.. It was refreshing to see a popular television drama offer a Jewish perspective on a political issue that captured the depth and nuance of what we call “ .” On the NBC series The West Wing, set in a fictional White House, President Josiah Bartlett (Martin Sheen) is under pressure to commute the death sentence of a murderer convicted under federal narcotics law. The inmate’s lawyer begins a last-minute, full-court press on the president’s staff, going so far as to contact the rabbi of White House Communications Director Toby Ziegler (the marvelously kvetchy Richard Schiff).
I couldn’t help but compare this episode of The West Wing with a story line a few years back on the hit ABC series The Practice. In those episodes (based on a novel by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, a CLAL Associate), a rabbi is arrested for giving tacit approval to a father who says he intends to (and later does) gun down the suspected murderer of his daughter.
The show went on to a lively and fascinating defense of the “Jewish view” on revenge and vigilantism. The rabbi maintains that his advice to the father was based on a number of biblical injunctions, including Numbers 35:19 (“the revenger of blood himself shall slay the murderer”).
In the dramatic courtroom climax, the prosecutor (himself Orthodox) challenges the rabbi by saying, “Are you aware of the Talmud’s attitude toward capital punishment?” But before he can quote the Talmud, the father explodes, saying he won’t be cowed by the prosecutor’s “fancy words” and that he knows that what he did was justified in God’s eyes. The prosecutor never gets to finish, and the jury rules in the father’s–and the rabbi’s–favor.
The rabbi and the father both quoted the Bible accurately. But the prosecutor’s reference to Talmud was hardly “fancy words”; rather, it was an invitation to a debate within Judaism that began almost as soon as the Five Books of Moses were canonized and that continues to this day.
