Torture, Terrorism, and the Halakhah 35

other members of his Commission could hardly be depicted as “indecent,” and their conclusions reflect a serious and thoughtful effort to draw a balance between the rule of law and the need to protect the public.’® My purpose, rather, is to suggest that these sentiments have a special resonance with us. I suspect that we liberal halakhists tend to recognize our story in the words of these critics of the Landau Commission report as well as in the words of Chief Justice Barak. In our narrative, the Torah does not stand in implacable opposition to modern culture; instead, it incorporates that culture’s highest cultural achievements and moral insights. For this reason, we cannot accept an interpretation of Torah and halakhah that would sanction the imitation of the methods of the terrorists, that would allow us to act, in the name of“righteousness,” in a manner that is“shocking to the conscience,” destructive of the rule of law and of the very concept of human rights. Modernity, to be sure, has seen a great falling away from the path of religious discipline. Its emphasis upon the centrality of the individual is in many ways at odds, as Warhaftig notes, with traditional Jewish teaching. We are not blind to this reality. We frequently take our society to task for its materialism, for its addiction to a technology that often strangles human values, and for its numerous other shortcomings. Yet for all that, we liberals believe in progress. Modernity has deepened our understanding of the content of the halakhic principle kevod haberiyot and of the traditional notion that each one of us is created in the Divine image. These ideals were defined differently during Biblical, Talmudic , and Maimonidean times. Jews in those days told different stories about their world and about their place in it, and that world may not have been hospitable to the ideals of individual freedom, religious and intellectual pluralism and tolerance, and limited government. We liberals, however, cannot conceive of a moral universe that does not involve a commitment to these ideals. And as liberal halakhists, we cannot and do not interpret Torah and Jewish law in a way that lies separate and apart from them.

When we recognize these facts— that is, when we acknowledge that we always and inevitably interpret our law from within the structure of our narratives— we learn how to read those texts which, on their face, run counter to that structure. And this brings me to Warhaftig’s citation from the Mishneh Torah, in which Rambam speaks of the beit din’s power to“contend with, curse, beat, and pull the hair” of a prisoner, not as a legally-specified punishment for a transgression that he has committed but as an inducement to him to behave properly. The text does seem to provide an unambiguous warrant for vigorous government