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Religious Violence 85

himself at the cost of one of this[Asahel ’s] limbs. Solomon:“Yet perhaps he could not do so.”[Rashi Abner was unable to aim pre­cisely to hit one of his limbs]. Joab retorted:“If Abner could aim exactly at the fifth rib[where the gallbladder and liver are located], could he not have aimed at one of his limbs? Thereupon Solomon concluded:“Let's drop the incident of Abner....”

Thus the Yeshivah students learned the fate of a rodef from this Talmudic anecdote.

We have heard that when the accused killer addressed the court trying him for murder, Yigal Amir expounded not only his political motives but also the theological impetus for the crime. “According to halakhah, ” he intoned,“when a Jew hands over his people and land to the enemy, we must kill him.”

Where did the murderer learn this distorted“halakhah”? The rabbis of the various Orthodox educational institutions in which Yigal Amir studied over the years all disavowed respon­sibility for his views. Rabbi Mordechai Greenberg of the Kerem Be-Yavne yeshiva was quoted to the effect that“I do not believe that he absorbed the ideology behind his act in our yeshiva.” Rabbi Moshe Razel, the head of the Higher Institute for Torah at Bar-Ilan University , maintained that Amir and other right-wing students of this institution did not receive any Torah -based guid­ance that might be interpreted as justifying murder.

Where, then, did Amir derive the loathsome view that a “lofty goal” that is“a Heavenly injunction” may justify violation of the commandment“Thou shalt not murder”? We do know about one particular document that was distributed in some Synagogues on the Day of Atonement in 1995 and gleefully read out on television by a member of the extreme right-wing Kahane Chai group. Its heading is Pulsa Derura(an Aramaic expression that Rashi glosses as“lashes of fire”). The term appears in several Talmudic legends—for instance, the description of the punish­ment of the angel Gabriel (BT Yoma 77a—and, in more moderate form, in the responsa literature of the sixteenth through twentieth Centuries,

The document in question, however, is neither folktale nor Prayer(as it was sometimes described by the media). Rather, Influenced by“practical kabbalah” or witchcraft, it is a test of black magic and excommunication, a death-curse directed at a Particular person, in this case the late prime minister, as we learn from the text: