Jewish Black Magic: They Cursed Ariel Sharon with the Pulsa D'Nora in 2005 - and can it work in October 2020 for someone else?

I've spent years teaching numerous college courses on religion - always with the disclaimer that we will cover only the positive aspects of the subject. Religion used for evil, that is for war or other forms of harm, is a misuse and distortion of systems of faith.

Curses, I reasoned, were a misuse and distortion of religious practice.

Curses invoked before the Rabin assassination changed my mind about that. Prior to that tragic event, on the eve of Yom Kippur, a group of "Kabbalists" intoned the pulsa curse outside the Rabin residence. Once again, in the summer of 2005, another group gathered to invoke the curse against P.M. Ariel Sharon. It seemed to me that curses indeed were part of our religion - like it or not.

One blogger, Canonist, dealt briefly with the curse back in July 2005, complete with a link to the video of the curse "ceremony" and quotations from learned professors:

Praying for Ariel Sharon's Death

Yesterday's death-curse seems thus far to have gone unanswered by the Almighty, but we'll see. Generally speaking, I don't write much about Israel and the disengagement, but this latest is quite interesting. PaleoJudaica's got a great roundup, including descriptions of the pulsa de-nura ceremony, its detractors, and the threat of prosecution that've come out of it. Meantime, you can actually watch the ceremony in this video, which, with a bunch of people in sweats reading from photocopies, looks oddly like some run-of-the-mill Jewish ceremony, like burning chametz or somesuch. The video comes courtesy of Samuel Heilman, via a listserv to which he wrote, with the subject "Jewish Jihadists": "Lest any of you think that only Islamists have jihadists, see the video below in which so-called 'religious Jews' pray for Prime Minister Sharon's Death in a Pulsa De Nura." Bold words on both sides. Let's see what comes of them.

Erudite rabbis have written about the matter, explaining that magic is not a part of Judaism, as in the following:

Is an eye for an eye kosher justice?

The latin lex talionis means the law of retaliation. Some think  this law is a core element of early biblical justice, familiarly expressed as, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, an arm for an arm, a life for a life."

I was teaching a Jewish Studies class a while back about how Talmudic law interprets virtually all retaliation in terms of monetary compensation. The Talmud provides methods to determine what is the value of the damages to an eye, the cost of pain, medical expenses, loss of income, suffering and humiliation.

This is a qualitative advance over the previous forms of justice via the literal direct retaliation of an eye for an eye, I explained. Any questions?

A student raised his hand. "How can you say the biblical idea is justice? It is barbaric to take out an eye. What kind of biblical morality was that?"

I was caught off guard. "By the standards of our developed sense of civilization you are right," I replied tentatively. "But imagine, if you will, what came before the biblical reforms. I put out your eye, then you took vengeance on my entire family, and I in turn came to wipe out your whole tribe. In comparison, the biblical scales of justice are a great leap forward in civilization. And the Talmudic interpreters carry justice further forward. They say that money compensates for damages, not direct physical retaliation."

Morally below an eye for an eye - a life for a video

In light of the barbaric murder of Americans in Libya, a very good friend reminded us of our concern on this blog and in our op eds for the concept of lex talionis - often associate with the biblical notion of an eye for an eye.

We wrote in the past about how that biblical legal notion was a great leap forward in moral compensation thinking in the ancient world of the middle east, even though it seems to many of us now to be a brutal principle of justice.

To be clear, we say now that those who murder and claim it is a response to a video will have to be classed with the most primitive of the pre-biblical tribes.

See one newspaper op-ed that we wrote about this in 2005 - here.

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A video of 40 lashes - ancient flogging in modern times from the Taliban in Pakistan’s Swat Valley

When studying the bible and Talmud I occasionally mused, If only we could go back in time and actually see the past.

But we can. You ask, By what magic can we go back 4000 years in time?

How is this possible to witness the act of ancient Biblical flogging?

Thanks to this source, here is it - pre-modern society captured on a cell phone video.

WSJ: Rabbi Bleich and Professor Sarna Dispute the Essence of the Blessing of the Sun

We've been thinking... Did the Beatles have this blessing in mind when they wrote their song?

Here comes the sun, here comes the sun,
and I say it's all right
Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter
Little darling, it feels like years since it's been here
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
and I say it's all right

Anyway, we love Talmudic disputes - especially when they take place in the Wall Street Journal.

While this one is not fully articulated (they rarely are to start with), you can appreciate the differing views of the rabbi and the professor regarding a simple old blessing. It's nicely presented in the article, "Love the Earth? Bless the Sun," By JULIE WIENER, concluding,

"There is no question that our relationship to the physical world and the sun is different than it was 28 years ago, let alone 2,000 years ago," says Nigel Savage, whose Jewish environmental group, Hazon, is organizing a sunrise ceremony on the roof of the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan. The Hazon event will also officially launch the Jewish Coalition for a Sustainable Upper West Side, a campaign pushing for more pedestrian- and bike-friendly policies in the neighborhood.

For Mr. Savage and other Jewish environmental activists, it makes sense to connect "blessing the sun with the power of the sun and with some understanding of how the sun's rays are affecting the planet in the 21st century."

The Teva Learning Center, a group that teaches about Judaism and the environment at Jewish day schools, summer camps and Hebrew schools, has dispatched a special "Birchat HaChama" bus. Running solely on reused vegetable oil, the bus has been visiting synagogues and Jewish community centers along the East Coast and in Ohio, sharing information not just about the sun blessing but also about a variety of environmentally friendly technologies, such as solar-powered ovens....

All of this is "a little bemusing" to Rabbi J. David Bleich, a Yeshiva University Talmud professor whose scholarly tome "Bircas HaChammah" was published in 1981 and re-released this year by the Orthodox Jewish publishing company ArtScroll Mesorah. According to Rabbi Bleich, environmental concerns are "issues in and of themselves and are totally unrelated to the blessing of the sun." He sees the blessing as an occasion to acknowledge the wonder of God's creations, not a political statement. "I suppose you can connect anything," he says. "You can draw dots and lines; you don't have to be logical."

But Brandeis's Mr. Sarna points out that the environmentalist remaking of the sun blessing mirrors the transformation over the past few decades of Tu b'Shvat, the Jewish "birthday of the trees," from a Zionist holiday to a sort of Jewish Earth Day. "Some will be unhappy with that, and others will understand that's a process as old as ritual itself," Mr. Sarna says. "When one looks at Jewish history, one finds there are rituals and practices that one generation discarded suddenly take on wonderful significance for a new generation."...more...

New Yorker Contest: Jewish Eustace Tilley - a Biblical Eye for an Eye Entry

The contest entries do not come from the New Yorker staff. This one stole part of my idea for a Jewish Eustace Tilley - clever - but I reject the implications of it. Israeli policy is based on many factors with political, military and diplomatic goals. Lex talionis, the ancient biblical concept of an eye for an eye, which is the text in the drawing, is not a motive of Israeli government actions.

Was the Saddam hanging justice or revenge?

The Latin lex talionis means the law of retaliation. Usually we think of the goal of this law as a core element of early biblical justice, familiarly expressed as, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, an arm for an arm, a life for a life."

One time I was teaching a Jewish Studies class about how Talmudic law interprets virtually all retaliation in terms of monetary compensation. The Talmud provides methods to determine what is the money value of the damages to an eye, the cost of pain, medical expenses, loss of income, suffering and humiliation.

This is a qualitative advance over the previous forms of justice via the literal direct retaliation of an eye for an eye, I explained.

A student raised his hand and asked, “How can you say the biblical idea is justice? It is barbaric to take out an eye. What kind of biblical morality is that?”

Momentarily I was caught off guard. Then I replied, “By the standards of our developed sense of civilization you are right. But imagine what came before the biblical reforms. If I put out your eye, then you took vengeance on my entire family, and I in turn came to wipe out your whole tribe. In comparison, the biblical scales of lex talionis were a step forward in civilization. The bible said that vengeance must be measured and managed.

And the Talmudic interpreters carried this notion further forward. They precluded direct physical retaliation and prescribed that money substitutes for bodily revenge.

Fast forward now to our world. We are taught to believe that it is governed by law meant to preserve universal order and to achieve justice. As such surely we reject the notion that one tribe may use laws as just another way to take vengeance on another tribe, regardless of the latter's brutality.

In our world we take for granted that the biblical "law" of lex talionis – a tooth for a tooth - is an outgrown quasi-legal principle. In modern civilization, it does not qualify as a principled or moral law. All it ever did was to balance tribal revenge, to keep it from getting out-of-hand. It was an improvement over a village massacre for an eye.

Merely managing our basest impulses has never been the civilized goal of the rule of law. We believe that it embodies ideals like justice, liberty, equality and that it be used to foster a good, ethical and moral life and to punish and deter crimes and evil.

Using courts as a sophisticated way to wreak a bloodthirsty revenge is actually a perversion of justice.

So now we ask, Was the Saddam hanging the immoral and bloodthirsty revenge of George W. Bush and the Shiites? Was the whole point of the invasion and war a veiled means for W to seek out and kill Saddam in revenge because in 1991 Hussein threatened to assassinate his father George Sr.?

Were the Shiite judges and executioners gleeful to hasten the death of Saddam to fulfill their need for blood vengeance against Sunni brutality? If so, then the hanging was a new low point in Middle Eastern society and a black chapter in the history of the American civilization.

Watch and listen to the cell phone video of Saddam’s hanging. You will hear the derision and mocking that is evidence of vengeance, not of justice.

Was the trial really about bringing to justice a man of evil for his crimes against humanity?

Or is it more fitting to drop the pretense that we and our partners acted out of any moral motive, any ethical imperative, any thirst for justice.

Would it have been better to say what we suspect motivated the whole process? To hell with law and justice. We wanted and got our revenge.

Was the Saddam Hanging Bush's and the Shiites' Immoral and Bloodthirsty Revenge?

Noah Feldman, a law professor at New York University and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, asks some contrarian questions in this coming Sunday's New York Times Magazine (login req'd).

What gave the Iraqis the direct legal right to execute Saddam? I'll provide an excerpt below.

My ruminations about this go off in a different direction. We do live a world that we believe is governed by law meant to preserve universal order. As such we reject the notion that one tribe may use laws as just another way to take vengeance on another tribe, regardless of the latter's brutality.

The biblical "law" of lex talionis - an eye for an eye - is an outgrown quasi-legal principle. All it did was balance tribal revenge to keep it from getting out-of-hand. It was an improvement over a village for an eye. In modern civilization, it does not qualify as a principled or moral law.

Merely managing our basest impulses has never been the loftiest goal of law. We prefer to think that it embodies ideals like justice, liberty, equality and that it be used to foster good and moral life and to punish and deter crimes and evil.

Using courts as a sophisticated way to wreak a bloodthirsty revenge is actually a perversion of justice. So now we ask The Question.

Was the Saddam Hanging Bush's and the Shiites' Immoral and Bloodthirsty Revenge? Was the whole point of the invasion and war a means for W to seek out and kill Saddam because in 1991 Hussein threatened to assassinate George Sr.?

Were the Shiite judges and executioners gleeful to hasten the death of Saddam to fulfill their need for revenge against Sunni brutality? If so, then the hanging was a new low point in middle Eastern society and a black chapter in the history of the US.

As I said, Feldman takes a look at the question more focused on what was the actual legal basis for the execution. He concludes,

In part, the tribunal sought to draw legitimacy from international law. The court found Saddam Hussein guilty not of ordinary murder but of ''crimes against humanity,'' a grand-sounding, internationally recognized charge with intuitive moral force. When the phrase ''crimes against humanity'' was used at the Nuremberg trials in 1945, the convening nations did not bother to explain what gave them the right to define and punish such crimes. It was presumed self-evident that certain actions were so terrible that they must be treated as illegal, even if they might have been permissible under Nazi German law when they took place. The so-called Rome Statute, which created the International Criminal Court in The Hague in 2002, specifically defined crimes against humanity in terms drawn from the Nuremberg charter, and the definition used by the Iraqi special tribunal was copied from there.

Yet it is hard to believe that the Iraqi tribunal could convincingly claim its authority from the international community. Like the United States, Iraq has not ratified the Rome Statute. Indeed, the Iraqi tribunal explicitly avoided submitting itself to international standards so that it would be able to apply the death penalty, which most of the international community rejects. This resulted in near complete withdrawal of international cooperation in the investigation of Saddam Hussein's crimes and the trial itself, and the tribunal lost some of the perception of fairness that would have come from broader international participation.

So where, if anywhere, did the Iraqi tribunal get the right to punish Saddam Hussein for crimes against humanity? Sovereign nations like Iraq can, of course, punish whatever crimes they choose, and can change or abrogate their own earlier laws to do it. But there is something unsatisfying about offering this as an account, for it diminishes the tribunal's credible claim that the Iraqi dictator's actions reverberated worldwide, implicating not just Iraq but all of humanity. There must be some deeper source of law, apart from treaties or the dictates of the United Nations Security Council, that bans the systematic killing of innocents.

The most persuasive answer is that a law prohibiting crimes against humanity derives its authority from the inherent moral responsibility that lies with whoever has the capacity to punish truly heinous deeds. To be sure, in some cases the international community will bear that responsibility. In the case of Iraq, though, the international community was not in a position to act, not only because of the question of the death penalty but also because many of its members denied the legality of the invasion. Responsibility rested with the powers that actually held Saddam Hussein within their grasp. Their right - and their duty - was to bring him to justice.

By these lights, the decision to charge Saddam Hussein with crimes against humanity was morally and legally justified. Nevertheless, the process fell short of what is needed to invoke the transcendent norms of universal justice. This was a profound failure. As with the other shortcomings of Iraq's government, many players were at fault here: the Americans for failing to provide security for the Iraqis, including the defense team; the Iraqis for failing to get the trial - or the country - to run smoothly; the international community for sanctimoniously disengaging.

But the fact that blame is to be shared does not mitigate the tragedy of this missed opportunity.

It would have been a lot more fitting to to drop the charade of pretending that we acted out of an, "inherent moral responsibility that lies with whoever has the capacity to punish truly heinous deeds" and said what we suspect motivated the whole process.

To hell with law and justice. We wanted revenge.