IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING — TOLERANCE

Haim Cohn

Justice Haim Cohn's answer to Shulamit Aloni

Our society is in a bad way and the country is plagued with injustices. One gets the impression sometimes that the battle against crime using the legal violence of the law enforcement authorities is a losing battle. Perhaps the time has come to try non-violent methods? Perhaps mutual tolerance has a respectable role to play even in this sphere?


Ever since Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge we purport to know good from evil. The trouble is that although all men are created in the image of God they are created with different faces, different opinions, different tastes and different insights. The early sages recounted of Moses that he prayed to God to give his people leaders “who would tolerate each person according to his individual views.” Freedom of opinion and conscience include the freedom to define and distinguish good from evil. People who differ in opinion, belief and worldview will also perceive good and evil differently. The kings of Judah and Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord - but in their own eyes it was good. Each and every one is entitled to say: “Where you see good, I see bad; and I don’t care if where I see good you see bad.”

But the hegemony of the rule of law created categories of evildoing which, even if some do not see in them any wrong, nonetheless the law of the land prevails and enforces its own standards. But the law does more than impose penalties on those who do what the law sees as "evil”; it also arrogates to itself the exclusive right to enforce the law. It forbids the insulted or assaulted or robbed individual from taking the law into his own hands. The individual may - sometimes even must - set the wheels of law enforcement in motion but he has no choice but to “wait for those charged with law enforcement to do their duty” (as Shulamit Aloni writes). Not that we must reconcile ourselves to “evil”; we must fight it by every legal means. But individual violence - individual, physical or verbal - is not a legal means.

The difference in one’s perception of good and evil, the revulsion a person of conscience feels witnessing evil in his (or her) sight, are both perfectly compatible with “a policy of tolerance.” Not only do the tolerant enjoy freedom of opinion and speech and demonstration and protest: they are the biggest beneficiaries of these freedoms because only they can be trusted not to abuse them. They will broadcast their opinion without uttering insults; they will denounce official wrongs without using threats; they will demonstrate and protest without attacking or assaulting. They will carry out the commandment to “rebuke neighbor in civilized language.”

Hillel the Elder’s renowned dictum: “Do not to others what you would hate done to you” is indeed the whole of “tolerance” in a nutshell. It is human nature that if you are insulted by someone, you will retort the insult; if you attack someone he will only return and double the assault; if someone is doing to others what you perceive as evil, you defame and execrate him in precisely the way that “you would hate done to you.” Treat him, says Hillel, as you would want him to treat you. And if you retort that this does not apply if you are already the injured party, that you are entitled to “get your own back,” then I retort that this route has no end. You will pay him back and he will pay you back doubly, you will pay him back again, and it will lead to endless chaos. All this does not apply where you are attempting to prevent someone from injuring you or another person: no extent of tolerance and no law forbids you from taking action, even evil and criminal action, to defend yourself or another from immediate injury.

True, our society is surely afflicted and violence is rampant in the country. One gets the impression sometimes that the battle against crime by the legal violence of law enforcement is a losing battle. Perhaps the time has come to try non-violent methods? Perhaps mutual tolerance has an important role to play even in this sphere?

Justice Haim Cohn, who passed away in 2002, was a most prominent philosopher of secular Judaism and human rights in Israel. He was the first Prosecutor General of the State of Israel and one of the people who formed the first laws of the country. An expert on Jewish law and Roman law, his more than 20 books include The Trial of Jesus, which was made into a historical documentary film by the BBC.

This article first appeared in issue 20 of Free Judaism, the quarterly journal of the Israeli Secular movement for Humanistic Judaism. It is reprinted here with permission of the publisher. It also appeared in Contemplate, Issue One, 2001, published by the Center for Cultural Judaism.

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