Reshus L'Mashchis

כיון שניתן רשות למשחית אינו מבחין בין צדיקים לרשעים

"Kiven Shniten Reshus L'mashchis Aino Mavchin beyn Tzadikim la’Reshaim" (Talmud Bava Kama Chapter 6)

This phrase is usually brought out when the Shoah (Holocaust) is discussed, to explain why both religious AND non-religious Jews were killed and why the killing was indiscriminate. One would think, considering all the promises made in the Torah to those who keep the commandments, and they would naturally be spared the wrath that ensues. I can think of no better testimonial to the Faith of Israel and the existence of God, than the protection of his faithful in troubled times. But alas, it was not to be.

For those of you who don’t know what that phrase means, I’ll translate it here. “Since permission is granted to the Destroyer, He (the Destroyer) makes no differentiation between Righteous and Wicked.”

This means that once God unleashes this ‘punisher/destroyer’, it no longer matters whether one is righteous or sinful, because this Destroyer doesn’t make any effort to discern between good and bad individuals. Shit. Even Santa Claus manages that! What’s up with the Destroyer? Is he dumb? Or is he just lazy? How is this possible?

This is the excuse intended to justify all the inconsistencies in God’s Judgments/Actions as it concerns protecting the righteous and punishing the wicked. It is but another layer of deceit, another level of rabbinic spin-doctoring, serving as more apologetics/excuses as to why God fails to keep His promises and routinely disregards His own sense of jurisprudence as it is stated in Torah.

The claim is that this Destroyer does not (or cannot) make differentiations, but in Exodus, when God told Moses that He was going to kill the First Born of Egypt, He instructed Moses to have the Jews paint a mark in blood on the doorpost of their home, so the Angel Destroyer would see that it is a Jewish Home and not kill the firstborn inside. What we see from the Plague of the First Born is that this Angel Destroyer is in fact capable of discerning between good/bad, Jew/Gentile, and believer/apostate. This is why we call the holiday Passover. The Torah suggests that the Destroyer IS capable, but for some reason the rabbis do not. (It’s about time they got their story straight.)

Furthermore, the Talmud in Bava Kama (I’m so glad I looked it up) is explaining why the Israelites were told to stay in their homes the entire night, because being outside would expose them to the Destroyer. The reason staying in the home would protect them from destruction was because they were participating in the Paschal Offering (that’s where the blood came from for the doorpost) and the Destroyer would see that the people fulfilled the Mitzvah and skip over their homes. So it was this one and only Mitzvah they had that saved them. So why didn’t the 613 mitzvos of Torah (plus the 7 of the Rabbis) act as enough protection for the righteous Jews of the 1940s?

Now some would argue that it was the non-religious who brought down the Destroyer on everyone. Maybe so. But that doesn’t explain how the righteous became caught up in that. If we go back to the Exodus from Egypt, Rashi explains that only one fifth of the Jews actually left Egypt, and the remaining ones were killed in the Plague of the First Born. So once again I ask, if God was able to differentiate in ancient times, why wasn’t He able to do it in the 20^th century?

In addition to all of the above issues, angels like Raphael, Satan, or the Angel of Death, according to Jewish Tradition do not have free will, but are mindless messengers of God. For this reason, it is claimed, the Angels did not receive a Torah because without free will, a code of law would be unnecessary. This ‘Destroyer’ is essentially an automaton, fulfilling the will and desire of its Maker. So if God made it, and God sent it, then why do we not say that God Himself does not discriminate between righteous and sinful, and cut out the middleman?

This deception is designed to deflect attention and blame for our suffering from the God who ORDERED it, onto a ‘Destroyer’, who in reality could have done nothing less than it was commanded to do by his Superior. If I program a computer to send out a virus over a wide network, then it is not the computer that is to blame, but the programmer and operator of that computer. Angels are, in every sense of the word, inanimate objects in motion, possessing neither will nor consciousness of their own. This is what Judaism believes.

The bigger issue is how God can take such an attitude that is direct conflict with everything that anyone holds as fair and just, that the righteous are rewarded and only the guilty are punished. If God is truly Omniscient, then He must KNOW who is deserving of punishment or not, yet He, for some unknown reason, decided that fairness was not a priority. Its not reassuring to imagine that even after years of following the spirit and letter of Jewish Law, that one could be swept away by suffering and murder as if he had been the greatest evildoer of all time. This means that in spite of God’s Omniscience and assumed love for Justice and Right, He is willing to IGNORE His own Torah, and murder the righteous along with the wicked. God doesn’t have to worry though, since his Rabbis are planning another argument in His defense.

No one would try and justify the execution of an entire family or community because of the sin or crime of one of its members, especially when the criminal is KNOWN and can be picked out for punishment on his own. That is something done by tyrants and maniacs.

This notion of indiscriminate punishment from a God who should know better, offends humanity’s sense of both justice and compassion. I guess it is as the song says, “You only hurt the ones you love.”