Veiled Vengeance: From the Death Penalty to the Gaza Genocide
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Vengeance.
It undeniably infects human affairs.
Parents observe it as their toddlers navigate playground dynamics: one child hits another; the other strikes back. Domestic feuds and old grudges can metastasize into jealousy, schadenfreude, and—if unchecked—retaliation. Belligerent drivers trigger micro-aggressions that can morph into road rage. In the extreme, assault and murder seem to beg for a commensurate response. Intentional harm breeds reciprocal foul. Whether on unabashed display or buried deeply beneath the surface, this base retributive impulse is potent, stealthy, and addictive—a perfect storm for inciting reactive violence. Society, to its peril, severely underestimates its capacity to do irrevocable damage.
Communally, this tit for tat unfolds with lethal consequences. Laws and government policies deftly conceal and enable the visceral thirst for vengeance through various forms of state-sponsored killing. This phenomenon particularly underpins two contemporary polarizing issues: the death penalty and the Gaza genocide. As the famed television personality and death penalty abolitionist Rev. Fred Rogers articulated, any form of the revenge model teaches children the patently hazardous lesson that two wrongs make a right. His wisdom rings true in both these cases.
The urge for retribution is insidious and subtle, often rendering it unrecognizable. It clouds objectivity, stifling judgment and self-awareness. It camouflages as false notions of “deterrence,” “public safety and security,” “justice,” a “Biblical mandate,” and “a lasting peace,” among other rationalizations. Many individuals and societies, therefore, vehemently deny any accusations of vengeful motivation—even for genocide—while unsuspectedly succumbing to its irresistible call.
The Shadow of the Holocaust
I should know. I once unwittingly operated under revenge’s cunning spell. As a third-generation Holocaust survivor, I used to experience the natural desire for vengeance against those who murdered my ancestors in cold blood. For years, that overpowering feeling contributed to my support of capital punishment. If I could not carry out that reprisal with my own hands, then I felt the state should do so by proxy against other murderers. “They should take ‘em out back and shoot ‘em,” some family suggested; “eye for an eye,” the Bible reinforced.
I was not alone among Jews in the wake of the Shoah (Holocaust) who harbored such feelings. Many certainly overcame rage and the urge for recompense, notably Elie Wiesel, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Albert Einstein, and Eva Mozes Kor. Other survivors and descendants like me held on to the pain and anger that grew from direct and intergenerational trauma.
A personal experience as recently as 2008 illuminated this reality for me. I was watching Mark Herman’s film adaptation of John Boyne’s fictional Holocaust novel “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” alongside a child survivor who was also a respected friend. In the climactic scene, the Nazis accidentally gassed to death a concentration camp commandant’s young son, who had befriended the film’s eponymous character. When the bereaved SS officer wept and screamed in agony upon discovering his child among the dead, my friend responded by flatly stating, “Good. Now they know how it feels.” In that fleeting moment, after watching a charged movie that so vividly portrayed the suffering of my ancestors, I agreed. While revenge was neither blissful nor sweet, for those few seconds, it felt bitterly just. Even after that emotion departed from my heart, how could I judge my friend for seeking to avenge his family members whom he had witnessed the Nazis murder, especially when I myself could identify with his reaction? We were only human, after all, living in the shadow of the wholesale mass murder of our people.
Unveiling Vengeance on Death Row
My vengeful impulse shifted later that same year when I started working as a Jewish prison chaplain in Canada with individuals whose convictions would have rendered them eligible for execution in certain United States jurisdictions. I learned what motivated those men and women to commit monstrous crimes, and I saw that many changed over time. They were not inherently evil. On the contrary, many began engaging in sincere repentance while safely incarcerated and no longer a threat to the public.
As I witnessed these human beings transform, so too did my views. My prison experiences unveiled my unconscious bias toward retribution, and I began to see it more clearly for what it was: an understandable wish for payback. In part to help break the cycle of violence into which I was born—and that I had been inadvertently perpetuating—I decided to launch into activism for death penalty abolition.
Since then, as an ordained cantor and co-founder of “L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty,” I have directly communicated for years with scores of condemned Americans— many now executed—as well as some of their victims’ loved ones. I have experienced the impact of government policies that shroud the collective appetite for vengeance in the form of psychologically and physically torturous state-sponsored executions. This pattern invariably repeats, even when murder victims’ family membersexpressly call for mercy. That tragically familiar scene unfurled again just this past week ahead of the United States’ most recent execution of Curtis Windom in Florida, whose governor predictably dismissed all such protests before he put him to death. As before, a political leader submitted to the will of death penalty advocates, many of whom harbor the mentality of “the more suffering, the better,” no matter if the existing execution methods of lethal injection, gassing, and the firing squad are unconscionable Nazi legacies.
Wielding Revenge in Gaza
A similar yearning to fulfill a deep-seated bloodlust has significantly influenced the Israeli government’s response to Hamas’ October 7, 2023, onslaught and the ongoing hostage crisis. That pogrom constituted the deadliest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, and the triggering of that historical memory and intergenerational trauma combined with the sheer devastation of the Hamas attack to create an unprecedented stimulus for violent response. Many have understood the incalculable brutality of that unjustifiable act of terrorism by observing that it, too, was in part a vengeful response to decades of suffering that Palestinians have endured since Israel’s 1948 independence, to which much of the Muslim world refers as the Nakba (“catastrophe.”) Since that unfathomable day nearly two years ago, Israeli hostage family members have increasingly demanded that government officials call for a ceasefire in Gaza to bring home their loved ones. Yet, the state has persisted in catering to hardliners who, motivated by vindictive extremism combined with Messianicreligious fundamentalism, use the excuse of Hamas recalcitrance to justify carrying out a genocidal policy of mass killing, destruction of societal infrastructure, and starvation. Pope Leo XIV rightfully labeled the outcome “collective punishment.” The effect strikingly evokes capital punishment, whose “machinery of death” so often overrides the wishes of murder victims’ families.
The terrorist organization Hamas, well-versed in revenge dynamics, strategically releases horrific videos of suffering and emaciated Israeli hostages such as Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski with the intention of stirring the popular bloodlust. On cue, Machiavellian and megalomaniacalleaders like Benjamin Netanyahu and convicted felon Donald J. Trump bow to the will of the riled hoi polloi so that they might hold onto power. Israel, in turn, continues its campaign of obliterating tens of thousands of innocent civilians who become martyrs, thereby playing directly into Hamas’ hands. Meanwhile, my coreligionists who are unable to see beyond vengeance’s capped lens project displaced anger onto those of us who dare to name the genocide that Israel’s government perpetuates.
Let there be no doubt: there is a time for fighting—even killing—to fend off lethal aggressors. The Axis Powers during the Second World War immediately come to mind, among many other examples. In the current human evolutionary phase, nations consequently must maintain strong militaries. Still, there is a time for even the most just wars to end, lest they cross the thin red line into unleashing a disproportionate force that cloaks collective punishment, as the Gaza genocide confirms.
Causality is complex, rarely reducible to a single point. As with any military conflict, multiple other geopolitical and historical factors are at play in the spiraling tempest that is Israel/Palestine. Likewise, various political considerations unrelated to the lex talionis psyche determine a state’s utilization of capital punishment. The carnal drive for vengeance, however, remains integral to both execution chamber protocols and to the policies that have buried countless emaciated children in the Gaza rubble. Neither would exist without the primitive urge of the revenge response that has propelled the cycle of violence and plagued humanity since time immemorial. Restorative justice practices, including harm acknowledgment, repentance, repair, forgiveness, and reconciliation, are the only viable means of breaking this fatal pattern.
“May the killings end.”
It will require vigilance to transcend the insidious fixation on vengeance, but it is indeed possible. Jewish anti-death penalty activism offers one telling model for achieving this. Traditional rabbinic parlance cites a specific posthumous honorific for murder victims who have died as martyrs, particularly in pogroms, genocide, or terrorist attacks. The acronym it adds after each martyr’s name is “HYD,” which derives from the Hebrew letters Hey-Yud-Dalet (×”×™״ד) and stands for “Hashem yikom damam” (”May G-d avenge their blood.”) Members of the “L’chaim!” (”To Life!”) death penalty abolitionist group, however, intentionally never invoke this vindictive formula when they pray for capital murder victims at execution vigils for their condemned assailants. In its place, without exception, they employ the more common refrain “Zichronam Livracha” (”May their memories be for a blessing”). They then conclude with the following prayerful intention for the murder victims:
May their abiding neshamot (spirits) be loving guides for us all.
May their loved ones be comforted among all the mourners of the world.
May no more blood be shed in their sacred names.
May the killings end.
So may it be for the tens of thousands of victims of both the October 7, 2023, barbarity and the resulting Gaza genocide, as well as all targets of vengeful acts—however veiled.
A version of this essay was first published in The Jurist.
