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?