If we look to the Torah, you can find all kinds of messages. Of course, most people will cite the famous Lex Talionis, right? Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. this idea that justice must be retributive. There must be retribution. There has to be some sort of cleansing of a debt.

They might also mention the very famous don't take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen. Love your fellow as yourself. The prohibition against vengeance is quite present within the Torah even as the demand that an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth be met. And you might also be familiar with a statement of our sages, which I think helps to explain the tension between these two. They say that a sage who doesn't take vengeance and hold grudges like a snake isn't actually a sage. Now what could they possibly mean? I'll tell you this, is that a sage never takes vengeance or holds a grudge because of their own honor. And this idea of honor, as we'll see in our further discussion, is intrinsically bound up with the place in which justice and vengeance really begin to part.

That justice doesn't really recognize honor. Justice is about eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, let's redistribute what has been lost. but the question of honor is really tied up with what it is you represent beyond your simple bundle of utility and life and a tamim hacham, a sage, represents the Torah which is why a sage who doesn't take vengeance when his honor is impinged isn't really a sage because he's not taking vengeance for himself but rather for the honor of the Torah which they represent and that demands the establishment of a clarity within the moral universe. See, a sage doesn't just represent knowledge. They hold up a standard of behavior and a moral framework. And if they're not willing to defend that moral framework, to cleanse its honor when besmirched, then they don't really represent it in the world.

All right, last but certainly not least before we shift gears into the interview, Purim is coming. I always think of Purim when I think of vengeance or perhaps vengeance when I think of Purim. And not just Purim, but most specifically, Shabbat Zahor, the Sabbath of remembering is just around the corner. This is the time of the year in which we make a formal fulfillment of the command to remember to wipe out Amalek. Now just think of it. Just because these people had the spiritual chutzpah to attack Am Yisrael at the heights of our divine glory as we're coming out from the Red Sea ten plagues, pillar of fire and smoke smashing the 600 chariots of Pharaoh there between the sides of the sea And Amalek decides to just leap on us because they don't care.

As our sages say, they cooled down the divine mission. They cast a little bit of cold water on the fiery, godly face that Amalek was showing to the world. And because of that, God declares a blood feud with them through the end of time. Yad al-kesiyad, my hand upon the throne of God, that God will have war with Amalek down through the generations. now what does this have to do with Purim? well if you know the story well then you know that the Purim represents the last recorded round of the battle between Israel and Amalek because Haman is the descendant of Amalek and when at the end of the story Esther and Mordecai hang Haman and his 10 sons from gallows in public and across the empire wipe out more than 75,000 of their enemies you have to take to heart that this is more than just self-defense, that there's an element of clenching vengeance which is taking place here, which is what makes that ending so morally problematic to so many of our more enlightened brothers and sisters today.

More on that when we discuss the Megillah at a different time. But for now, I'll just close with this. How did we get here to this discussion of vengeance? Well, don't forget, the last linear episode I did was on the Munich Massacre when 11 Israeli athletes were murdered by Black September terrorists in the Munich Olympics of 1972. And at the end of that episode, I spoke about this wrath of God operation, ordered by Prime Minister Golda Meir. This determination that the Israeli government took as a political body to not just prevent, but to hunt down and kill in an act of clear vengeance, or call it justice, we'll talk about that soon, an act of revenge to hunt down and kill everyone involved in the Munich massacre.

I mean, you can understand how the kidnapping and brutal murder of 11 citizens in the most public foreign imaginable created a debt of blood and honor. The question is, is it the role of governments to cleanse that debt? And in order to discuss both that specifically and the broader role that vengeance, revenge, call it what you will, plays within our social consciousness, I think there's a need to speak it over with an expert. If such a thing as an expert on the question of vengeance can possibly be found. So I'm here with Thayne Rosenbaum, American novelist, essayist, distinguished professor. He's the director of the Forum on Life, Culture, and Society hosted by Truro College, legal analyst for CBS News Radio, and author, most importantly for the present discussion, of a book called Payback, The Case for Revenge.

Hi, Finn. How are you doing? How are you, Michael? Enjoy hearing your voice, and let's have fun here. I'm really excited. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me, especially about what for many people is such an edgy topic, revenge, or vengeance, as you may want to distinguish it. And before we get into the details of the book, which I did read, by the way, I really enjoyed it, I highly recommend people take a look at Payback, The Case for Revenge, if they're interested in the sort of moral and social questions behind the role that revenge plays in our society. But before we get into the kitchens of the book, I want to ask you a personal question, which is how did it come about that you decided to engage something like The Case for Revenge?

Where did that come from when there are so many things to think about? That's such a good question. You're forcing me to go back a number of years now. I had written an earlier book. I have been a longtime law professor, and I wrote an earlier nonfiction book, The Myth of Moral Justice, Why Our Legal System Fails to Do What's Right. And I thought about, you know, what that book was really about. Right. And it really was about how people feel unsatisfied when they go through the legal system. And, you know, even Kafka in his Before the Law Parable, which appears in the trial, speaks to this idea of the kind of, you know, the whole point of being Kafka as concept is that it would it would make no sense.

Right. And that there would no be real feeling of moral clarity and closure. And so really, that book was really a moral indictment of the Western legal system. and then so I thought well what would you know since one of the things I said about that that legal systems fail to provide repair right which is you know of course in America everyone thinks that to could or to kill no long and that's not what I was thinking I was just saying that that wouldn't be great if legal systems provided moral justice as well as legal justice and so that the outcome would make sense to the moral universe as well as it would make sense to lawyers. It seems to be going out on a limb for a law professor. You must have gotten some fairly strong responses from that stance.

Yes, mostly negative. I spoke all over the country. I think the New York Times reviewed the book three different times because it really did strike you know, a lot of nerves. Yes, law professors, lawyers, judges were very upset by this book, because it was really a moral indictment of what happens when you, again, as Kafka would say, come before the law. And so then I thought, well, if this is really about an appeal, a cry for repair, for what I would call restorative justice, as opposed to purely retributive justice, Right. So the idea would be, how do we restore moral balance to relationships? Right. It's one thing to punish. But could we do so? Can we go more than punish? Can we make victims feel better?

And then I really thought, well, then how have we done this even before there were legal systems? And that took me to revenge because I realized that revenge has a bad rap. Right. Everyone thinks of the word as something they would never accept that they they're prone to. right I you know I not a vengeful person is what a person would say sure you know we say in the book I talk a lot about the way in which people back out of the statement by saying oh no no no no I not a vengeful person is what a person would say Sure You know we say in the book I talk a lot about the way in which people back out of the statement by saying oh no no no no no I not interested in revenge I'm only interested in justice.

And people say this all the time. So the book, as you remember, has many anecdotes of people backing away and say, oh, no, no, no, it's not that I'm really interested in justice. But I would say that the grand thesis of the book is that justice and revenge are actually the same thing. and we should stop backing away from vengeance, we should say that there's no justice unless victims feel avenged. Yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry. This was the piece that really struck me because, I mean, you set up a paradigm. It's true. I received your message that in the end of the day, on some level, justice and vengeance are the same. But one of the distinctions that I felt that you articulated so well was between the sort of rational, cold, blind stance of the legal system in pursuit of justice, and the emotional need that victims, and even society at large, and we'll talk about also the moral needs, but the emotional needs in particular, to feel satisfied that justice has been done.

And I want to ask you, because I think that there are many challenges that our society faces in the application of justice, and as you note in the book, many guilty people go free, And even when they're punished, there's still what you call a moral debt, which, like I said, I'm going to come back to. But I'm curious what you think it would look like to pursue vengeance within society in a healthy and productive manner. Because, as you said, many people shy away because they have this image of sort of like violence run amok when you talk about vengeance. But what does what does vengeance really look like when it functions in society in a healthy and productive manner? the key thing and this is this comes up a lot in in movies by the way revenge movies as you know the book figure in greatly into the thesis because you know on the one hand we're told that vengeance is a terrible thing and we should be embarrassed and it's a it's it's based on you know barbarism and a primitive society but at the same time no one walks out of a revenge movie early and saying, this is disgusting.

People only, you know, they cannot leave until they know that the wrongdoer receives what's deserved. And so profound sense of satisfaction you speak about. Right. And again, remember, satisfaction is an interesting word, right? Because it's not gluttony. It shows you the word satisfied to be satisfied, say, when you're at a dinner table, means I've had enough, right? I don't need more than enough. And that's what an eye for an eye means. People think it means bloodthirstiness, right? Barbarism. But no, actually it means satisfaction. It means that I take exactly enough for me to be satisfied, not more, because if I'm disproportionate, I'm only going to invite a retaliatory strike of revenge, right? That's what blood feuds do.

They never end. It's just the recycling of revenge. By the way, living in Israel, that field must feel very tangible to you. Yeah, well, I'll tell you, I did a series of episodes on the war of attrition. I don't know if you're familiar with it from 1970. And one of the theses that I put forward was that Israel deeply misunderstood the sort of blood honor culture of the Arab world and didn't appreciate that our stance of retaliatory attacks, which were always aimed to be as destructive as possible in order to deter, were actually constantly creating new debts of blood and honor, which the Egyptians felt honored bound to Israel. race. And then that sort of cycle of blood feud, as you called it, really was almost endless.

Yes. I mean, in fact, you know, permitted societies would have predicted exactly what would happen to Israelis, right? They would have said, you do understand what's going to happen. What's actually interesting about that is in the book of Genesis, right? Jacob, the rape of Jacob's daughter. Because that happens, remember, the brothers go too far, right? They wipe out an entire tribe, right? In a city, right? They just literally wipe them out. And if I remember correctly, Joseph, Jacob has this great response when he comes back. I think the first line is, look what you've done to me, right? You know, right? Look what you've done to me as if he knows this now cannot end this you've gone way too far i think i think one of the brothers then says what is our sister nothing but a whore or something like that right well what's beautiful in his response when jacob says he says basically you've muddied the waters yeah right the moral clarity is gone and the brothers respond okay but should they treat our sister like a whore and he has he has nothing to answer right right right but it does introduce the idea of you know measure for measure, getting it right, and that if one exceeds the proportion, it is disproportionate, and you're right, in honor societies.

Look, you know, Aristotle spoke about this too, right? That the moral worth of human beings, the moral character is very much defined by whether or not a person is willing to let others take advantage of them, right? You know, to be made to feel low and to accept that feeling of lowness and not to even the score, right, to settle the debt, redeem the debt, right? What does that say about one's moral character that one is willing to remain in that inferior position? And so if you think of it in that way, you can see how these societies say, look, we are not, you know, and by the way, this is one of the great messages, even in the movie The Godfather, the opening scene is so interesting because the godfather says to the undertaker, he says, I cannot kill the people that you raped your daughter because your daughter is still alive.

Remember, the undertaker comes to ask a favor of the godfather. Right. On the wedding day, right? Yeah. When he can't refuse, right? Right. He can't refuse a favor on the day the godfather's daughter is getting married. And yet the godfather, who is a professional killer, right, is disciplining the undertaker. It's so powerful, right? Both of them are, they're both in the death business, right, in different capacities. Different ends of the business. Exactly. Different ends. Brilliant. Well said, Michael. Different ends. And the godfather is lecturing. He says, this is something I cannot do. And you would say, well, why does a professional killer even care? you know why does he even think that he has to explain this to the whence the sudden moral qualms from someone who kills for a living yes why why is he all of a sudden the righteous and the answer is no because he really is in the death business and remember comes up a lot in the godfather it's not personal it's business right he says this comes up a lot so it's the same idea that i can't this is a business and in a business i have to recognize what what's allowable and what's not allowable.

But I also recognize, the Godfather says, that it is morally, and he doesn't say it this way, but it's essentially what he's saying. It must be morally and emotionally unbearable for you to know that your daughter was gang raped, and that they, remember that I love this, this speaks to a lot of Talmudic wisdom, and that when the boys left the courtroom, they snickered and laughed at you. I just love that. The Godfather knows that the story that the undertaker just said, that when they left, they laughed and smiled at me as if we got away with murder. We got away with this crime. And he says that, he says that I will not allow to happen either. Right. He said to the undertaker, don't worry, I'll take care of it.

I'll wipe the smile off their face. I'm not going to kill them. that's right, I'm not going to kill them, they're going to absolutely receive what they deserve. And I just love that scene. It reminds me again of the story from Jacob and Dina. And it gives you a sense of a kind of moral universe, a moral clarity, of basic notions of fundamental fairness that our species simply cannot tolerate to watch the wrongdoer, a person who is blameworthy, get away with it. And that's the power of revenge films and it's the power of these biblical stories because obviously we know this now from neuroscience and evolutionary biology that our brains are hardwired for fairness. Oh, I want to come to that, the biological evolutionary argument you make, which I think is powerful and potentially problematic.

But first, I want to pick up that thread of the mentioned by Aristotle and this idea that the moral worth, so to speak, of a human being can be to some degree measured by their sort of almost intolerance, their unwillingness to accept a certain degree of sort of being lowered. And I want to compare it. There's a very powerful biblical passage, which has always been resonant for me, which you also quoted in the book it's from the 9th chapter of Genesis it's the end of the sort of story of Noach and it says that whoever sheds the blood of man by man his blood shall be shed which is basically another version of the eye for eye but here it adds because in God's image God made man meaning there is as you were alluding to in Aristotle's statement something essential about the divine within the human being, which is bound up with our intolerance for certain types of injustice and the demand that the recompense for spilling blood is blood being spilled.

Or as you said in the book, which is a piece that I really just was blown away by this statement about the role vengeance plays in maintaining the boundaries of a moral universe. He said, revenge creates order out of chaos by sending a message as to how one is expected to behave in a civilized society. Now, what I'm wondering is beyond, as you mentioned, the role that plays in art and beyond this sort of tension with the legal system. Right now in the Jewish calendar, we're coming up on a very interesting time of year. I don't know how connected you are to the Purim holiday that's coming up in a couple of weeks. But even before Purim in two weeks, this coming Shabbat, we have a very special Torah reading, which is this is known as Shabbat Zachor, a Sabbath of remembering.

And in particular, we're remembering the commandment to wipe out Amalek. Amalek, this sort of like anti-Israel, opposite, you know, almost the bizarro universe, if you will. Right. And it's an incredibly bloodthirsty holiday in certain respects. I mean, you're talking about a command to wipe out man, woman, child and even the cattle that they owned. You know, and as you say, revenge is as much about memory as it is about just desserts. So I wonder what you think in light of the the moral universe, in light of the role in catharsis and art. What do you think of the bloodthirsty side of this holiday where we celebrate, you know, killing Haman, hanging he and his 10 sons on a tree and 75,000 accomplices?

Why do you think that this holiday holds to power in the element of vengeance that it expresses? That holiday in this way, it reminds me of things that I've written about the golem story. Yeah, how so? Well, if you remember Rabbi Lowe in medieval Prague, he ultimately comes up with the ultimate Jewish fighting machine. And the purpose is, again, very much like the other thing that you just said, is that it sends a very, very strong message to enemies of the Jewish people. Again, this is the reciprocity that you will receive. The message must be sent in order for us to live our lives that you have to understand the boundaries of what we will tolerate. And that's what this, you know, this is not just a public acknowledgement of our loss and the memorialization of our loss.

But it's also the only way that we can assure that we will be able to live in an ordered society. right that we can live in peace and in order to sort of to live in peace one must send the message that all attacks will be reciprocated right and in some cases when it's you know again disproportionate its intent is to send the message again it it often backfires right because that's the whole point for measure for measure but i think that you know in the end you know the the whole concept of the lex talionis, the law of retaliation, was it served mankind, humankind, as the only legal system that existed, right? The only thing that existed was the recognition that retaliation would be forthcoming, and that you were forced to think about how bad it would be.

You know, that was the whole idea of tit for tat, right? It's the acceptance of the golden rule, do unto others as you will. Tip for Tapses, if you continue to cooperate with us, we will cooperate in return, and then you will cooperate. But if you defect, if instead of cooperating, you attack, we will attack in return. Now, our first attack will determine whether or not there will be a recycling of attacks, right? The blood view. And so that's why, as I say in the book, it's not about bloodthirstiness. You know, revenge is the work of accountants. It's not the revenge of barbarians. Oh, that's exactly why I'm asking about the Purim story, because I find it strange. In fact, I encounter a lot with my more progressive students a deep discomfort.

I mean, you read the end of the Purim McGill, the story of Esther, and it's a slaughter. It's a slaughter, not just a slaughter, but it's a rejoice. We are rejoicing. I mean, the famous line, the Jews ruled over their enemies. Something which, of course, for a couple thousand years was nothing more than, I almost think of this as a ritualized revenge fantasy. And yet, some people are very deeply uncomfortable with it today. And I find amongst some of my more conservative religious friends, particularly here in the land of Israel, there's almost a thirst for this type of moral clarity. it just makes it a crazy holiday in some ways yeah well that was why i mentioned the golem because the golem end very differently that tale right because there you have the rabbinic wisdom of the rabbi saying i will disable the golem but the message has been sent that i can't even control the golem if he is sent off into the world to to redeem the debt that's owed to jews against, you know, vicious murdering anti-Semites, right?

At that point, if I unleash the golem, all hell will break loose. So I have now sent the message of what will the power that is held in reserve Right You know it funny I don know how old you are You sound much younger than me, but you know, 47. Oh, you are very younger than me. You know, I don't know. I don't know how people remember Abba Iban in Israel nowadays. But he was significant in my era as a boy. I knew he was. And I was a bookish boy. So a bookish Israeli who who had an English accent and who graduated from Cambridge was very interesting and fantastically eloquent. Yeah, very fantastically eloquent. And also he was, as we remember him, he was he was an outlier among Israeli public officials. True.

Because, you know, he wasn't the thought of as a soldier. He wasn't a warrior. He was basically an intellectual cosmopolitan even. Yeah, sure. Very much so. But I remember hearing him in New York years ago, and he said something that made me think of the golem. He said he was referring to why it was important to really consider returning to West Bank and Gaza. And he said, essentially, he didn't invoke the golem, but it made me think he was thinking of Rabbi Lowe, which is they know what we can do. They know we can take it back. They know we we didn't. So this was probably 1989. I think I was a Wall Street lawyer in those days. And I walked over to a synagogue. I remember it was near my law firm and I had heard him many times before.

But that struck with me. He said if I'll never forget, he said if they if they throw one more rock, that was the word. He didn't know anything about, you know, at that time we had not had rockets from Hamas yet. Right. This was still early. But so he used the more first intifada image. Sure. If they throw one more rock. And I just remember thinking this is the rabbi low idea, right, that they know what we can do. We have the golem. So I want to run with that. I want to run with that. Because that's exactly to my next question. because that idea they know what we're going to do or we can do, I wonder. Because I hear that as an expression of what you said, like the revenge basically creates boundaries for our moral universe, lets people know the consequences of potential action by having demonstrated them.

But I'm wondering in particular, we were speaking right before the show about the Munich massacre in 1972, which was the immediate sort of cause for me reaching out to you to discuss this. And you said that you remembered even in your own lifetime as a boy the reaction of American Jewry. I'm just wondering, here we have, you know, it's famous in art. It's famous in investigated journalism. There's a mix of hard fact, fantasy, etc., that tells this tale about Israel from 1972 to 1992, hunting down and killing every single one of the terrorists that they could get their hands on that were involved from Black September in that operation. At least one famous botched failure where they killed an innocent man in Norway, I'm sure you...

The waiter, right? The waiter, exactly. So what I'm wondering is that, did the moral universe really come into line there? I mean, the truth of the matter is that terrorism certainly didn't stop, even though they knew what we were capable of doing. Yeah, go ahead. No, no, no, go ahead, Mike. No, I'm really just wondering, do you think that it's an aspiration that vengeance bring the moral universe into being. But the reality is, is that not everybody plays on the same moral playing field. But, you know, I'm very Kantian when it comes to this. I discussed, you know, Kant in the book, because Kant, for him, revenge was a moral imperative. It was not even a question. In fact, there's that really great anecdote that Kant says, that if the world had come to an end, and everyone, there was only two people left, say, on an island, and one of whom was an unpunished murderer.

And the world was now coming to an end, and those were the last two people. The murderer must be punished and killed before the world comes to an end, because it would be a moral stain on us to have allowed someone to go unpunished. Now, the anecdote says, well, yeah, but the world's coming to an end. What difference does it make? Right, and Kant says, oh, it makes all the difference in the world, because it sends a message of what you were willing to allow morally, that you allowed yourself to live in an unjust, immoral society where you allowed someone to get away with murder. Even though he was going to be killed anyway, the world was coming to an end, but he needed to be punished. He couldn't simply just be wiped out with the rest of the world.

The message of the moral clarity was still ultimately essential, obligatory, imperative. So he would say that this is just a moral duty that you don't even sweat it, right? So like when someone says, well, we don't believe in capital punishment because that makes us in the same position as the murderer. Kant would laugh out loud. He would say, what a moron to say such a thing. What do you mean? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We are in a very different position. The murderer, to him, it was a world of desert. Literally, the word he used the word desert. What is desert? What is desert? It is not about it is not about the person who has to undertake the methods of how one. The act of vengeance. The act of vengeance, how one redeems the dead.

That's not that person has a moral duty to do it. We don't judge him. He's not doing anything other than what the murderer insisted on being done to him. Right. That this was a moral obligation. And so, you know, we should be able to have at least the moral distance, the moral clarity that the society that undertakes the punishment is not clearly in the position of a murder. So anyway, you know, the idea of, well, what happens in the hunting down of Arab terrorists for Black September and saying, well, it only actually inspired further acts of terrorism. if one is contient about this right they're saying it but doesn't matter i'm not worried about the retaliation right now what i know the only thing i know for sure is that each one of them must die that's it and and i understand there are going to be consequences for this and one could later look upon this and take a tabulation a score did we really actually even the score and you could make the argument maybe we didn't actually we you know we never out in the end, we never really even the score because the recycling just continued on.

But in a Kantian perspective, in a Kantian universe, it would say, yeah, but that doesn't matter. You know, which is why Kant also would say, it doesn't matter that when the brain is hardwired to think and poets, of course, have written that revenge is sweet. But we know that also revenge leaves a bitter aftertaste. In other words, after it's undertaken, it's not true, even in art, by the way, that the Avenger is happy. No, almost never. Yeah. But Kant would say, it doesn't matter. It's not about happiness. It's what's required. This must happen regardless of how one feels afterward. There's that wonderful scene in the comedy, I don't know how well known it is in Israel, the princess bride oh i know it sure well so there's that great line when ingo montoya all has this a line he sets up from the very beginning that he says the there's a six-fingered man who killed his father so he rehearses the line he says my name is mingo ingo montoya uh you killed my father prepare to die right he rehearses this and so finally when he killed the six on six-fingered man he says to his friend he says you know i've spent my entire life in the revenge business waiting to kill the six million men.

And now that I've killed the six-fingered man, I have no idea what to do with myself, right? Which is a good line, is that this is sort of what I've set myself up to do. But it still doesn't matter. The ambivalence doesn't matter. The directionless doesn't matter. Only that matters is the moral requirement. Right, and that's what you really mean by moral imperative, that aside from any utilitarian outcome or equations, that there is simply an act which is required. Yeah. You know, and I don't know if I've mentioned this in the book, but I remembered writing an op-ed when Steven Spielberg came out with the movie Munich. Great. I wanted to ask you about that. Perfect. So I wrote an op-ed. I can't remember. It was the New York Times or something.

I can't remember. It was one of the New York papers. And I remembered I wrote it because I read that Israelis and Palestinians were both upset by the movie. That's what I read. And I thought, wow, that's fascinating. And the reason apparently Israelis were upset because it didn't make them, first of all, it made them seem that they just didn't, like at one point, I think Avner drops his gun instead of when he tries to kill the first terrorist. And the Israelis said, no, no, you know, Mossad, our people are not incompetent in this. Nobody drops their gun. But when we do this, we do this really elegantly. And we're fascinated. Yeah, that's the pride there. Yeah. Do not make it seem like we don't know what the hell we're doing when it comes to this.

We really that's the first thing. And the second thing was that they Israelis apparently didn't like that when the the team, the the the assassination team. Yeah. The Avengers. The Avengers. Yeah, sure. When the Avengers after each of their assassinations, apparently in the movie, they're shown having an elegant dinner that Avner makes for them. They eat well. But the purpose is they're eating well, but their vengeance is not satisfied because they all they all argue among themselves whether they did the right thing and whether they should continue for the next assignment. So apparently Israelis were upset and saying, oh, no, no, no, no. There was no ambivalence for us. We don't look upon this. This is Steven Spielberg pretending that we didn't know what we were doing and why we do.

We know exactly why we're doing it. And this is what should be done. And apparently the the Palestinians were upset because they didn't think that the movie gave explained why they do what they do. Right. So I wrote an op ed and I said, you know, the Israelis really have this wrong because this is quite a compliment to the Israelis. if the movie, because what it really says is that they don't ever stop. They do what must be done, but they haven't lost their humanity so that every night they will debate whether this is justified and whether this ultimately makes sense. And they raise the questions of their own ambivalence, and then they wake up the next day and they go after the next one. And that the Palestinians should be upset for some other reason, which is they're shown as never thinking about that.

Like they're shown as not human. They're only interested in the world must know why we do what we do. We have no ambivalence about killing Jews. Morally unidimensional. Exactly. And I said that in many ways, the Palestinians should be upset for a different reason. and the Israelis probably should be proud because it says that they know why they do it, but that doesn't mean that they don't question it. It's like the book of Job, right? It's what Jews do for a living. They're going to question. I can imagine that that was not an op-ed that won you a lot of friends. No, it did not. It absolutely did not. I have another couple of questions here and I'm sensitive to the time. So you make a lot in the book about the tension between the rational logic, which is built into the legal, almost mechanical justice system, and the emotional experience, which is required for vengeance, which is desired by victims.

And I think it's a very important point you make that emotions are often sort of transposed within the language as being sort of wild and undisciplined. As you said, people, oh, I'm not a vengeful person. I just want justice. It's a big part of Western discourse. But I think you make a very important assertion that I want my listeners to hear your thoughts on, which is that you say that emotions are actually a guide to moral insight. This language of a moral universe, to me, was very precious to read in a book that's published recently. Because when you talk about Steven Spielberg, one of the things I've heard people criticize him for is the moral equivalency he makes also between the assassins and the terrorists.

And in that sense, it's almost a postmodern book, which is there are no heroes or villains. There's just power and who holds the right end of the gun in a given moment. But what I'm curious is that how you think today in our society, we can make justice more emotionally and therefore more morally correct? Are there practical steps, do you think, that could be taken? Well, you know, Tony, I never really answered your first question, and this is how I can, because this is really another way of looking at your first question, which was that, you know, how can it be done in a way that actually does solve both the justice and vengeance pieces, elements of, you know, what happens to victims? And one response is that, you know, the legal system in its, you know, overly technical legalistic dimensions, right, It discounts emotion, right, in all instances.

Yes, actively so. Right, actively so. And in fact, we talk about debts owed to society, not debts owed to victims, right? We refer to this is why we punish, because someone needs to pay back the debt owed to society. But we really should be speaking about the double debt, a debt that's owed to the breaking of our laws as a society and the debts that are owed to victims. And truly saying to them, look, we are not going to let you undertake your own act of private vengeance, self-help, but tell us what we can do. Right. What would and in many cases, so much of it is not just that the victim is the event, the wrongdoer is punished, but the victim has a day in court, a real day, a meaningful day where he or she gets to publicly proclaim their loss.

and to actually speak their pain. You know, this is the one issue that the restorative justice principles that come out of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions of South Africa, right? Which is to say, I think, I believe that Truth and Reconciliation Commissions are morally repugnant precisely because they grant amnesty, right? Right, there's no punishment. They're premised on an absence of punishment. That's right. But they get the first part right. What the argument they make is that we don't get the catharsis unless we grant amnesty, because we'll never know the truth. Right. The wrongdoers will never tell us unless they feel that they won't be punished. Exactly. Unless they know if we tell them, if we tell them the more truth you give us, the less punishment you receive.

They won't shut up. They'll tell us everything they thought of. They think they they will show every evil that they ever had because they be afraid that later it come back that we think you know you left something out We have to punish you So the idea was that this would be a true bloodletting of wrong by granting amnesty If truth matters more than punishment, truth and to be able to reconcile oneself by knowing that the stories were told and a record was taken and a public proclamation was made of this is what happened to me. This is what happened to me. Right. And that is essentially what the Avenger is asking for. You know, oftentimes the Avenger, especially in art, isn't good at the job at first.

They don't want it. Right. You know, they want to be they want to be left alone. You know, they don't know Kav Maga. You know, they don't know Israeli martial arts. They don't you know, they don't know how to fight necessarily. All the great revenge films have this what it was with the ambivalent Avenger. And then they go about doing it because, again, it becomes the moral imperative. But it must be done. Right. It must be done. It would be morally intolerable for it not to be done. But there are ways, I think, to satisfy both, which is to say punishment will happen according to the social contract and the rule of law. But it'll be done with a recognition that it's also being done to assuage, to satisfy the need, the emotional obligation of the emotional need to express the loss, right, to acknowledge the loss and the tie between the emotional elements of revenge and the moral universe.

universe, right? That only if the victim feels avenge, is there any righting of the wrong, right? Is there any restoring balance to the moral universe? So in a sense, what I hear you saying is that the courts could serve not only as the mechanism of justice, but also as a platform, the public square for the emotional satisfaction and therefore moral clarity that comes with giving the the victim voice and place in in in almost that narrative of punishment at retribution and revenge yeah right and then what well said yeah actually i want to pivot real quick before we close yeah we want to ask something great i just want to yeah i remember receiving a letter from a federal judge here in the united states who read the book and he said i was on a plane he said i was reading your book and it made me think that I had just made a mistake.

And he told me a story about how he had to dismiss a case. And he realized under the law, he had to dismiss the case, but he realized what he should have done is before dismissing the case, let the victims get into the box, into the witness box and tell the story and take a public record of what happened. Let them tell. And he said, I could have easily done that given the person 20 minutes. And just, and I realized I had never, it never occurred to me that that would have been a way for me to do something. Under the law, I had to dismiss the case. But what had happened was so horrific. It deserved to be heard. And it would be easy for me to allow in this, you know, this palatial courtroom, give a person an opportunity to be heard.

I think that's really, to me, it connects also to the Purim story in the sense that, you know, you have a story which is publicly read every year as an obligation on, you know, every Jewish man and woman to hear it. And think about all the years in which Jews were sort of on the outside of the systems of power and justice that might have given actual redress to our wrongs. Still, there's that sense of the assertion of moral clarity of taking vengeance on the enemies. It's a very powerful story. I want to pivot before we end to a recent event, because, you know, you spoke a lot in the book about how also vengeance can help maintain social boundaries, Certainly in the pre sort of legal system, pre-social contract, as you called it, world.

But even within the society today, there's a sense that a person should know if they cross a line, they'll be punished, they'll be sanctioned. And today there's all this talk in America and here in Israel about cancel culture, which is an edgy word. It exists. It doesn't exist. It's a problem. It's not. But the way I understand it is basically there is a perception of a wrong which triggers sanctions that maintain the boundaries of an accepted narrative. I mean, you're allowed to talk about things and you're not allowed to talk about others. And we just had this example of Gina Carano, the actress who was fired by Disney for making statements, basically saying that Nazi Germany didn't start from the government, but started from its populace.

I don't necessarily want to go into the details of what she said. Is it right? Is it wrong? But do you think that there's a place within media and what I would call the horizontal sphere of media, social media and business, for sanctioning what people perceive to be wrong narratives? I'm very incredibly troubled by cancel culture, in part because my last book, my most recent book, is a book about free speech. and by the way yeah it by the way i i know we don't probably don't have the time for this but i something you said earlier made me think of the new book because i in the book i talk about how israel most people don't know uh most people outside of israel don't know that actually doesn't have a constitution you have basic laws there was some thought that one day you would have a constitution.

I'm praying every day. Right. But there really isn't. And people are surprised when I've done public lectures, talk about the book, and I say, you know, the Israelis actually don't have a basic law about free speech. Everyone has it. They believe in it. But it doesn't exist. It's not actually a basic law. However, what is a basic law of human dignity? Yeah. The respect for other human beings. Right. And I talk about how, how important that is because even in European societies, free speech is not allowed to trample over the human dignity of other human beings. Right. That it's only in the United States where free, you know, neo-Nazis can march into a town of Holocaust survivors and the government will protect the Nazis and not the Holocaust survivors.

Right. Because the free speech of the Nazis is considered more important than the profound sensitivities and the traumatic memories of Holocaust survivors. Which is how you then get Mayor Kahane and the JDL meeting those Nazis with baseball bats in the 70s and 80s. Yeah. And by the way, I wrote a book about free speech, but no, I do not believe in cross burnings and neo-Nazis marching on Holocaust survivors. I actually have a very European take on this, or I would argue it's an Israeli take on this, which is that human dignity matters. It matters a lot. And that your free speech rights cannot be exercised if what it ultimately does is erases or cancel the human dignity of a other human being, their own sense of citizenship and tranquility, right?

Can I live in a society without being traumatized by the people that murdered my family, right? Simply because they still would like to do it again, Right. And so therefore their freedom to speak to what they want to do cancels out my ability to be treated as a person of dignity in society, that I don't have to be afraid to go outside to explain to my children why those Nazis want to kill Jews. Right. And so so, you know, again, it goes to the what I would say most of my writings is a very victim centered vision of a legal of a justice system. Right. That it's victim centered. Like, what is it that human beings need in order to function and be treated with the dignity deserved of human beings? Well, one thing is what Aristotle said not to be made to feel low.

Right. recognize that they that we need to they have to rise because otherwise this is a sign of you know a real moral deficiency moral character and they'll never be able to live you know justly in a society having been wronged and the wrongdoer being so unpunished so let's go back to your last point i'm sorry i just wanted to deviate that's all right because i just thought it would be interesting to talk about human dignity because it's all it's in Europe and it's in Israel, Western societies where dignity is treated as a right. And the United States, people don't realize the word dignity does not appear in the Declaration of Independence or the American Constitution. We don't have it. It's not there.

And if you look at the German Constitution, remember, again, written after the Holocaust, which makes sense. The word dignity is everywhere, everywhere. It's almost endless because the Nazis understood what happens when you deprive human beings of their dignity. The specific question was about the cancel culture of today and how the way I see it is that the vengeance power here is when perceived wrongs basically are triggering sanctions that maintain the boundaries of an accepted narrative. And so to me, it almost appears like it's vengeance gone wild because it's really maintaining what is not true or untrue, but rather acceptable and unacceptable. Right. That's exactly right. In fact, you reminded me why that got me into this last book on free speech, because, you know, it's clear that the cancel culture, that university life on campus is inconsistent with the concept, the principles of free speech, because what it's basically saying is there's some things that can't be mentioned, right?

And the mere act of, even by accident, like the N word, you know, like things that if said clearly mean you must be canceled, you must be banished, you know, a kind of moral revulsion, right? That the mere fact that you're saying is you social ostracism, go away. And that is the antithesis of free speech, where even ideas or history can't be raised, because in order to raise them, certain things have to be said or explained or words need to be used. And the words themselves are now forbidden. And so, yes, this anecdote about the I read about this, the Disney star, you know, and I'll tell you what I found interesting about that, Michael. That was one of the first times where the sensitivities of Jews was part of the cancel culture.

That's something that hasn't been discussed about this recent anecdote. Now, maybe it's not perceived in that way, which is to say we don't ever talk about this in a way because it ultimately trivializes what happens to Jews in Germany by raising it, you know, by equating things here as if this was on the road to not- To genocide, yeah. To genocide, right. Like when Trump said this, it was essentially, and by the way, I've been on the record saying, by the way, I didn't vote for Trump, but he's not a Nazi. It does trivialize the crimes of the Nazis. It's its own form of Holocaust denial in my eyes. Yes, it is. When one speaks of this as if it's the same. And so I understand that. I just thought it was interesting that Disney decision, because it seemed to me that that was the first time where some corporate decision was made because it trivialized something that happened to a marginalized group.

In the United States, Jews are white people now. They're part of the privilege. And so therefore, that's why there was an academic from Oberlin College who recently stated shockingly that the Holocaust should not be taught in American universities because it's merely white-on-white crime. And white-on-white, right, it doesn't matter, right? And so that's why I'm saying the Disney decision was interesting because it was really saying that the crimes committed against the Jews require a special sensitivity and it can't be trivialized. So basically there's a real complexity here because on one hand, vengeance and sanction calls into being the moral universe, which is important. On the other hand, if it excises certain elements of the conversation, then we can't get moral clarity because we can't even speak to one another.

And there's no truth. There's no truth. Right, which is its own deadly descent. Right, right. It creates an alternate truth and it creates a silence about the actual truth. And the moral universe absolutely rejects anything that doesn't allow the truth to be known. We know this from Oedipus Rex, right? the universe, you know, demands that the truth be known and that it be recalled, memorialized, so that anything that silences the truth or makes truth impossible to be known completely contradicts the moral universe. Well, I don't think we could end on a more clear statement than that, that anything which prevents the truth from being known contradicts the moral universe. And therefore, if vengeance serves for that sort of emotional satisfaction and the moral clarity side of justice, then it's an important tool in the pursuit of truth.

But if it's used to erase truth and to undermine the very notion of clear factuality and shared reality, then it's a dangerous tool. Wow. Professor Thane Rosenbaum, it was a fantastic conversation. Before we go, I just want to ask if people want to get their hands on your books or they want to hear more of what you teach, how can they best do that? Well, thank you for that. I have st. Rosenbaum.com is my website where all the essays and writings are on and books are listed. Of course, all the books are sold on Amazon or any other place but one can purchase books. I think my website also, I have a Facebook page that also has all of the public events that I do. Nowadays, everything is videotaped. So either the website has it or my Facebook page has, you know, whether radio appearances.

And I can assure you, Michael, the Jewish story will be prominently listed when you send me the link. I will promote it. I promise to promote it widely on all my social media channels, handles and my website. I enjoyed speaking to you. I'm familiar with this podcast. I think you do a wonderful job with it. You're incredibly smart and charming and you're interested in ideas. And if you're interested in ideas, you are my brother. Wow. Well, I thank you for that. Really, there's just left for me to say. Really, thank you for taking the time and for sharing your thoughts. and I also want to thank all the folks that are out there listening, especially those that give their hard-earned money to make the show happen keep it free and widely available.

I want to invite you to join them right now. You can go to my website at jewishstory.co In the upper right-hand corner you'll see a button that says Be a Patron. You can click on that for a little bit of podcast support or you can be in touch with me at robmikefoyer at gmail.com or you can send me a message on Facebook if you want to dedicate a show. I want to thank the Land of Israel Network. That's thelandofisrael.com for building a platform that let me reach so many amazing people around the world. I want to thank the Pardes Institute, pardes.org.il, for building an educational institution that gives me the privilege of teaching so many fine Jews. And I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story.