8 | AUGUST 3 • 2023 

PURELY COMMENTARY

O

n Oct. 27, 2018, Robert Bowers 
entered Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life 
synagogue intending to kill 
Jews. His murder of 11 congregants was 
the deadliest antisemitic attack in our 
country’s history, shattering a community 
and forcing Jews, including me, to reckon 
with our place in America. 
At the time, I had just 
started a doctoral program 
in philosophy in New York. 
The attacks in Pittsburgh 
made it hard to be away 
from my hometown of 
Detroit. I remember 
speaking with my father 
after he returned from an outreach 
mission to Pittsburgh as CEO of Jewish 
Family Service of Metro Detroit. He 
tearfully recounted the outpouring of 
support from the Jewish community for 
those affected by the shooting, none of 
which could erase the fear and horror of 
what had happened. 
In June, a jury found Bowers guilty of 
all 63 federal charges brought against him, 
and, recently, the same jury voted that he 
is eligible to receive the death penalty. The 
prospect of a death penalty for Bowers 
has touched off a debate within the Jewish 
community about capital punishment, 
something that Jewish tradition allows but 
which it made nearly impossible to carry 
out in practice. 
Contemporary voices have expressed 
conflicting views — some calling for 
leniency in the name of compassion, 
others insisting that the death penalty is a 
just response to crimes of this magnitude, 
and still others criticizing our country’s 
brand of capital punishment in light of its 
racialized and deeply flawed outcomes. 
I want to add another voice to this 
important debate: that of the Jewish 
philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Born 
in 1905 in Kaunas, Lithuania, Levinas 
emigrated to France and spent five years 
as a prisoner of war under the Nazis. His 
status as a French officer protected him 

from the death camps, while his wife and 
daughter were hidden by nuns in Orléans. 
Virtually every other member of his family 
perished in the Shoah. As a graduate 
student, I have spent the past five years 
immersing myself in Levinas’ philosophy, 
whose signal achievement is to view 
responsibility for others as central to being 
human. This vision displaced a traditional 
view of power, freedom and knowledge as 
the starting points of selfhood. 
According to Levinas, our responsibility 
for others is unlimited because others are 
infinitely more than what we can know 
of them. To be responsible means to bear 
responsibility for another’s actions, even 
and especially when we cannot fathom the 
reasons behind them.
But Levinas’ ideas about responsibility 
do not stop here. We live in a world 
with multiple others for whom we 
are responsible. This means we must 
constantly weigh our obligations in 
order to meet everyone’s needs. Think, 
for instance, of a teacher who must 
balance the needs of each member of 
their classroom. But how should the 
teacher respond when one student harms 
another? How can they be responsible 
for both the injured and the guilty party? 
For Levinas, this problem represents the 
essence of what it means to pursue justice. 
Justice is not simply about applying laws 
to particular cases but about responding 
to social harms. The key point is that in 
seeking justice, we remain responsible for 
all parties involved.
Levinas was not opposed to punishment, 
and he recognized the importance of legal 
institutions for maintaining an equitable 
society. My dissertation, which is in 
progress, argues that a concern for justice 
runs through all our social interactions. 
Belonging to a community means being 
concerned with fairness, whether it 
involves a dispute in a basketball game or 
over the results of an election. The point is 
not that fairness is guaranteed — far from 
it. But our desire for equality and fairness 

is the glue that holds our society together. 
Despite acknowledging a role for 
judgment and punishment, Levinas also 
emphasized that “love must always watch 
over justice.” He means that what animates 
justice is not a desire for vengeance but an 
original responsibility for others, even and 
especially those who commit horrific acts. 
What does it mean to seek justice for 
the Tree of Life shootings? Can the pursuit 
of justice extend to the act of sentencing 
someone to death? Answering these 
questions means considering how we 
become responsible for others in the first 
place.
For Levinas, responsibility for another 
person is sparked through an encounter 
with their face. The face is something both 
holy and fragile. Even before someone 
speaks, their face cries out: “Thou shalt 
not kill.” This does not mean that the face 
is immune to violence. It has what Levinas 
calls an “ethical resistance,” which is as 
strong as the person who encounters it 
is good. If we accept this view, then the 
answer to the questions above is clear: 
while justice demands that we hold guilty 
parties accountable, we cannot do so by 
killing them. This restraint — perhaps 
Levinas would call it love — is what makes 
us human in the face of inhumanity. 
I sometimes wonder how, in the 
aftermath of the Shoah, Levinas remained 
convinced that people were inherently 
responsible, that violence represented 
the exception and not the rule of human 
conduct. The lesson I take away is that 
no matter how others treat us, the only 
thing we have control over is how to 
respond. Whatever the outcome of Bowers’ 
sentencing, the debate our community is 
having over the death penalty showcases 
the very best of our tradition — and our 
desire to respond to atrocities with justice, 
rather than vengeance. 

Charlie Driker-Ohren is a Metro Detroit native and 

a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Stony Brook 

University in New York.

Charlie 
Driker-Ohren

opinion

Does the Tree of Life Shooter 
Deserve the Death Penalty?

