A great rabbi stands teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultry, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. (There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine, a Speaker for the Dead, has told me of two other rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you.) The rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him, the mob forbears, and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. 'Is there anyone here,' he says to them, 'who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?' They murmer and say, 'We all know the desire. But, Rabbi, none of us has acted on it.' The rabbi says, 'Then kneel down and give thanks that God made you strong.' He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, 'Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress. Then he'll know I'm his loyal servant.' So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder. Another rabbi, another city. He goes to her and stops the mob, as in the other story, and says, 'Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.' The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. Someday, they think, I may be like this woman, and I'll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her the way I wish to be treated. As they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground, the rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman's head, and throws it straight down with all his might. It crushes her skull and dashes her brains onto the cobblestones. 'Nor am I without sin,' he says to the people. 'But if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it.' So the women died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance. The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis, and when they veer too far, they die. Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So, of course, we killed him.

Morality·Judgment·Mercy