Temple Aliyah

By Rabbi Carl M. Perkins

Parashat Bereishit
The Question of Torture
October 21, 2006

About twenty years ago, I was speaking to a woman who had just given birth. “How was it?” I asked. “How was labor?”

“The man who invented the epidural,” she said—an “epidural” is an injection of an anesthetic into the epidural space of the spine, used to control pain during childbirth—“that man deserves the Nobel Prize.”

I thought about that conversation this week as I sat in my dentist’s office waiting for the Novocain to take effect. Novocain was invented or discovered only about a hundred years ago. And as the dental assistant who was caring for me told me, back in Russia (where she lived until recently), they didn’t have Novocain. She had had the same procedure I was having, perhaps ten years ago, without Novocain! She endured dental pain once for an entire month, while waiting for a crown to be made.

How do we understand pain? It’s a natural part of who we are to have the capacity to feel pain: physical pain; psychological pain. Pain can be overwhelming. We go to great lengths to try to avoid it. When we can’t, it can be unbearable.

At a certain point in time, we realize that it’s wrong to inflict pain. Dr. William Schulz, past president of the Unitarian Universalist Association and former executive director of Amnesty International, tells us that when he was seven or eight years old, he used to play after school with a dog across the street. He’d hold her forepaws and dance. He noticed that after a few minutes, she’d pull away. It hurt. One day, he held on. The more she tugged, the tighter he held on. Finally, once she began yelping, he let her go. The next day, he repeated it. The third day, she cowered before him, and he realized what he had done—and became ashamed. What had come over him? He later realized it was the displacement of anger onto one who held no threat over him. Others, elsewhere, might tell him what to do, but not there. There, he reigned supreme.

According to my colleague, Reverend John Buehrens of the First Parish Unitarian Universalist in Needham, “Harvard historian Jill Lepore recently published a book called New York Burning. It’s about New York in the year 1741, when the town had only 10,000 residents: 8,000 white citizens and 2,000 black slaves. A series of house fires occurred. Around the same time, there had been a series of slave rebellions in South Carolina and on several Caribbean islands. Because groups of blacks had been observed in New York meeting together in secret, the authorities attributed the fires to a slave conspiracy. People were jailed and tortured in the basement of the city hall until they confessed and named other supposed co-conspirators. Despite English common law, they were denied access to legal counsel. They were offered reduced sentences in return for naming names. Many did name names. Dozens of people were executed. Others were jailed, tortured, or sold overseas. The victims eventually numbered about 180.”

“There is reason to believe that most of the house fires were simply the result of household accidents, clogged chimneys, and the like. The very existence of a black conspiracy to burn the town was largely a creation of false testimony extracted under torture.”

I’m sure that all of us are relieved that forced confessions are no longer in favor. For coerced testimony is generally unreliable. People will say anything—including misleading falsehoods—to avoid pain. There’s another reason as well. Engaging in such practices, even authorizing such practices, is unseemly and demeaning—to our victims and to ourselves. To humiliate them, to terrify them, to hurt them, in order to extract information from them or in order to achieve compliance, does violence to our moral sense of ourselves and to our moral standing in the world.

I remember, not too long ago, learning about Abu Ghraib, and wondering: How could this be? Isn’t it awful that these abuses were carried out in the name of our country, under color of authority? How ashamed we should all be feeling!

I never dreamed that, within a few short months, we’d be talking about what kinds of coercive interrogation techniques are—and what kinds aren’t—permissible; which techniques qualify as torture—and which ones don’t.

I, for one, have long been grateful that the Geneva Conventions exist. The Geneva Conventions, which were first promulgated over a hundred and fifty years ago, forbid the torture of prisoners of war. I always thought of that as a very decent constraint—one that helps even soldiers who are trained and authorized to kill one another to remember that a common humanity unites us all. Those conventions may not have protected Eastern European Jews during World War II, who were not deemed worthy enough to be entitled to their protections, but they certainly did protect the lives and well-being of many American soldiers who became prisoners of war.

For several years in a row, I used to make an appearance at the Pollard Middle School here in Needham on what’s called STA-Day. It’s a day on which classes and activities on a variety of subjects are offered. I always used to offer a seminar on human rights.

Invariably, of all the human rights that we would discuss, the right not to be tortured would generate lively discussion. That right is codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 5, which reads, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” It’s also part of the U. N. convention against torture, ratified by the U. S. Senate in the 1990’s. Generally, everyone in the class would acknowledge that there’s something unseemly or distasteful about torture. But then I, or one of the students, would bring up the proverbial case of the ticking time bomb—the suicide bomber caught on the way to blowing up many people, who possessed information which—if one could only extract it from him—could lead to dismantling his bomb, and thereby saving those people.

What then? Shouldn’t one, in such a case, inflict torture in order to extract that information? Isn’t squeamishness about torture in such a circumstance immoral? Interestingly, for the most part, students would say, “No.” Somehow, they generally coalesced around a position forbidding torture at all times.

Israel has had to confront the question of torture, because it has so very often been targeted by terrorists willing to murder and maim innocent civilians. And so “moderate physical pressure” became a tactic employed against suspected terrorists during the early 1990s in order to elicit information to prevent future terrorist attacks. Several attacks were indeed prevented as a result of the use of this tactic. But then the Israeli Supreme Court weighed in and, in an opinion authored by Aharon Barack, the recently retired president of the court, banned the use of “moderate physical pressure” against suspects.

The Israeli Supreme Court ban was total. Torture was prohibited. Even moderate physical pressure was prohibited. Period. The Court did leave open the possibility that, in an actual “ticking bomb” case, a situation in which a terrorist was refusing to divulge information necessary to defuse a bomb that was about to kill hundreds of innocent civilians, an agent who went ahead and, on his own, employed physical pressure, could defend himself against criminal charges by invoking the “law of necessity.” In other words, the Court was saying that if an agent—(think Jack Bauer, the protagonist of the T.V. series, “24”)—was reasonably convinced that he had to apply physical pressure on the suspect in order to save lives, then he could offer that up as a defense. The behavior would still be unlawful, but that defense could exculpate him. Interestingly, no such case has arisen in Israel since that decision.

Where does this notion come from that it is wrong to torture another human being? In our tradition, it comes right out of the texts we read today. It comes right out of Genesis. We understand it to follow from the statement, repeated several times in today’s parashah, that the human being was created in the image of God. We were created, “b’tsalmo,” in God’s image, “u’bidmuto“, and in God’s likeness. That’s why it’s wrong to treat others with disrespect; that’s why it’s wrong to humiliate another; that’s why it’s wrong to hurt another human being. We can’t take the time to explore in full detail exactly what this notion of being created in God’s image means, and what it doesn’t mean. It is a bit mysterious. After all, since both men and women are described as being in God’s image, it can’t mean that God has a physical appearance like us. The point is, though, that every human being reflects an aspect of the divine within him or her, and therefore, one must treat everyone, everyone, wherever he or she comes from, with that awareness. As Rabbi Tanhum teaches us in Bereishit Rabbah (24:7), to humiliate another person is to demean that of which he or she is an image, namely, God.

There may very well be a price to be paid for our fidelity to this principle. Certainly, we would want our government to have every tool at its disposal in the fight against terrorism. Not employing every tool might result in the loss of innocent life. But the use of some tools may diminish the effectiveness of other tools.

The morality of our country—our fairness, our decency—is a source of deep strength. The way in which we have risen beyond prejudice, xenophobia, jingoism—the way we have risen beyond the interrogation techniques employed in 18th century New York—that’s not only a tribute to our nation, but it’s one of the reasons that people come here from all over the world. We’re a great and also a strong nation because we are a nation of fairness and decency—a nation of laws and of moral principles.

In its 1999 opinion, the Israeli Supreme Court recognized that democracies must pay a price to maintain their commitment to their values. “Democracies must fight terror with one hand tied behind their backs,” the Court said. “But they maintain the upper hand,”—precisely because of the values they hold dear—values which are impugned when torture is inflicted in the name of the state.

All of us, whatever our religion, our nationality, our ethnicity, whatever the color of our skin—we’re all descended from Adam and Eve. And we all, therefore, are created not only in their image, but in God’s image as well. Let’s not sully that image—either within ourselves or within those whom we encounter.