by Rabbi Avi Billet
There are two incidents in the Torah in which a person sins and is ultimately stoned to death by the population. The first was in Parshas Emor, when the son of the Shlomit bas Divri (and an Egyptian man) cursed God’s name. The second is towards the end of Parshas Sh’lach, when the wood gatherer is stoned for violating the laws of Shabbos. [It is quite interesting that two verses before we are told the story of the wood-gatherer, the Torah references a person who is מגדף (blasphemes) Hashem. And two verses before the tale of the blasphemer there is instruction about how to set up the Shulchan (Table) in the Mishkan – ביום השבת ביום השבת.]
There is a distinction in the way the stonings are presented to us - in Emor we are told וירגמו אותו אבן, that people stoned the man with a single stone (or at least a stone presented in a singular language) while in Sh’lach it says וירגמו אותו באבנים, that the people stoned the man with stones.
Why the difference from אבן to אבנים - singular to plural?
When he was a child, not-yet-rabbi Meir Shapiro shared the following insight. There is a view presented in the Midrash (as recorded by Tosafos Baba Basra 119) that the wood gatherer did what he did for the sake of heaven. In other words, after the sin of the spies some people gave up hope and felt there was no reason to continue to observe mitzvos. He went ahead and sacrificed himself to demonstrate that the Torah was still applicable.
Of course such a notion should be radically disturbing. No one has a right to give up his life simply to prove that the Torah’s law and justice system is in force.
Young Meir Shapiro noted the dichotomy and how some may have felt very differently about the situation. Some may have felt the wood-gatherer was a sinner (whether his intentions were honorable is irrelevant as his decision was still wrong) and put that note of concentration into their stoning role. Others may have felt conflicted, accepting his sacrifice for the positive intent he had, and also feeling terribly that they had to participate in his execution, doing so only because God had commanded such.
The אבנים therefore indicate multiple thought processes behind the people participating in the stoning.
In the case of the blasphemer, everyone was of the same mind as to the nature and degree of the crime and were all, therefore, as one in stoning with a single thought process as represented by the singular אבן.
There are other explanations as well. Chizkuni notes that in the blasphemer’s case it may have only taken one stone! And Sifrei notes regarding the wood gatherer that if one stone doesn’t do the job, more stones are to be used.
Another view, presented by Meshekh Hokhma (R Meir Simcha of Dvinsk) suggests that the wood gatherer needed to be buried where he was executed, therefore many stones were used to not only do the deed but become the markers of his grave. In the case of the blasphemer, a different process needed to be followed insofar as to how his burial was to be conducted, so only one stone, presumably a much larger stone, could be used to fulfill God’s instruction.
While the first insight, ultimately, is that of a child (albeit a prodigy!) and may not be the best explanation for the discrepancy in terminology, it is nevertheless quite insightful as to how human psychology tends to work.
Sometimes we are quite sure of what is a proper path forward, and we do it with gusto. We don’t hesitate, we know it’s right, we are confident in an outcome and we forge ahead.
And sometimes we proceed with caution. We are not exactly sure. Something doesn’t smell right.
There is, of course, a significant distinction to be made between when God tells us to do something we don’t like versus if a human tells us to do something we are unsure of, or we don’t want to do.
What young Meir Shapiro was positing is that God’s rule may trump one’s considerations in the realm of practice, but even some things can’t overtake our mind, such as the distaste we may feel at needing to take someone’s life.
By extension we can certainly say if a person who is an unproven prophet or who doesn’t even claim prophesy but claims to know exactly what God wants dictates a path forward that may not sound right or is coming from a place that is not clearly to our benefit, we ought to tread carefully.
But even more importantly, it is totally normal for people to have different mindsets about any kind of instruction! Could it be that some people were happy to stone the wood-gatherer? Yes. Could it be some people were uncomfortable with it? Surely that can be true too.
We have a responsibility to realize that not every trend works for everyone. That is supposed to be OK, as people have different backgrounds, different histories, different bodies, different physical needs, different stories.
For a people who are well aware of the dangers and destructiveness of Sinas Chinam (baseless hatred), as well as the need to give others the benefit of the doubt (דן לכף זכות) we must be able to realize that the beauty of humanity and the beauty of the Jewish people is accepting each person through very simple criteria: if a non-Jew, the person’s basic decency, if a Jew, the fact that the person is a Jew (who is supposed to also have basic decency). We may have differences, there are things we may not prefer about another person. But our intolerance (if we have such a character) is more a reflection of us than a reflection of the person we don’t find agreeable.
Thankfully we are not faced with the challenge of executing people (though if we engage in character assassination, we are guilty of just that!), but we are faced with the challenge of finding a space for people who don’t fit into what we may view as the perfect box.
Should the blasphemer and wood-gatherer have had a different outcome? That was God’s call after the fact – we may have judged them differently, but that wasn’t our call no matter how we splice it. But one wonders if they hadn’t felt socially ostracized in whatever way, would they have engaged in their errant behavior in the first place?
There is a very real possibility that they would not have done what they did. So who is more at fault? Them, or the people who isolated or marginalized them, causing them to be in such a bad head space that they committed their respective capital crimes? Every person is partly a product of one’s environment. Let us do our part to create the environment in which all feel welcome.
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