We Ought to Know Better Than This!

Kidnapping is an old and ugly crime. Jewish tradition asserts that the commandment “Thou shalt not steal” is really about stealing people — kidnapping. We see that by context, for it is surrounded in the Ten Commandments by other capital crimes, like murder. The command against theft of property appears later, in Leviticus. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: The Necessity of Judgment)

Despite the fact that it is a grievous crime, the focus of the legal system built on Scripture has been first not so much on punishing the offender but on bringing relief to the victim of the crime — our first priority should be humanitarian. The superb jurist and philosopher, Rabbi Moses Maimonides, put it this way in his magnificent and influential code of law:

The redemption of captives receives priority over sustaining the poor and providing them with clothing. [Indeed,] there is no greater mitzvah than the redemption of captives. For a captive is among those who are hungry, thirsty, and unclothed and he is in mortal peril.

He goes on to rule that even if a community has gathered funds for the sacred purpose of building a house of worship and the work has begun, those funds should be diverted to ransoming captives if other means cannot be found. In short, emphasizing by repetition, he rules, “There is no mitzvah [commandment] as great as the redemption of captives.”

That sounds definitive — ‘nuff said. If it is the greatest of commandments, then nothing else can take precedence.

But that isn’t the end of the matter. The real affairs of this troubled world are rarely uncomplicated. It may well be that no other command can trump this, but doesn’t rule out the command trumping itself.

Maimonides writes:

We do not redeem captives for more than their worth for the benefit of the world at large (tikkun olam), so that enemies will not pursue people to hold them captive.

True that we must be concerned about victims. But that includes not only the current victims but also those whom we can reasonably assume would become victims through our incentivizing kidnapping. His point here is that when the ransom goes way beyond the going rate in this criminal enterprise, you unleash powerful market forces that will practically guarantee that more will be kidnapped and it will be more difficult to extract them from their misery.

You may have noted the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam quoted from the original text. It may be because that phrase was used by Obama and his supporters and allies to give a Jewish legitimacy to their political and moral agenda. As they use it, it means doing things to make the world better — so far, so good. But then they use it to overrule custom, precedent, or any other legal or moral impediment to the implementation of their programs, as if it were a constitutional provision that nullifies every obstacle in their way. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Support Policies We Can Live With)

Here, in Maimonides’ master text, we can see the meaning of tikkun olam is not some sledgehammer that allows good intentions to justify anything. Rather, it is very specific. It is about avoiding the foreseeable negative consequences of a specific policy, and overriding it in that instance. It is looking at the larger picture in which a law narrowly considered would wind up working against its own aim. Tikun olam means to consider the law or the policy in its wholeness and thereby achieve its aims.

We have seen great policies fail due to this. The Great Society of LBJ was the result of laudable intentions but of policies that in the end have too often worsened the situations they were meant to better. Thomas Sowell among others memorably demonstrated how the Great Society programs incentivized behaviors that weakened the black family and the black church, the great voluntary private institutions that kept hope alive when bigotry was the rule in our public life. 

But politicians are thirsty for power. Why care about the repercussions to merely private institutions when they had a unique opportunity to marshal unprecedented federal power to address a worthy cause? In a one-party Washington, this was irresistible. Of course, all institutions except government were viewed as ineffectual and were written out. Trillions of dollars later, we are still dealing with the consequences of policies that may have been well-intentioned but resulted in grave and lasting injury. Government cannot substitute for the most basic building blocks of civilization — the home and the faith community.

Such unintended consequences can often be anticipated, and to the degree that they can be, we are responsible to avoid them. And so Maimonides rules in the case of ransoming captives — be good but be smart and responsible. Good intentions are no excuse for bad policy. The suffering of the next victims will not be relieved one bit by those intentions.

The Obamaists of the Executive Branch seem to double down on past mistakes wherever and whenever they can, inoculated against reality by their own good intentions, Contemptuous of any insights except their own, they forge ahead with marvelous abandon, convinced of their own good.

There is a certain charm when a teenager does that, with the hope that perhaps the young person will be treated with kindness by the world and will learn wisdom through gentle lessons.

But these are not teenagers whose recklessness mostly affects themselves. These are power people, adept at outsourcing to the less powerful the foreseeable pain their policies will cause. 

Six billion dollars are being released to the terrorist state of Iran. There will be no controls on how this money will be used any more than there were on any other agreement Iran has signed onto. Six billion dollars will surely be spent on strengthening Iran’s baleful influence, including their well-known policy of seeking the destruction of Israel, a policy publicly reaffirmed again and again since the mullahs’ accession to power more than forty years ago.  (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Religious Freedom Deserves a Strong Defense)

Offering gigantic incentives to the gangster regime to kidnap some more won’t bring peace, though the Obamaist hard core hope it will bring a renewed nuke agreement. Our current administration gives no evidence that it much cares what follows that either.

We ought to rejoice with the families of the prisoners and with the prisoners themselves on their freedom. May God heal their hurt and may they live long in freedom.

We also ought to pray that God save the future victims from the natural consequences of the policies of the irresponsible, negligent, reckless, and impossibly self-absorbed appeasers of the blood-drenched Iranian regime.

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