The international press and global organizations often blame Israel for targeting Gazans, despite Hamas’s embedding among civilians as a deliberate strategy. On Yom Kippur, Greater Manchester Police officers shot and killed a Jewish worshipper at a synagogue while they neutralized a terrorist, who killed another Jewish man.
Rabbis told JNS that the accidental police killing at Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation, an Orthodox synagogue in Manchester, in the United Kingdom, is the responsibility of the terrorist.
“If I walk into a bank and pull a gun on the teller and he has a heart attack, it’s probably a felony murder,” Rabbi J. David Bleich, Herbert and Florence Tenzer professor of Jewish law and ethics at Yeshiva University, told JNS.
In such a situation, the intent would be irrelevant, “because you have to be aware of the consequences of the illegal act,” Bleich, who holds a doctorate in late medieval Jewish philosophy and has often written on Jewish law and ethics, told JNS.
“This was a police officer who fired the shot, but I think if you’re on a killing spree, you can expect that there will be a response from the authorities,” he told JNS. “You can expect that innocent people might be killed.”
Rabbi David Wolpe, rabbi emeritus of Sinai Temple, a Conservative synagogue in Los Angeles, and scholar-in-residence at the Maimonides Fund, told JNS that “the competence of the response may be on the police, but the moral weight of the entire tragedy is with the terrorist.”
Wolpe cited the Talmudic principle of adam mu’ad l’olam, which he defined as “a person is always forewarned.”
“It means if you start something, the consequences, even if not fully foreseen, are on you,” he said.
