Killing and Letting Die: The Sixth Commandment

 

Ah, the old “thou shalt not kill.” So pleasantly non-controversial. So easy to agree with. So easy to follow. So accessible. So unambiguous. So comfortably devoid of any ancient, foreign religious weirdness. Right?

 

Especially if you translate the Hebrew verb ratzach, as many do, as “murder” rather than “kill.” Then we’re only talking about what Colonel Mustard might do with the lead pipe in the library. We’re not talking about killing in self-defense. We’re not talking about killing in war. We’re not talking about killing animals. We’re only talking about unprovoked, premeditated murder of a human being. I think we could probably all get on board with that being a bad thing that we should be commanded to not do.

 

But the thing is, and I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say that the majority of people in the world wouldn’t dream of actually doing it to begin with. Most of us don’t murder. And we don’t murder, not because we’re commanded not to, but because we’re naturally, strongly inclined not to. We might joke in moments of frustration, “I want to kill so-and-so,” but we’re not actually going to go do it. (At least I won’t. Usually.) And I’m going to go out on another limb and say that someone like Ivan Lopez who murdered three people at Ft. Hood this week, who evidently is inclined to murder, is not going to not do it because he is commanded not to. Whatever his suffering was, whether it was PTSD or mental illness or what’s now being called “moral injury,” it took him outside of any realm where the Ten Commandments could have made a difference.

 

The Ten Commandments are practical. The other nine address things that we actually are inclined to do and that we do do, but where we might, with the right intention and inspiration and teaching, move toward a better path. To narrowly understand lo tirtzach as “don’t murder” would make it a pretty meaningless commandment. Those who could hear it wouldn’t need it, and those who needed it would be unable to hear it. This commandment can’t just be about murder. It’s got to be more complicated than that.

 

And luckily there’s no shortage of rabbis who are all too happy to complicate it for us. Here’s a sampling of what the medieval rabbinic commentators had to say about it:

 

Rabbi Ibn Ezra: “Do not murder, either physically or by your speech by lying, gossiping, deliberately giving fatal advice; or failing to reveal a secret that might save a life. If you do not reveal it, you are like a murderer.”

 

Rabbi Hizkuni: “Do not murder, even by remaining silent when a murderer’s plans become known to you. In fact, it really means ‘Do not kill,’ whether justly or unjustly.”

 

Rabbi Abarbanel: “The prohibitions of murder, adultery, and theft are undoubtedly not single commandments, but headings that contain many commandments under them.”

 

And I’ll add one more by Rabbi Nahmanides, just because it’s poetic. He writes, speaking in God’s voice: “Do not vandalize my creation by spilling human blood.” I love that idea of killing as vandalizing creation.

 

Each one of these could be the basis of a sermon in itself. But what they seem to have in common is that they all define lo tirtzach more broadly to include indirect killing, passive killing, and simply letting someone die when you could save them. Suddenly this commandment is not so simple. This opens up a huge moral can of worms for us in the first world who routinely let people die whom we could save. The simplest example of this is the shiny brochures we get in the mail and online that advertise how for some relatively small sum of money, we can save the life of a child in Bangladesh. We may give to charity in this way a little, but we’re certainly not spending every last available cent saving these children. Likewise, most of us don’t give blood every time we could, which is technically every two months, even though we could more save lives if we did. We let people die, for reasons that are incredibly complicated.

 

One of those reasons is that we tend to think there’s a big moral difference between killing and letting die. Our Western conventional ethics suggest that we have a negative obligation to not hurt others, but not a positive obligation to help others. We have an obligation to not push someone who can’t swim into a swimming pool, but no absolute obligation to rescue someone already drowning in that same pool. Perhaps these medieval rabbis are contesting the idea that these two are really so different.

 

Modern day philosopher James Rachels lays out the argument this way:

“A woman wants her uncle dead, and she gives him poison in his coffee. Another woman, who also wants her uncle dead, is about to give him poison when she sees him unknowingly drink poison from another source. She watches him die, withholding the antidote in her pocket. Does either woman behave better? If the bare difference between killing and letting die were morally important, then the second woman’s behavior would be better. But it is not. Therefore, the argument goes, the difference between killing and letting die is not morally important.”

 

But, some of us might protest, the woman wants her uncle dead. Her murderous intention is the problem here, not whether she did or did not literally hand him the poisoned coffee. And it’s true: intention does matter. When we go out to dinner instead of sending money to a starving child in Bangladesh, we don’t want the child to die. We’re generally not thinking about him at all. And while that does make a difference in some sense, I wonder how much difference it really makes from the perspective of the Bangladeshi child.

 

I love geeking out on these ethical questions but it’s not ultimately that useful. If we set out to not let anyone die, we could devote our whole lives to it and still we would fail. This is not my goal and I don’t believe it was the goal of the Ten Commandments author. But the question does serve to broaden our thinking about what our obligations are with respect to the lives of others. We live in an interconnected global society in which many of the products that we rely on in our daily lives are produced at the expense of the health or sometimes the lives of people far away. The produce that we eat may be grown with pesticides that cause cancer and birth defects in the farmworkers and their families. The clothes that we wear may be made by workers in factories that can collapse. Most significantly, I think, the workings of our whole economy in this country is contributing to an overheating planet, causing deadly storms and rising waters that have killed many and will kill many more.

 

Now we’re talking about, not individuals, but systems that kill. If we understand lo tirtzach to include the systems in which we participate, then our nice, non-controversial commandment has suddenly become politically radical. And contemporary theologians, including the current Pope, are understanding it this way. In the apostolic exhortation he released in November, Pope Francis wrote:

“Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality.’ Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? …Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away when people are starving?… Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.”

Those are the words of the Pope.

 

And lets look again at the rabbinic commentators in the light of this systemic thinking. Drug companies let people die rather than price drugs at a level that’s affordable to people in poorer countries or even poor people in this country without insurance. They fiercely guard the intellectual property that is the real value of these drugs. Again, there are complex reasons for this, but it is a clear instance of what Rabbi Ibn Ezra called, “…failing to reveal a secret that might save a life.”

 

When employees at a car company become aware that they are sending vehicles out into the marketplace that have faulty parts that can and have caused deaths and don’t speak up about it for years, this is an instance of what Rabbi Hizkuni called, “remaining silent when a murderer’s plans become known to you.” Murder, of course, is not the intention. But, again, how much difference does it really make to the victims whether their deaths are caused by hostility or by indifference?

 

What are our obligations to people, most of whom we will never know, but whose very lives are on the line with our collective action and inaction? The Commandment lo tirtzach does not answer this question – 3,000 years ago the author could not have possibly anticipated a world in which systems could kill; in which we could communicate with people we would never meet, where we could passively, inadvertently, indirectly kill people on the other side of the planet. Lo tirtzach does not answer the question of what are our obligations to these people. But it does ask the question.

 

It prompts us to ask the question and to not be satisfied with an easy answer. We know that we have not done our job on this planet by simply refraining from poisoning our uncle’s coffee. Ethics is more complicated than that. We live in a world in which everyone touches everything and everything touches everyone. We know this and yet we also know that we can’t fix it all and heal it all and save everyone ourselves.

 

And so maybe this commandment serves as a north star – an orientation toward the world to which we should all aspire. Maybe we need to understand it as Nahmanides understood it – that we are not to vandalize creation by spilling human blood. The world with all its creatures is a living work of art in which every brush stroke is crucial. The commandment “Do not kill” call us as religious people is to nurture life on this earth; to support systems that are healthy and compassionate; to speak up when we see lethal injustice. “Do not kill” at is simplest is a call for world peace: a call for each of us to protect, honor, and serve all the creatures of the earth.