Canter Bridge

Anglo-Saxons like this writer tend to view law as a given, even as an absolute. Our discussion of controversial issues often begins and ends with reference to the law. One of the many dangers of such a legalistic mindset is the reduction to a code of what in Torah is a far more humane, personalistic, and subtle enterprise.

Law in biblical terms is far more often penultimate than ultimate. It serves a function rather than represents an end. A person’s dignity, even that of a perpetrator, is preserved in a dictum like this one from Moses’ valedictory sermons in Deuteronomy:

Suppose two persons have a dispute and enter into litigation, and the judges decide between them, declaring one to be in the right and the other to be in the wrong. If the one in the wrong deserves to be flogged, the judge shall make that person lie down and be beaten in his presence with the number of lashes proportionate to the offense. Forty lashes may be given but not more; if more lashes than these are given, your neighbor will be degraded in your sight.

The honor-shame reflex common to many cultures finds its way into the limit of forty lashes and no more. More fundamentally, a concern for a person’s dignity is apparent. This legal prescription is concerned with something deeper than the mere satisfaction of abstract justice. It seems as though forty-two, or forty-nine, lashes might have represented the conceptual debt of the neighbor’s wrongdoing. Yet his neighbors stop at forty in order to preserve a guilty neighbor’s dignity.

Severity becomes subordinate to the ongoing need of a man-among-his-neighbors. He will continue to grow grain, buy a mule, greet his peers in the street, grieve the eventual loss of a daughter or a spouse. Better that he should do so with his head held high, not as the degraded victim of, say, forty-four lashes.

Memory is long. The memory of a man reduced to a vomiting, bleeding, crying lump by the forty-third lash might prove longer still.

We are asked here to look away from the abstract severities of raw justice so that in future we might look into the eyes of a neighbor who once suffered deservedly under our community’s lash, forty times. Look into his eyes, that is, and see a human being rather than a perpetrator. Memory and abstractions, when neighbors’ eyes meet in the street, are not the most important things.