You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.
-Ex. 23:9
You were strangers in the land of Egypt reminds us that we have experienced the great suffering that one in a foreign land feels. By remembering the pain which we ourselves have undergone, from which God, in His mercy, delivered us, our compassion will be stirred up towards every man in this plight.
–Sefer Ha-Hinukh 431
We know the heart of the stranger.
From the Bible on, the prohibition against oppressing others is founded on our own historical memories of persecution: “Do not oppress him in your land when you are stronger than him. Remember, you were strangers like him” (ibn Ezra on Ex. 22:20). Everyday, as we recite the Shema, we recall our experience as defenseless victims in Egypt, and God’s redeeming role in our liberation. Everyday we recall that our cries were heard –our people born out of slavery – so that we too might respond to the cry of suffering in the world around us.[1]
The Talmud highlights that the prohibition against oppressing the stranger recurs no less than thirty-six times in the Torah, more than any other commandment, including the injunction to keep the Sabbath, refrain from forbidden foods, and love God (Baba Metzia 59b).[2]
While we cannot draw equivalencies between our suffering – its unique depths and horrors – and the suffering of any other people, past or present, we can, in remembering our humiliations, weave empathy from pain. We know, from the inside, what it can mean to be abandoned to powerful governments with lofty aspirations. We know what it can mean to be dehumanized, blamed, and punished collectively for the misdeeds, real and imagined, of the few.
When torture is explicitly named in Jewish texts, it is from the vantage point of the victim. From the Roman Empire to the Crusades to the Holocaust, Jews have been the victims of torture and religious persecution. The Geneva Conventions – which ban torture as a war crime – were drafted and adopted by the nations of the world in response to the atrocities of Nazi Germany. As Jews, we have a special sensitivity to the immorality and costs of torture.
Eleh ezkara: These I remember.
Every Yom Kippur during the “martyrology” service, we mourn for the violent torture and execution of ten of our greatest teachers under the Roman occupation. R. Akiva, R. Hananiah b. Teradyon, R. Yishmael, R. Shimon ben Gamliel, and all those who have followed in their wake throughout history, condemned for adhering to their faith.
Wherever I stand, I hear rattling:
My brothers in chains, in chambers of the stricken.
They pierce the walls and burst the silence
Through the generations their echoes cry out.
In torture camps, in pits of the dead.[3]
Why do we remember? To protest ongoing innocent bloodshed and human cruelty, and to honor those who have defended the victims in every age. To urge the One who delivered us from Egypt to help us deliver all those persecuted today. To ask that mercy might prevail and our lives take part in bringing the world’s torments to an end.
We remember the martyrdom of the sages.
The Second and Fourth Books of Maccabees recount the torture and martyrdom of Hannah’s seven sons as well as the High Priest Eleazar under Antiochus IV:
“I will… leave behind me a noble example to the young how to die willingly and nobly on behalf of our reverend and holy laws.” With these words [Eleazar] stepped forward at once to the instrument of torture… Under the strokes of torture, he groaned out: “The Lord who has holy knowledge understands that, although I might have been freed from death, I endure cruel pains in my body from scourging and suffer this gladly in my soul, because I fear Him. (2 Macc. 6:6, 6:18-30, and 7; cf. Lam R. 1:16 and BT Gittin 57b).
The Talmud recalls the gory horrors withstood by R. Akiva and R. Hananiah b. Teradyon, attributed to the Hadrianic persecutions; R. Akiva’s flesh torn from his body with iron combs (BT Brachot 61b), R Hananiah b. Teradyon set on fire, enwrapped in a Torah scroll and bundles of branches, wet wool placed over his chest to prolong his agony (BT Avodah Zarah 17b).[4]
We remember Hannah and her seven sons, R. Akiva, R. Hananiah b. Teradyon – the paradigmatic martyrs of Jewish memory, tortured unto death.
We remember the torments of Crusader Europe.
The u’netaneh tokef, according to legend, was incorporated into our High Holiday liturgy after an incident of torture involving R. Amnon of Mainz, a rabbi of the tenth century who was brutally tortured and maimed after refusing to convert. On Rosh Hashanah, he was carried to the synagogue, where he led the congregation in reciting u’netaneh tokef and then promptly died. A century later, the legend goes, he appeared to Rabbi Kalonymus ben Meshullam in a dream and asked that this prayer be recited each year during the Yamim Noraim. The story and poem were popularized, given their martyrological associations, among Jews suffering through the violence of the Crusades.
The Crusader period saw the advent of blood libels and the condemnation of entire communities to torture and death; in 1171, the false accusation that a Jewish man had murdered a Christian child induced the Count of Blois to enchain and imprison all of the local Jews, then torture fifty men and women and burn them at the stake.
We are tormented and ill-treated,
And dragged to die upon the scaffold,
We cling to You with growing fervor.[5]
A Tosafot commentary on BT Avodah Zarah 18a, roughly contemporary with the Crusades, expresses the darkness of the times in the question it addresses; one may override the prohibition against suicide, avows Rebbenu Tam, when subjected to unbearable torture as a pressure to convert.
We remember those accused falsely and those condemned for others’ wrongdoing, those who lived in constant fear and those forced to make impossible choices, those who submitted and those who resisted tyranny with their lives.
We remember the tortures of the Inquisition.
During the Spanish Inquisition, Jewish women – particularly conversos and crypto-Jews – were the primary targets and victims of torture. We remember Maria and Isabel Lopez, accused of abstaining from pork and wearing festive clothes on the Jewish Sabbath. The Lopez family was subjected to a form of water torture called the “escalera,” in which defendants were bound naked to a scaffold with their feet over their heads and their faces covered with headpieces. Victims experienced a sense of suffocation when water was poured over their faces and pressure progressively increased through tightened ropes:
“And the said Lord inquisitors ordered the said Maria Lopez to be taken to the torture chamber and to be undressed and to be placed on the rack of torment and to be tied with some hemp ropes. She was undressed and placed on the said rack and tied with the said ropes and was required and admonished by the said Lord Inquisitors to tell the truth: who were those persons whom she had seen commit those heretical crimes of which she is accused? Because the intention of your Graces is none other than to know the entire truth, and if she dies during torture or receives an injury to any limb, it will be her fault and not that of your Graces…The order was made to pour water with a pitcher [that contains up to four pints] and [to put] something additional upon her face on top of the silk headdress that she had on her face. It was ordered for the ropes to be tightened with a tourniquet and it was tightened with two tourniquets.[6]
The meticulous Inquisition records document the subsequent torture of Maria’s daughter Isabel before her eyes, two and a half jars of water poured down her throat while the ropes were tightened and Isabel cried out for help, vowing that she had already told the truth and had nothing more to confess.
Other accounts record the shame of women forced to undress before their inquisitors, asking to be blindfolded so as not to have to see themselves naked and exposed. The scribe records a woman crying out as her clothes were removed: “the affront is much worse to fear than the pain…so it is for the innocent and the guilty alike.”[7]
We remember all those women and men tormented for “withholding evidence,” those who refused to “procure information” and those who had none to give, those who confessed and those who didn’t, those who were condemned and those who were absolved after withstanding untold agony and debasement.
We remember the unspeakable persecution of the Holocaust.
We remember not only the gas chambers and the mass graves, but also the assaults on dignity and precious religious commitments: the presentation of pork on Yom Kippor to starving inmates; the shaving of beards; the sexual violation and rape of women and men. We remember the humiliation and disgust of those forced to stew in their own excrement, refused access to latrines and toilet paper: “Urine and excreta poured down the prisoners’ legs, and by nightfall the excrement, which had frozen to our limbs, gave off its stench… we were really no longer human beings in the accepted sense. Not even animals, but putrefying corpses moving on two legs.”[8] Alexander Donat notes that he and his fellow inmates insisted on washing themselves with their coffee in the morning, no matter their hunger or thirst, for to not do so “was the first step to the grave. It was almost an iron law: those who failed to wash every day soon died.”[9]
We remember not only the slaughter, but also the daily cruelties, the crushing of self-respect, the attacks on religious faith, the robbing of humanity.
We remember mass suspicion and collective punishment throughout the centuries.
Two or three Jews were in charge of the king’s mint, and it was discovered that the coins were flawed. The king was greatly incensed and his wrath burned to the extent that he wished to expel all the Jews from his kingdom. After great efforts, a compromise was struck with the king, whereby he would refrain from expelling the Jews in exchange for a thousand gold pieces. This levy which the king imposed upon the Jews was pure theft… for [is it reasonable that] because of the mistake of two or three Jews, the king should be angered with all the Jews and expel them forcibly from his land unless they pay him several thousand gold pieces!? It was regarding a case like this that our patriarch Abraham of blessed memory said to the Holy One, blessed be He, “Far be it from You to do such a thing.” And [so said] our master Moses of blessed memory, “Shall one man sin, and You will be angry with all the community?” And the old Aramaic adage rightly asks: “Tuvia chata v’Zigud nagad!?” (Tuvia sinned and Zigud was lashed!?). If so, this levy is pure theft (Rivash, Responsa Rivash HaHadashot 9).[10]
Our texts record the pretexts used to punish the innocent and righteous alongside the guilty. We remember Jews blamed for the death of Jesus, the blood of Christian children, the revolutionary upsurge, the economic crisis.
We honor all the Jews, throughout the ages, who were scorned and demonized, mortified and tortured, deemed suspicious and punished en masse.
We remember, and our memories renew our empathy.
Torture heralds the breakdown of empathy – the failure to see the one tortured as a human being.[11]
But we Jews cannot afford to live without empathy. For we know the person beaten and degraded could be us, our families, our loved ones, the members of our communities. And the One who heard our cries in Egypt commanded that our alienation and tears become a wellspring of compassion for all who suffer.
We remember the escalara, the water tortures of the Inquisition, and we cry out that “waterboarding” is an approved method of the C.I.A. – suspects strapped to a board, turned upside down, and immersed in a wet towel to simulate the feeling of drowning until they lose consciousness.
We remember R. Hananiah b. Teradyon burning inside his Torah scroll, the stripping of women during the Inquisition, the forced eating of pork and shearing of beards in the Holocaust, and we cry out that authorized treatment in U.S. military detention includes stripping traditional Muslim men naked, forcibly shaving their beards, dressing them in lingerie, and subjecting them to various other forms of sexual humiliation. We mourn that the Qur’an has been desecrated in Guantánamo[12] and that detainees in Abu Ghraib – in addition to being sexually violated on international television – were force-fed pork and alcohol.[13] We cry out, imagining our traditional family members and forefathers stripped, shaved, smeared with menstrual blood, and rubbed with the breasts of female interrogators dressed in lacy thongs.
We remember Jews forced to work in labor camps with feces and urine streaming down their legs, and we cry out that detainees in Guantánamo have been subjected to forced enemas and found stewing in their own excrement for 18-24 hours,[14] and that detainees in Abu Ghraib have been smeared with feces, forced to drink from toilet bowls, forced to stir pots of feces and urine, and left to soil themselves.
We remember Jews throughout the ages, rounded up, tortured, and killed for the suspected crimes of the few, and we cry out at the indiscriminate round-ups that have condemned thousands of innocent people to detention and cruel and degrading treatment at the hands of American armed forces.[15] We cry out against guilt by association, fathers being put to death for the sins of their children, the innocent swept away with the guilty.
We cry out because the psychological shields of the untouched majority – denial (it’s not really happening), minimization (it’s not really so bad), justification (it must be done), and dehumanization (they must deserve it) – have been used, all too often, against our people as well.
We cry out because the heart of the stranger is our own heart, the humiliation of the stranger our own humiliation, and the persecution of the stranger our own persecution.
We cry out and commit ourselves to action to ensure that no one under our government’s jurisdiction be made to suffer torments like those our ancestors endured.
[1] This introduction is drawn in part from material in Nehama Leibowitz,Studies in Shemot, pp. 1-11 and 379-389.
[2] One of the two verbs used Biblically to refer to oppression – both of us in Egypt, and of the stranger amongst us – is the verb used in contemporary Hebrew to refer to torture (inui).
[3] Mahzor Hadash, Prayer Book Press, 1977, p. 732
[4] For descriptions of torture of Jews in the Roman criminal justice system, see Saul Lieberman, “Roman Legal Institutions in Early Rabbinics and in theActa Martyrum,” in Texts and Studies, Ktav, 1974, pp. 112-177.
[5] Yehudah ben Kalonymus, 1st crusade, Speyer, Germany.
[6] Renee Levine Melammed, Heretics or Daughters of Israel: The Crypto-Jewish Women of Castille, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 136-137.
[7] Angel Alcala, “Maria de Cazalla: The Grievous Price of Victory,” Women in the Inquisition, ed. by Mary E. Giles, John Hopkins Press, 1999, p. 113
[8] Reska Weiss, Journey Through Hell, Vallentine, Mitchell, 1961, p. 211
[9] Alexander Donat, The Holocaust Kingdom, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1965, p. 173. Cf. Terence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, Oxford University Press, 1976, ch. 3.
[10] Cited in Rav Meir Batiste, “Collective Punishment,” Crossroads: Halacha and the Modern World, Vol. V, Zomet Institute, 1999, pp. 233-234
[11] Studies of bystanders suggest that dehumanization tends to accompany feelings of powerlessness to help. When subjects believe they have control over the fate of a victim, they describe the victim in much more positive terms; when they believe they have no control they tend to disparage the victim. John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture, New York, 2000, p. 251.
[12] See Dan Eggen and Josh White, “Inmates Alleged Koran Abuse, FBI Papers Cite Complaints as Early as 2002,” Washington Post, May 26, 2005, athttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/25/AR2005052501395.html and Roland Watson, “US Admits Guard Soiled Koran at Guantanamo,” Times Online, athttp://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1641152,00.html
[13] “Abu Ghraib Inmates Recall Torture,” BBC News, Jan. 12, 2005, athttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4165627.stm
[14] See Josh White, U.S. is Found Lacking in Detainee Care PlansWashington Post, July 9, 2005, and Carol Leonnig, “Further Detainee Abuse Alleged,” Washington Post, Dec. 26, 2004, athttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25962-2004Dec25.html
[15] The International Committee of the Red Cross report, produced shortly before the Abu Ghraib scandal, reports that “Certain military intelligence officers told the ICRC that in their estimate between 70-90 percent of persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.” More recent official estimates drop that figure to two-thirds, while estimates of “mistaken identities” at Guantánamo hover around 40 percent.
