Ignorance, wickedness, and impurity are celebrated – and they also do so on billboards, wearing a false cloak of holiness.
Worse than that, it turns out that there is at least one more potential murderer roaming our streets, and there is no telling who he will decide to hit next.
The Mishnah in Tractate Sanhedrin (1:1) lists three people whom "jealous men harm," and they are: one who steals a service vessel from the Temple; one who curses with a sorcerer, that is, one who blesses (in the language of the Sagi Nehor) a place in the name of idolatry; and one who burns Aramaic - in the eyes of ten of Israel. Rashi explains the meaning of the harm of jealous men: "People who are righteous and who are jealous of a place harm it when they see the deed, but after that, his death is not handed over to the court of law, and the law is from Moses from Sinai.".
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Let's break it down into details:
A. Only "qualified" people can do this.
B. They are people who "envy the envy of a place.".
C. This is only done when they see the perpetrator of the sin actually committing it.
D. If it didn't happen there, no one can hurt them anymore.
E. Of course, this is only about the three offenses listed in the mishna, which are not offenses that require a court-ordered death penalty, such as having sex with a man, for example.
Pinchas ben Eleazar? May God protect him.
Immediately after the attack that turned into murder last week, I was shocked to see that someone, even more than one person, tried to compare Schlissel to Pinchas ben Elazar the priest, who saved the people of Israel through an act of zeal, as we read in this week's parashah two weeks ago.
Rivers of ink have been spilled in the literature of our sages regarding the fact that zealotry is an act that is carried out spontaneously, not by premeditation. Schlissel planned his act for years, and in recent weeks he has stated this repeatedly.
Schlissel is simply a murderer, and if we had a Sanhedrin near the Temple Mount today, his sentence would be death, just like the offense for which he tried to 'take the law into his own hands.' "Death by the court," as the name suggests, is a surrender to the court, and anyone who tries to carry it out himself is a murderer in every sense of the word.
The Pashkvil that appeared today on the streets of Jerusalem – and it is very possible that, as in the past, the person behind it is a lone madman, but there is absolutely no way to know – suffers from the same ignorance that led to the murder. Once again, Schlissel the murderer is described as a modern Pinchas, who "redeemed" the world from anarchy.
Where do we find that it is permissible to murder, even for some noble purpose? Pinchas committed his act exactly according to what the Gemara specifies – it was committed against an Aramaic prostitute, and as mentioned, it was an act of "zeal", and not an act of insane, premeditated murder.
Alas, we have reached a situation where ignorance reigns supreme, when one person thinks he is permitted to murder because he thinks he understood something written in the Torah when explicit rulings say otherwise, and another thinks the murderer is holy because he is like Pinchas, who was jealous of God's jealousy.
And this comparison is not only outrageous – it is also dangerous!
If there is even one person walking our streets who thinks he is allowed to commit murder in order to prevent "chaos," there is no telling what the next step will be when he thinks he is allowed to murder. I call on the Israel Police to locate the murderer from the printer of the Pashkvil as soon as possible, to imprison him, and to remove him from our streets.
