"Eye for an Eye" Translated into Human Reality

After I labored to clean the floor yesterday, a whole day full of pens, markers, scraps of paper and the like scattered about from a whole day of homeschooling, I joked with my two children, "You have a challenge, let's see how dirty you can make the apartment by the time I come home from work!" In a way, perhaps, I was complimenting myself - in my wife's presence - on how nicely I had cleaned the floor. Within 2 minutes, lo and behold, my daughters, managed to scatter pieces of the parts of the pita they didn't like all around the couch. I took away the remainder of what they were eating until they cleaned up the floor, and then, thought to myself why hadn't my daughters understood the veiled message I was trying to convey, "You better not make a mess! Or else!" obviously in good humor. 

The fact that my daughters understood the very opposite of what I was trying to convey, in a sense, may dovetail with a message elucidated in this week's parsha. My errant and inveterate use of sarcasm notwithstanding - there is something to be said about a situation where the speaker, in effect, says exactly the opposite of what she or he really means, when the connotation and denotation are diametrically opposed. 

On that note, let's look for a brief moment at these famous verses from our parsha: "(22) When men fight, and one of them pushes a pregnant woman and a miscarriage results, but no other damage ensues, the one responsible shall be fined according as the woman’s husband may exact from him, the payment to be based on reckoning. (23) But if other damage ensues, the penalty shall be life for life, (24) eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, (25) burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise."

As we all know, in the tragic situation above, the murderer who kills not only the unborn child, but also its mother, is not put to death. Likewise, the one who gouges another's eye, does not have his eye removed from its socket, and likewise, we do not scald a person who causes burns or lesions to his fellow man. 

In explaining the seeming difficulty in understanding the above verses, the Gaon of Vilna likens it to a stamp. When a lawyer, a doctor, a clerk stamps a document, for the ink to appear correctly on the final document, it has to appear in reverse on the face of the stamp itself. The Torah, thus, to communicate the gravity and enormity of harming another, presents the egregiousness of one's actions in its rawest form, i.e. you deserve to have your eye gouged, your limb severed, or in the extreme, put to death, the same way you deprived another of his or her life. 

This idea is a powerful one, one that flies in the face of post-modernism, that refuses to accept that definitions are fluid, life dispensable, and messages obfuscated to the point of meaningless. It's a message that deserves a little extra thought in modern times, given the seeming fragility of our modern conception of fairness and justice, and what would seem, at times, perhaps, unequal to the task of instilling true morality, and ethicality that sees the wholeness of human life in its purest and unadulterated form. 

 

(22) When men fight, and one of them pushes a pregnant woman and a miscarriage results, but no other damage ensues, the one responsible shall be fined according as the woman’s husband may exact from him, the payment to be based on reckoning. (23) But if other damage ensues, the penalty shall be life for life, (24) eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, (25) burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.