A D’var Torah for Parshat Vayetze by Rabbi Michael Bernstein
Last week, the governor of Alabama, Kay Ivey, took the unusual step of ordering a moratorium on executions in her state. Under normal circumstances, this act would be impossible to imagine in a state that is among the leaders per capita in carrying out the death penalty. In this case, however, Ivey was reacting to the incompetence and cruelty in the implementation of recent executions. The attempt to inject Kenneth Smith with deadly poison failed, making him the third inmate in recent days whose execution was botched or deemed after the fact to have caused excessive suffering. All the while, Mr. Smith prayed fervently that he would not be killed and recognized his survival as a miraculous answer to this prayer.
I am indebted to an indispensable organization, L’ Chaim: Jews Against The Death Penalty for sharing this window into Mr. Smith’s and other inmates’ experience in their own words. L’Chaim not only advocates tirelessly against the practice of state sanctioned execution in every country, but reaches out to make contact with the condemned prisoners and their families.
The incredible soul of this organization, Michael Zoosman, has become a close confidant of many of those awaiting their prescribed fate on death row, referring to them as “our pen pals.” Cantor Zoosman, with whom I had the honor of sharing a bima in my first pulpit what seems like a lifetime ago, moved from being a pulpit cantor to a prison chaplain and from one who opposed the death penalty as a general principle to one who is dedicating his life in service to the lives of those whose deaths have been ordered in our country and around the world.
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L’Chaim points to the nauseating facts that some states employ Zyklon B, the gas used by the Nazis in their extermination camps, and that the list of other countries practicing the death penalty includes such brutal regimes as Iran, China, and Saudi Arabia.
Cantor Zoosman talks about his own realization that there should be no exceptions even in the edge case of Nazis who murdered so many Jewish forebears, including his own.
No exceptions means even in such a singular case as Adolf Eichmann or even the theoretical execution of Hitler. More recently and poignantly, when many condemned a Florida jury for failing to sentence the Parkland school shooter to death, L’chaim was among those who cheered the verdict.
In fact, the motto adopted by L’Chaim is a quote from Elie Wiesel:
With every cell of my being and with every fiber of my memory I oppose the death penalty in all forms. I do not believe any civilized society should be at the service of death. I don’t think it’s human to become an agent of the angel of death.
Elie Wiesel, having borne the brunt of the ultimate degradation of human worth, emerged with a certainty that no human being, regardless of their wickedness, loses their status as created in God’s image.
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Such an awakening to the divine stamp on every human being is part of the story of many death penalty abolitionists. In this, they echo a seminal moment in the life of Jacob, one of the architects of the Jewish tradition of discovering God in dark places. Fleeing from his brother Esau, he finds himself in the wilderness as the sun is setting, falls asleep, and has his famous dream of a ladder reaching to heaven. In the morning, he wakes suddenly and exclaims in surprise, “Indeed there is Adonai in this place and I, I did not know.” (Genesis 28:16)
Unlike his grandfather Abraham, who woke up early in the morning to take his son to a mountaintop he was shown by God, Jacob had no idea he was in the presence of God. According to the midrash, this place was the future site of the Holy Temple. Jacob was intending to pass through on his journey but God, desiring that he rest there, made the night fall abruptly. Only then does Jacob lay down and dream of the great ladder to heaven and the angels running urgently up and down. When he wakes up, he is struck not just by his vision but that he “did not know.” L’Chaim seeks to make sure none of us simply passes by these places where the presence of God, the Divine image, is being ignored. When someone like Kenneth Smith is praying even as he is lying on a bed of death, how can we pass by once we are made aware, awakened to God’s presence there?
If only the governor had her moment of revelation not based on the state’s failure to efficiently execute an inmate but rather through the recognition that, indeed, God is in this place and she, she had yet to awaken to the image of the Divine in those who are being put to death in our name.
Rabbi Michael Bernstein is the spiritual leader of Gesher L’ Torah in Alpharetta, GA. He was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1999 and served congregations in Massachusetts and Philadelphia before coming to Atlanta with wife Tracie and their three children Ayelet, Yaron and Liana.
