Amnesh Yasatzu was nineteen years old.
Last Thursday, ten Israeli rabbis gathered at the spot where Amnesh was killed. They prayed together. Then they cried out to the Lord: "Our hands have not spilled this blood and our eyes have not seen. Atone for Your people who You have redeemed, O Lord, and don't give innocent blood to be in the midst of Your people."
Those words are from the Torah - Deuteronomy 21:7-8. They are part of a ceremony know as ha-eglah ha-arufah - literally, the necked heifer. The Torah means for this ceremony to be performed whenever a dead body is found and its assailant is unknown. First, responsibility for the body is assigned by determining which city is closest to the place it was found. The elders of that city then adjourn to a desolate field, bringing with them a year old heifer which has never worked a field. They break (some translate as axe) the back of the neck of the heifer, after which they wash their hands and make the declaration cited above.
The rabbis who gathered at the side of Highway 66 did not bring a heifer with them. They dispensed with that part of the ritual entirely. Nevertheless, in reviving at least a part of this strange ritual, they were making a powerful statement about what the death of this young soldier means to her community. Rabbi David Stav, who led the group of rabbis performing this ritual put it best when he said that there "should not be a situation in which blood is haphazardly spilt and the public does not perform any act of remorse" He went on to say that "the Torah presents an uncompromising moral statement, that all of us, religious, traditional and secular, have to adopt: We are responsible for spilt blood. We are responsible for blood spilt in road accidents, we are responsible for blood spilt in stupid gang fights, for women murdered by their husbands, and for the blood spilt in the murders which fill the pages of our newspapers."
The above Jerusalem Post article cites the 15th century exegete Isaac Abarbanel who said that this peculiar ceremony "was meant to shock residents of the cities close to the site where the corpse was discovered. The purpose was to interrupt the routine of everyday life and force those watching and passing by to think about and take responsibility for a situation in which a society can allow a person’s death to go unpunished and unnoticed."
Though I have read this section of Torah many times before, the eglah arufah ceremony first made an impression on me perhaps three or four years ago. It awakened me to a simple fact that I have always known but had not thought about all that much. When a person is arrested and charged with a crime, the matter is pursued under the caption "The State of Such-and-such Versus So-and-so." We don't prosecute people in the name of the victim or the victim's family. We do so in the name of the community. In other words, crimes committed against a person are really crimes against the entire community and on that basis do we deny someone convicted of a crime their liberty or even their lives.
As much as it is a means of protecting ourselves and punishing wrongdoing, our criminal justice system says something about us. The harshness or leniency of the punishments we mete out - and the consistency with which we apply these standards - all speak to who we are as a community. But what the eglah arufah ceremony reminds us is that we say something about ourselves even when we don't know on whom to charge the crime. Someone has been hurt. Perhaps even blood has been shed. Can we turn away from such a thing and not diminish ourselves?
To those who mourn for Amnesh Yasatzu, I pray that God comfort them among those who mourn in Zion and Jerusalem. And for Rabbi Stav and those who stood with him to atone for her death, may the Holy One strengthen those who bring the words and the teachings of Torah to enrich and ennoble our lives.
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