When [Hillel] saw a skull floating on the water, he said to it, “Because you drowned others, they drowned you. In the end, they who drowned you shall be drowned.” Pirke Avot 2:7

I’m sitting next to Hillel on the bank of the Jordan river back in the day when it was more than a trickle. We see a skull float by. I’m thinking, “Gross! Yuck! Poor guy.” And Hillel, great sage that he is, comes up with the perfect formulation of Jewish Karma. All right, so next to Hillel, I’m kind of s schlepper. But my skills shine when it comes to knowing how to Google!

Hillel is enamored with Exodus 21:23-25, “the penalty shall be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.” Let’s see where that might lead (thanks to Reb Google):

In 1914, a member of the Canadian House of Parliament named Mr. Graham argued against the death penalty. He said, “We can argue all we like, but if capital punishment is being inflicted on some man, we are inclined to say: ‘It serves him right.’ That is not the spirit, I believe, in which legislation is enacted. If in this present age we were to go back to the old time of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ there would be very few honorable gentlemen in this House who would not, metaphorically speaking, be blind and toothless.”

Or more concisely, in Fiddler on the Roof, a man says, “We should defend ourselves. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” And Tevye responds, “Very good. And that way, the whole world will be blind and toothless.

Now as it happens, I’m not dead set again the death penalty, but I do believe that the evidentiary requirements for carrying it our should be extra-high. Not just guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but “beyond any shadow of doubt.” Hillel’s observation, however, is not limited to the arena of  punishment by human courts. The Karma he describes means that when we put out destructive energy, at some point in the future we will find ourselves facing the backlash from our negative behavior. All behavior, positive and negative, has inescapable consequences. Every action produces waves of energy which bounce around, affecting the world around us. Eventually, the waves will inevitably come back towards us, whether by human or divine agency.

The idea that our behavior affects our fate is a cornerstone of Judaism, hammered into our heads in the month and a half leading up to Yom Kippur. I tip my hat to our sage Hillel, whose immersion in the waters of Torah was so deep that he viewed everything that passed before through the lens of Jewish theology.

Hebrew Words of the Month (body parts connected to letters of the Hebrew alphabet):

• Ayin – eye
• Shen – tooth
• Peh – mouth
• Yad – hand
• Rosh – head
• Kaf – palm