When irreligious Jews or gentiles hear about this Torah attitude of capital punishment so they think it may be too extreme and that the Torah is wicked.
ANSWER: Of course they do! Because the outside world has all kinds of criminal attitudes. I once spoke in one of these lectures. A man came over to me. He was a high school principal or something. And he said, “Rabbi Miller, you advocate capital punishment? How can you think of killing?”
So, I said to him, “Suppose a man was about to murder your mother, would you kill him to save your mother?”
“Oh no!” he said.
So, this ideal of being righteously ‘just’ to the criminal and being very stern on the decent people, that attitude, of course, looks down on the Torah that condemns a criminal to death. But we have to realize that the mercy and the compassion of today's liberal world is actually the worst kind of cruelty. It's a result of their compassion that murder today is on a bigger scale than ever before. That's the compassion. Like the rasha, yemach shemo, Cuomo, said. Cuomo said “I'm going to veto the death penalty because it's barbaric. It's barbarism.” But we have to know that Cuomo is a murderer who is constantly killing people, every day, as a result of his attitude. If there was a death penalty there's no question that murderers wouldn't repeat their crimes. Once you kill a murderer, you're finished with him. It's the best rehabilitation. And so, as a result of the liberal compassion on criminals, crime today, murder today, is more than it was ever before. June 1992
Reprinted from this week’s email of Torah Avigdor based on a lecture delivered on. June 1992).
