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?