JUST DESERTS
Revenge is not unlike the eating habits of people at mealtime—the appetite should stop on satisfaction. It’s far healthier to eat only to the point of reaching satiety. The appetite is satisfied and the body has had enough. Americans, however, are known for their big serving portions—Big Macs, Whoppers, foot longs, extra scoops, double-deckers. Buffet tables are for people who like to walk away feeling stuffed. Paradoxically, however, when it comes to vengeance, at least against common criminals, Americans are dainty eaters.
The taking of revenge has much in common with the consumption of food. There is an upper limit for eating after which one becomes a glutton; and there is a bottom limit where the intake is insufficient, where the body has, in fact, not had enough to sustain the same weight. So, too, is the case with revenge. There are indelicate and indecent avengers who shamelessly stuff themselves beyond the breaking point of justified vengeance; and there are those so decorous, forgiving, or cowardly that they refuse to partake in revenge—honor anorexics who push themselves away from the table of just deserts. Counting calories is to good health as just deserts is to justice: it’s all about balance and proportion. Just deserts require that wrongdoers receive what they deserve—with precision. No arbitrary penalty, and surely not a devalued one. Only then can the punishment be deemed just.
Justified revenge—moral vengeance—is not possible unless the avenger is able to exercise restraint, has a specific measure of payback in mind, and knows not to take too much. To be an avenger rather than a hotheaded vigilante is to know when to stop, to set limits, to take what one is entitled to and no more.
As an artifact of American culture, the movie The Godfather is one of the most celebrated if not frequently quoted films. In fact, the film occupies a transcendent place within film history. In romanticizing the underworld activities of the Cosa Nostra, with its elegant gangsters, decapitated horses, dead bodies swimming with fish, and all of those offers that can’t be refused, it’s easy to overlook what the film has to say about family honor, business vendettas, and how we should all feel about the legal system. The opening scene, in fact, is a cautionary tale for lawyers and judges. And yet many miss the message.
The film begins with Bonasera, an undertaker, visiting the Godfather, the head of the Corleone crime syndicate, on the day when the Don’s daughter is to be wed. Bonasera is there to ask a favor, knowing that among the various Sicilian rituals that traveled over from the old country, a man cannot refuse a favor on the day his daughter becomes a bride. Bonasera’s request concerns his own daughter who was brutally beaten by two neighborhood boys who tried to rape her. Like any good, law-abiding American, the undertaker first looked to the legal system for justice.
That proved to be a mistake. The boys were given a light sentence, which was ultimately suspended, and they were returned to the street, but not before sneering at the father whose daughter they victimized. Surely this was not justice; those who had damaged his daughter were not made to pay for their crime. Bonasera felt the great insult and sense of outrage that arises when a crime goes unpunished, when loss of honor remains lost. As cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker has observed, in many languages around the world, the word “honor” itself means to avenge insults, even if it requires bloodshed to do it.1
For most of his life the undertaker had made sure to stay clear of the Godfather. He didn’t want to get mixed up with illegal business; he wanted to stay on the right side of line that divided the lawless from the lawful. Now, however, he found himself with little choice but to place himself in the Godfather’s debt in return for the assurance that his daughter would be avenged. But, in doing so, Bonasera acknowledged a bitter truth about his adopted country: “For Justice, we must go to the Godfather.”2
Many have seen the film but few recognized the moral implications of its opening scene. Chastened by the law’s failure, the undertaker comes to realize that despite the trappings and promises of the law, the Mafia is, ultimately, a far more reliable dispenser of justice. And we all know the narrow and specific range of justice within which the Mafia operates. The Cosa Nostra does not preside over prisons or convene courtrooms; nor are they known for maintaining precise ledgers in keeping their books. Their world is largely confined to ending life swiftly and leaving no trace of evidence of the finality of their work.
When Don Corleone asks Bonasera what he proposes as the proper punishment for the boys who got away with the crime, the undertaker unblinkingly says vengeance: He wants the two boys killed. Don Corleone immediately replies that killing them is not fair vindication. His daughter, after all, is still alive. When Bonasera leaves, the Don instructs his lawyer Tom Hagen, “Give this to, uh, Clemenza. I want reliable people, people who aren’t going to be carried away. After all, we’re not murderers, in spite of what this undertaker thinks.” The Godfather will only ensure that the boys will be beaten up, measure for measure, in the same way as they had beaten Bonasera’s daughter—but no more.
There is a healthy dose of movie irony having a hardened killer, a Mafia chieftain, no less, someone gainfully involved in the death business—even more so than Bonasera, the undertaker—making distinctions among attempted rape, assault, and premeditated murder. Who knew the Cosa Nostra was so meticulous about punishment? The Godfather could have simply given Bonasera what he wished for: an old-fashioned Mafia death sentence for the boys who assaulted his daughter. Instead, he went to the trouble of fashioning an appropriate remedy. “We’re not murderers,” the Godfather proclaims. He didn’t say: “Hey, I’m the Godfather. I kill for a living. I can’t refuse a favor on the day of my daughter’s wedding. Let’s just kill the boys and be done with it.”
The fact that a professional killer, even a fictional one, observes the rules of retaliation is more than just a neat movie anecdote. It’s also an object lesson about justice. Retaliation is obligatory, but so, too, is a standard for measuring the amount of retaliation that is allowed. Precision is essential; proper measurement counts. Revenge is a balancing act that is steadied by a fine sense of proportion. An avenger is not required to possess the math skills of a CPA, but neither can he be a spatial moron, a spastic when it comes to arithmetic.
The opening scene from The Godfather speaks to the age-old difficulties of getting vengeance right, especially in cases where the crime doesn’t suggest a perfect eye-for-an-eye symmetry. What is the proper punishment for rape? The fathers of modernity have had no less an easy time of getting it right than did the patriarchs of the Bible. Indeed, Bonasera is not the first father who was faced with this moral dilemma. Biblical forefathers had daughters, too, and the Old Testament has its version of loutish, roguish street thugs who tried to take advantage of young women. In fact, all modern narratives about rape, a father’s anguish, and what should be done about it, have their origins in the rape of Dinah from the book of Genesis.3 These questions arose from the very beginning; the proper punishment owed to the rapist has always been one of humanity’s great imponderables. Everyone agrees that retaliation is required. But what form should the punishment take?
From Genesis and beyond, fathers understood the duty that Bonasera owed to his daughter. And the Godfather was correct in reminding this aggrieved father that the price of vengeance cannot exceed the cost of the original crime. Don Corleone intuitively understood how revenge can be made lawful, and how lawless revenge is bad business—even for the Mafia. The people of the Bible had already figured it all out. Bonasera had a predecessor in Jacob.
Jacob, one of the three patriarchs of Judaism, had many sons (remember Joseph and his brothers?) and a daughter named Dinah. One day while out on an apparent date with Shechem, the son of Hamor the Hivite, the ruler of a neighboring tribe, Dinah is raped and returns to her father’s tent humiliated and damaged. Like all stories in the Bible, this one begins with a wrong turn that leads to a moral lesson.
Shechem is no ordinary sexual predator. He may, in fact, be the first date rapist of any historic note. It turns out that he loves Dinah and wants to marry her. The problem is that their first date got off to a very bad start. Although a prince, his courtship skills were prehistoric—even for biblical times. Shechem asks his father, Hamor, whether anything can be done to help win Dinah back. Hamor visits Jacob and offers him the right for Jews to own land where the Hivites have lived for generations, in return for Jacob granting Shechem’s marriage proposal to Dinah. Shechem even goes so far as to double his father’s offer.
Jacob’s sons, known to be both wily and wild, make a counteroffer. They agree to allow their sister to marry into the Hivite tribe, but only after all of its males agree to be circumcised. Dinah’s brothers want their new extended family to become Jews—to actually join their tribe. Circumcision, of course, is a painful ritual—especially for grown men and especially in the absence of anesthetics. The entire male Hivite population was being asked to make this enormous sacrifice simply to enable Shechem to marry Dinah. Hamor agrees to the proposal and returns to his tribe to give them the news. Shortly thereafter, while each Hivite male is recovering from the removal of his foreskin, two of Jacob’s sons, Levi and Simeon, enter the city, kill all the men, and loot the tribe of its riches.
Jacob was not aware of what Levi and Simeon had in store for their future brother-in-law and tribal brothers. He may have realized that his sons never intended to dance at Dinah’s wedding, but he is furious when he discovers what his sons have done to avenge the rape of their sister. He tells them that their family will now forever be targets of retaliatory vengeance. The brothers, however, are neither apologetic nor fearful. Dinah’s rape had to be avenged. To do anything less would dishonor their family and send a disastrous message to all neighboring tribes that Jacob and his children—and all Jews, for that matter—could be violated with impunity.
The problem was not that Levi and Simeon had suckered the Hivites into a marriage that would lead to payback. Shechem had it coming. Yet Jacob knew that what Don Corleone would one day tell Bonasera was correct: when vengeance is taken to excess it ceases to be revenge and can turn into a blood feud that knows no end. It becomes unjustified revenge and loses its moral authority. And when that happens, the retaliation—wholly out of bounds and lawless—is neither vengeance nor justice. Worse still, it will invite a new series of disproportionate reprisals. Rather than settling the score, unmeasured revenge runs up the score and a new game of vengeance begins.
Dinah’s brothers went well beyond even. In repayment for the rape, they not only killed the rapist, they also killed every male member of his tribe. And then, as an added bonus, they stole all of the tribe’s possessions.
The imposition of collective responsibility for Shechem’s crime by killing the entire Hivite male population and stealing all of their wealth surely was not a just outcome. Dinah was not killed, after all. She was raped, but she was alive. Don Corleone made the same distinction in scaling back Bonasera’s desire for vengeance.
In the intervening millennia since the story of the rape of Dinah, killing the rapist has been understood as not being the proper payback for the crime of rape. Criminal statutes in the Western world continue to regard the murder of the rapist as a far more culpable crime than the underlying rape itself. The US Supreme Court, in Coker v. Georgia, barred the execution of rapists as “grossly disproportionate and excessive punishment” in violation of the Eighth Amendment.4 The rule, not so very different from the Bible’s treatment of Dinah, seems to be based on the principle that adult women are expected to recover from the trauma of rape. The very fact that the rape victim survived the attack means that the rapist cannot be put to death. Rules vary more widely with regard to the rape of children, however. But is the presumption that the killing of the rapist constitutes disproportionate punishment necessarily right? When it comes to the proper balancing of the scales of justice, the weights and measurements are sometimes in dispute.
Law professor Peter French, for instance, in his important book, The Virtues of Vengeance, wonders why the death of the rapist is not an appropriate punishment for the lifetime of psychological damage inflicted on the rape victim.5 The crime of rape has always presented measurement problems in fashioning the correct penalty for the rapist. Susan Jacoby has observed that women, historically, did not receive the same right of revenge as was allowed their fathers and husbands to avenge the rape. Women avengers, apparently, were too threatening to patriarchal visions of female helplessness. And the manly duty to defend honor applied exclusively to men.6
What is not permitted under the law is often accepted in art, however. Feature films such as Hannie Caulder (1971), A Time to Kill (1996), Kill Bill (vols. 1 and 2, 2003 and 2004, respectively), and the fourth season of the TV series Dexter present the apparently more emotionally satisfying idea that the death of the rapist is the equivalent punishment for the crime of rape—whether performed by the rape victim herself or by her husband, boyfriend, or father.
The rape of Dinah in the book of Genesis assumes a right of revenge. But it is more a cautionary tale than a blanket license to avenge. Murdering an entire tribe of men and sacking their city as payback for the rape of a sister is vastly disproportionate and unmeasured. Levi and Simeon were gluttons at the revenge table. Shechem was guilty of neither murder nor theft. In a legal sense, Levi and Simeon are now guilty of both. Jacob was right in fearing that the liberties his sons had taken would likely unleash a new wave of retaliatory violence.
Yet, if the people of the Bible were on notice that a right of retaliation always lurked behind a contemplated crime, how would they know how much revenge to take without igniting a blood feud? It is an especially complicated arithmetic when dealing with revenge among nations.
This was exactly what Steven Spielberg had in mind in his film Munich (2005), which was inspired by the murder of the entire Israeli Olympic team by Palestinian terrorists during the 1972 Olympic Games. In an early scene in the film, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir is consulting with her advisers on what Israel’s response should be to the killings. One of her generals reminds her that Israel had already succeeded in bombing a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) training base in retaliation. Many terrorists were killed, far more than the number of murdered Israeli athletes. Was that the appropriate and proportionate response? In the sober, unemotional language of real politik, the general explains that the attack against the PLO base is precisely what nations do in such circumstances.
Aaron Sorkin, the creator of the dramatic television series The West Wing, gave his fictional president an opportunity to weigh in on what constitutes a “proportional response” when it comes to vengeance among nations. With great agitation and impatience, the president asks his military advisers what are the virtues of a proportional response. Terrorists have attacked America; the president is taking the offense personally and shows little desire to tailor the retaliation so as not to exceed the original assault. What he wants is to dial up the kind of “shock and awe” (code words for unmeasured, disproportionate retaliation) that an actual American president, George W. Bush, ultimately unleashed on Afghanistan. The privilege of commanding a superpower makes it possible to send a message that the cost of attacking the United States will result in the kind of payback that can truly scorch the earth. The measure of America’s resolve is always an infinite number. But presidents and prime ministers surround themselves with advisers in situation rooms, and the advice they give is to stay the hand of vengeance. Accept the customary reprisal and move on to the others matters of state. The American president in The West Wing remains unconvinced. A Navy admiral responds to the president by saying, “It isn’t virtuous, Mr. President. It’s all there is.”7
But is that true? Nations, apparently, are bound by clearly defined protocols where retaliation is permitted but only to the extent that it is proportionate. There are rules, and one such rule is that a nation is not permitted to simply go berserk. How does a state know when its retaliation will be regarded as disproportionate and unjustified? There is no shortage of national security experts who advise world leaders as to what is appropriate and proportional and what violates international norms. Are America’s drone strikes on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan in proportion to the crimes of 9/11? Were Allied bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden a measured response for the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and the German bombing of London?
In the film Munich, Prime Minister Golda Meir, surrounded by her military advisers, is equally unconvinced that proportion is measurable, that balance is at all possible, and that a ratio can be found. For the prime minister, a proportional response that is limited to an attack against a PLO base does not feel sufficiently retaliatory, much less emotionally satisfying. She wants to get the actual killers. Her people, the Israeli public, watched their Olympic team kidnapped and slaughtered on national TV. They will regard an isolated, nonspecific act of vengeance to be insufficient, even if that is how nations exercise revenge on the global stage.
The prime minister orders the targeted assassinations of a rogue’s gallery of Palestinian terrorists all throughout Western Europe, consisting of the men who actually plotted the murder of the Israeli Olympic team. She says, “Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.”8 Revenge, in this instance, cannot be achieved by killing PLO terrorists indiscriminately—regardless of where they live and who they are. Even in international affairs, accuracy matters. Those responsible for the crime must be discovered and held fully accountable. At the same time, the point of view of the film as it reaches its conclusion is that indiscriminate killings have led to a blood feud between the Israelis and the Palestinians, achieving little except for an endless recycling of revenge.
In 2009, Israel’s invasion of Gaza led to a United Nations investigation by its Human Rights Council. The resulting “fact-finding report” primarily blamed Israel for a three-week incursion that produced a disproportionate number of Palestinian casualties: As many as fourteen hundred Palestinians were killed during the campaign as compared with just thirteen Israelis. Israel was also condemned for apparently failing to distinguish between civilians and combatants in targeting its victims.
The Gaza campaign lasted for twenty days, and during that time period the Palestinians clearly suffered more than the Israelis did. But since 2001, Hamas, the terrorist group that governs Gaza, launched eight thousand rockets into Israel. The rain of rockets continued even after 2005 when Israel withdrew from Gaza as a first step toward achieving peace. Meanwhile, Hamas never wavered from its proclaimed intention to rid the region of all its Jews and claim Israel for itself. A Palestinian statehood that includes all of greater Israel minus all the Jews is precisely what Hamas sought. That’s the scorecard that Hamas was using and the endgame of its intentions: not coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, but no existence at all for Israelis.
From the Israeli perspective, that’s how proportion needed to be measured when the Gaza campaign began. And it was not unlike the choice its prime minister (the real Gold Meir, not just the fictional one portrayed in Munich) made in 1972 following the murder of Israel’s Olympic team. Any discussion about proportion had to take into account the larger Palestinian objectives. The Gaza War—short as it was, and apparently as uneven as it was—was a snapshot of a far more complicated and murderous landscape where proportion can easily grow all out of proportion. In such zero-sum circumstances, one-to-one ratios are no longer the standards by which reprisals are measured. The two sides can’t agree about when the scales of justice are balanced, when will the scores finally be settled?9
In the world’s estimation, the Gaza War, known in Israel as Operation Cast Lead, was conducted as if Israel had a lead foot on the accelerator of immeasurable force. But when it comes to international affairs and the strife between nations, a proportional response must always take account of the past. Revenge is, by definition, a response to some prior action that resulted in great harm, loss, or dishonor. Vengeance is all about the past; it is fixated entirely on what happened and what must now be done about it. Without stubbornly long memories, the impulse to avenge would lose its moral urgency. Even preemptive strikes require a concrete provocation, and that provocation is sometimes embedded in past memories.
It is precisely a nation’s collective memory—and the sanity of its individual members—that makes revenge indispensable to achieving justice. Revenge is as much about memory as it is an instrument of just deserts. There is no reason to balance the scales of justice if they were never believed to be unbalanced to begin with. Something had already tipped the scale. Only then does the state of affairs appear to be out of proportion, all on account of the unilateral act of another. But the vilest of all provocations occurs when one nation draws a line in the sand and says: “Everything behind this line no longer counts. Our sins and your grievances are forever erased. But everything going forward will result in our nation screaming bloody murder.”
Such are the psychodynamics and mind games of the Middle East: New lines are drawn in the desert sand, and no nation wishes to take responsibility for the actions of the past—to faithfully remember what had happened. Every day is Groundhog Day in Gaza and the Galilee; the odometer of grievance always rolls back to zero.10 Proportion has a way of looking all lopsided, the fuzzy math of the Middle East never adds up. The enduring conflict is as much a tragedy about keeping score as it is one of failed opportunities. Israel’s recent eight-day excursion into Gaza in November 2012, to retaliate against the one thousand missiles Hamas had launched at the Jewish state, produced similar dynamics and disproportions.11
It becomes nearly impossible to remember who started what and when. One nation’s retaliation is another’s provocation. Revenge must be deliberate rather than accidental, but it does not have to be immediate in its delivery. Just as an avenger can wait and bide his or her time in taking revenge, so, too, can nations store up the debts that are owed to them and retaliate when the time is right. Indeed, waiting to take revenge provides its own ancillary punishment, torturous in its own way. The wrongdoer knows his just deserts are coming and must always look over his shoulder to avoid being taken by surprise. Hamlet stumbles around Denmark throughout the entirety of Shakespeare’s play alternating between madness and self-doubt. His mother, Gertrude, and his uncle, Claudius, their reign fragile and their deaths all but certain, know that eventually the addled son of the murdered king will do his duty and avenge his father.
All this talk about proportionate retaliation does make one think that the world would be better off if managed by business majors rather than inept politicians and loathsome dictators—at least when it comes to doling out vengeance. Revenge requires a heart full of passion and a head for numbers. It is a moral enterprise, not a political one, and performed not to achieve an advantage but to redeem a debt. Whether in the Bible or on modern day battlefields, it’s best when the avenging nation—or the individual who must resort to vengeance—is motivated by math and knows how to keep the books.
Even British rock bands understand this simple accounting principle. The Who, one of the iconic bands of the British invasion of the 1960s and 1970s, sang, “My love is vengeance, That’s never free” on its 1971 single, “Behind Blue Eyes.”12 Vengeance is always repayment, even if it is delivered as an act of love. There is nothing arbitrary or reckless about it; you’re either owed payback or you’re not. A true debtor is never surprised when vengeance arrives. He might ask for one more day, but he never blurts out: “The check is in the mail!”
How much vengeance to take and in what form should it be delivered is, however, a mixture of art and science. Ancient societies never doubted the morality of revenge. All they had to decide was who the authorized avenger would be and whether his manner of taking revenge was properly tailored for the original loss. Neither God nor Jacob was troubled by the moral duty to avenge the rape of Dinah. The Old Testament didn’t prohibit the taking of revenge. Cities of refuge were created precisely because avengers were on the loose with rightful claims against wrongdoers. Those who were innocent or merely negligent were permitted sanctuary. But there was no escaping punishment that was justly owed.
What concerned ancient peoples was not vengeance but its excess. Vengeance always carried the risk of an infinite recycling of revenge. Ethnic violence and tribal blood feuds are still traceable to repetitious revenge cycles. They occurred when retribution went too far, when getting even somehow was not enough. Fresh wounds and new debts invite entirely new rounds of payback. It was the fear of voracious vengeance that convinced governments to go into the revenge business for themselves. Individuals were suddenly required to outsource their revenge obligations by handing them over to the state.
Governments believed that as institutions freed of the emotion that causes hatred to run amuck, the state is better suited to tailor punishment than vindictive victims too blinded by rage to take the true measure of what they were owed. Peter French observed that vengeance always concerns proper fit.13 The act of revenge must always be a well-suited response to the underlying injury. Size matters when it comes to revenge. How much revenge is too much? How little is the bare minimum? The fit must be suitable, the measurements specific, to qualify as moral revenge. Private avengers and robed jurists are both in the same business, and each must be ever mindful of what gives them the authority to avenge, and for whose ultimate benefit justice is being done. No matter the arena, regardless of whether justice is being delivered by the state or by a deputized avenger, moral revenge must possess these four basic elements: (1) there must be a severe moral injury or act of wrongdoing; (2) the avenger, or the court, must have the authority to seek vengeance and communicate to the wrongdoer why vengeance is being taken and on whose behalf justice is being delivered; (3) the wrongdoer must be deserving of punishment; and (4) the punishment must not be disproportionate to the original injury; it must properly address and pay back for the harm.
So what does an eye for an eye actually look like, and how can such complicated measurements be determined?
This is the cornerstone of lex talionis, the law of the talion—the intellectual and metaphorical birthplace of an eye-for-an-eye. It establishes the ground rules for retaliation and informs the principle of just compensation and the balancing of loss and repayment—“life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand.” No more, and no less—the basic formulation of equivalence and reciprocity that is codified in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. All the necessary fuss about proportionate revenge derives from the talion.
The talion is no less fastidious than an audit by the Internal Revenue Service. It establishes an upper limit on how much an avenger can take in response to another’s wrong. More crucially, however, it sets forth a lower limit, too, which imposes a moral obligation to avenge. Vengeance is not optional; it is obligatory. Some measure of revenge must be taken; it cannot simply be forsaken or ignored.14
There is no justice in pretending that a moral injury never actually occurred. The moral balance of communities, and the sanity of victims, cannot tolerate the outrage of such casual forgetting. But the fear of igniting blood feuds and gluttonous revenge is moderated by an upper boundary of restraint. Proportionate revenge demands a perfect fit. The prerequisites of an eye for an eye do not permit the substitution of a limb for the taking of a life. As Bonasera came to learn, there is no “a life for a rape.”
Or maybe there is. The recent Argentine thriller The Secret in Their Eyes, which received the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film in 2010, puts the lie to Don Corleone’s words and introduces a new twist on how to seek vengeance against a rapist who has also committed murder.15 In the film, a wife is raped and killed in her home. The detective assigned to the case promises the victim’s husband that when he is caught, the assailant will be given a life sentence for his crime. The wrongdoer is apprehended, but he is eventually released due to a procedural error and police corruption.
A quarter of a century later, the detective travels to the home of the victim’s husband. He wonders how the man has managed to live all these years without the love of his life. Apparently, with great difficulty. The widower appears not to have fared well. But then again, neither has the rapist/murderer. The crime that was never successfully prosecuted was not forgotten, even though no one has seen the accused in years. The police had promised the husband that his wife’s murderer would spend his entire life in prison. And so far he has, locked up in a makeshift cell in a small building near the main house where the widower lives. There he has been imprisoned all this time, aging alone, with no one to speak to, not even his bereft jailor, who has fashioned a punishment that mirrors his own emptiness, measure for measure.
Compensation and punishment are not so easily interchangeable. Accuracy is the governing ethos of revenge. Precision is both the avenger’s duty and his secret weapon. The avenger who worries about fit is not the avenger who easily loses his head. Revenge is admittedly emotional and personal, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t also be lucid and clear-headed. Emotion can lead to exactness rather than excess. The avenger who is mindful of suitability is not likely to be accused of taking disproportionate vengeance; proper fit rarely leads to a blood feud.
Similarly, the talion has a message for the reluctant avenger. He, or she, is given a mandate of what is at least minimally required. Indulging too much constitutes unjustified revenge; partaking in too little—not going far enough—violates a different moral principle. To not satisfy the debt is morally repugnant. The eyes of the community are always watching. And a human being’s sense of honor and self-worth will accept no less than proper payback. Hamlet was one such ambivalent avenger, and while it takes two acts of the drama for him to stumble about before doing his duty, he knows that his mother and uncle will have to die in retaliation for his father’s murder.
Revenge is not an act of lawless barbarism, although it is understandable how deeply this catchphrase, over time, has shaped our perceptions. Nor is it true that revenge is always animated by anger and rage. If revenge is the antidote to lost honor—if it is indeed the only way to reclaim one’s honor—then anger doesn’t have to be the guiding principle behind vengeance at all. To that point law professor William Ian Miller asks, “Couldn’t [the victim] also be motivated by a sense of grief or duty or love? Perhaps they’re desperate to set things right for their loved one. Perhaps they’re not motivated by rage but by a grim sense of purpose, or a keen sense of obligation. We demean the wide emotional range of what the avenger might feel.”16
And we also demean, and fail to comprehend, why vengeance becomes so essential to a feeling of justice. One of the reasons why modern societies have such trouble with revenge is because they have so little appreciation of honor as having its own intrinsic value—of something that is worth fighting to reclaim. We speak of honor abstractly, not as something that can be taken away, its absence painfully felt. A bruised body receives compensatory relief under the law; wounded pride, however, has no equivalent remedy. Dishonor and disrespect deserve compensation, too, the kind that is not measurable in monetary terms. Instead, we insist that what is unbearable should be internalized and made tolerable—suck it up, walk it off, let it go. But we can’t. Steven Pinker points out that sociologists remain puzzled as to why more murders, comparatively speaking, are not perpetrated in connection with robberies or drug deals. Instead, we see homicides linked to insults, humiliation, curses, and the damage done to reputation.17
As William Ian Miller has said, “In our Utilitarian, highly sophisticated society, we don’t think as clearly as the people in old cultures. They were much better at evaluating things that we think can’t be captured in dollars. They knew what a man was worth. Why? Because they measured his honor.”18
All this suggests that vengeance is never casually undertaken, nor is it necessarily the handiwork of unhinged emotions. There are rules for revenge; and the first rule is that it be justified. Petty slights, imagined insults, and feigned injuries can never give rise to revenge. Lost honor must have arisen from a true act of dishonor. Some material loss, some moral injury, some true deficit must occur, creating a debt owed to the victim that must be repaid. Modern Western cultures tend to value human beings by net material worth. But ancient peoples were better at taking true stock of human beings, and they knew that honor was a more worthy measure of value than money. And when lost, it had to be reclaimed, even if that meant taking justice into one’s own hands. But, still, not without guidelines. As one biblical example, the story of the rape of Dinah, illustrated both the moral duty to avenge and the consequences of immoderate revenge.
Yet most people believe that an eye for an eye is a biblical green light in favor of vengeful, dismembering fury. What kind of a person other than a savage would forcefully take out someone’s eye? But this misreading, so widely shared, is one of the reasons why revenge labors under so many falsehoods and much societal scorn.
The Old Testament doesn’t promote people “going postal”. The Old Testament merely recognizes that loss must be repaid to victims and that avengers are the delegated beneficiaries of the payback—it is their task to fulfill. No one has a superior right to redeem the debt. Given the inevitability of revenge, the Bible simply wishes that it be done correctly.
No one is entitled to the repayment of an eye unless they have actually lost one. Evening the score places the avenger in the position of a creditor. But the rules of vengeance ensure that credit limits are always in place. Avengers must act responsibly. An avenger might be angry, and he might have good reasons for that anger, but his vengeance must always take account of the actual debt. There is no such thing as a revenge jackpot, where avengers leverage debts like Wall Street bankers, surpassing getting even by multiples on the way to greater revenge riches. Even with vengeance, the house always wins. No matter how sloppy the avenger is in his life, no matter how poorly his arithmetic, precision must always guide the discharging of the debt.
Think of Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice sharpening his knife, checking on the accuracy of his scale, preparing to take his pound of flesh, but being warned by Portia, the judge in drag, that the pound of flesh denominated by the bond does not permit the spilling of any of Antonio’s—his debtor’s—blood. Shylock wants his revenge. But he can only have what he bargained for, what he is allowed—to take no more than a pound of flesh, measure for measure. One pound of flesh is his upper limit, his full entitlement. Like all acts of vengeance, the satisfaction of this debt demands accuracy. Even if he can carve out an exact pound of Antonio’s flesh, how will he stop the blood, which is not part of the original bargain, and will, by necessity, unbalance the scale?19
It is the very specificity of this debt that forces Shylock to put away his knife—no matter how deserving Antonio and his friends are of receiving a good old-fashioned dose of biblical revenge. In The Merchant of Venice, the law of the talion, as much as Portia’s clever lawyering, actually limited Shylock’s vengeful impulses—the talion working both sides of this dispute, supplying the necessary check on revenge even as it required that vengeance be done.
The talionic principle always operates in the shadows of moral injury, reminding the avenger that as much as there are obligations to avenge, there are also reciprocal limitations on revenge. This is precisely what Jacob meant in the book of Genesis when he lamented how poorly his sons had miscalculated the amount of Shechem’s debt. The scales were once again uneven; the murder and sacking of Shechem’s tribe had now produced a new set of debts that would require another round of repayments—this time with Jacob and his family in the position of debtors rather than as creditors and justified avengers. And the moral lesson within this biblical parable is that standing up for family honor is essential, but taking too much revenge leaves the family vulnerable.
Short of constituting a principle of blind and irrational rage, the talion establishes an orderly vision of justice and fairness. And it extended far beyond the ancient peoples of the Bible. It is also found in the Hammurabi Code. The talion influenced the medieval tribes of Iceland and Germany. Tribal cultures all over the world adopted similar rules designed to accomplish a variety of retributive and compensatory goals. Each was a mix of punishment and revenge, compensation and satisfaction.
In medieval England, for instance, the loss of a middle finger required the compensation of four shillings; a broken rib was three shillings; the loss of a foot, fifty shillings, thirty for a thumb, a little more than sixty-six for an eye.20 All of these recoveries for tortious injury were achieved without government intervention, without courtrooms, without prison walls. Present-day workers’ compensation laws were long preceded by the law of the talion. Everyone understood what an eye was worth—not the literal eye, but something of predetermined, equivalent value. When it came to a life, however, an intentional killing was usually satisfied in only one finite way, although in some cultures a combination of money and services might permit a life to be spared.
With the rise of Christianity and the New Testament, human beings were told to renounce their right of revenge—not because vengeance was too risky, but because it was deemed too unbecoming for the followers of the Prince of Peace. In the New Testament, God declares in the book of Romans (12:19): “Dearly Beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written: Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”
Once God reserves the right to vengeance only for himself, the moral cause of revenge begins to lose its moral authority. In the book of Luke (10:30–36), Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan, which diverts Christians away from justifiable revenge and in the direction of forgiveness, mercy, and compassion. And in the book of Matthew (5:43–48) lies the most disastrous undoing of the equalizing benefits and fundamental morality of revenge. It is here, in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, where the principle of loving one’s enemies first appears. For millions of Christians around the world, what might seem to be an unnatural act of love becomes a true labor of love. But it also forbids avengers from evening the score.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well . . .
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You should love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
With the Old and New Testaments crossing wires when it comes to vengeance, what did biblical people ultimately believe? Christianity favors turning the other cheek and practicing mercy as a salvational response to injury. But even as Christians counsel “to forgive and forget”—backed up by the teachings of modern psychology that anger causes sickness—we all know that these slogans of civil society are difficult to live by. Turning the other cheek is not a natural reflex of the human anatomy. And if forgiving means forgetting, then whatever religious benefits derive from such teachings are surely offset by an even greater moral sin: the act of forgetting, the pretense that a wrong never took place at all.
John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian who served as a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, emigrated to America after the war and lived in Ohio for many years as a law-abiding citizen until the Justice Department discovered who he was—or who they thought he was. After being stripped of his citizenship in 1985 for lying about his past, he was extradited to Israel to face trial. But he ended up back in the United States when the Israeli Supreme Court, which had already sentenced him to death in 1993, was forced to overturn his conviction when it learned that the Americans had prosecuted Demjanjuk under the wrong alias. They thought he was the notorious guard at Treblinka, Ivan the Terrible. As it turned out, Demjanjuk was, indeed, a guard, but at Sobibor, not Treblinka, and he wasn’t Ivan the Terrible. He was a much lower mass murderer, someone who still participated in the killing of twenty-eight thousand people. Only in the Nazi universe of genocidal excellence would that lofty number not qualify as notorious.
Further legal proceedings lasting nearly twenty years finally resulted in Demjanjuk being deported to Germany in 2009. In May 2011, at age ninety-one, Demjanjuk, who suffered from a number of ailments that forced him to lie on his back throughout the trial, was sentenced to five years in prison. What was the point of prosecuting a sick, ninety-one-year-old man for a crime that took place in 1943? The punishment, which involved many years of prosecutions and jail sentences with the final one assuring that he would die in prison, which he did, less that a year later, took decades and cost millions to achieve, but it was anxiously awaited by Demjanjuk’s victims—those dead and alive.
Rudie S. Cortissos survived the Holocaust as a small boy by hiding in Amsterdam. His mother, however, was not so fortunate. She was deported to Sobibor where she ended up as one of Demjanjuk’s victims. Costissos, speaking for himself and his mother, testified at the trial. “I had an opportunity to say what I wanted to say for 50 years,” Cortissos, now seventy-three, said outside of the courtroom after the verdict was announced. “I’m satisfied. It doesn’t mean I can forget; it doesn’t mean I can forgive.”21
Cortissos invoked the word “satisfied” (satisfaction), which embodies the very essence of proportional revenge. Demjanjuk received what he deserved—no more, and no less. And yet Cortissos acknowledged that even though his mother’s murderer was finally going to be punished after decades of avoidance, it didn’t mean that he could now forget what Demjanjuk had done to her. To leave a crime unavenged is to desecrate the dead. And to forget the wrong is a betrayal of family love. To avenge is to remember, and to act in honor of that memory. Philosopher Berel Lang has written, “Unlike forgiveness which erases the past, revenge preserves it.”22 Hamlet’s father, who appears to Hamlet as a ghost in the play’s opening scene, doesn’t tell his son to avenge his murder. He doesn’t have to. He merely says, “Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me.” For better or worse, Hamlet knows exactly what those words mean and what he must ultimately do to honor his father and heed his final words.23
Hamlet’s ghost is not alone among the undead who were murdered through treachery and now refuse to rest easy until they are properly remembered—whether they have their sons honor their memory or they are forced to avenge themselves by returning to haunt the living. All ghost stories and horror films are ultimately tales of revenge—vengeance necessitated by the failure to remember.
What’s most frightening about horror films such as I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), The Crow (1994), and The Ring (2002) is not the presence of ghosts and boogiemen, which the rational mind can easily dismiss as being just a movie. What can’t be ignored, however, what provides the realism and moral urgency for the scary business of horror, is why these ghosts haunt in the first place. The avengers may be dead, but they still must have their vengeance. The duty carries over to the grave. The moral lesson that lies underneath all the gore is that the ghosts are not there merely to scare the audience. They serve as reminders that unpunished crimes can’t be buried along with the dead.
If justice had been done, if the crimes that resulted in their deaths had been avenged, if the wrongdoers had been justly punished, had their lives been memorialized by acknowledging how they had died, then the ghosts would have had no reason to return. Not in the habit of turning the other cheek, ghosts end up turning over in their graves. The failure to avenge can haunt the dreams of those who refuse to do their duty. And wrongdoers, at least in art, can find themselves forever haunted by their dead victims who were denied earthly justice. It might take a lifetime to achieve, but vengeance must occur and, in the mind of the wrongdoer, must always be anticipated. Revenge is looming in the rearview mirror of those who have escaped punishment. It always remains the most crucial piece of unfinished business.
Some societies still practice vengeance. For most other people, revenge simply exists as part of their deepest fantasies. What is certain is that the desire for revenge can’t be stopped. Centuries of teachings and prohibitions have failed to make it go away. Whether it was God’s declaration that “vengeance is mine,” the Christian prescription to “love thy neighbor,” the New Age-y homilies about “letting go” of all anger, the prescribed rules of tribal societies requiring civil payment as compensation for maiming and murder, or the enlightened philosophers who favored the retribution of states over the revenge of individuals, humankind has been relentlessly presented with alternatives but still won’t give up on revenge. Most people don’t believe that revenge is half the vice it’s cracked up to be. What lingers within all human beings is the overwhelming sense of rightness that vengeance evokes in each of us.
Revenge has not been made obsolete with the modern world’s reliance on the rule of law. If anything, justice would feel more just if vengeance could better influence the rule of law. The emotional connection that vengeance has with justice is precisely what is most lacking in the state’s administration of the legal system. Justice that is stubbornly unconcerned with the honor and dignity of victims will never achieve the satisfaction of revenge. Drawing on this emotional absence as one reason why the legal system suffers from a lack of public legitimacy, Robert C. Solomon has written, “Not that the law and respect for the law are unimportant, of course, but one should not glibly identify these with justice and dismiss the passion for vengeance as something quite different and wholly illegitimate.”24
Vengeance is not as sinful as we have all been led to believe. Nor does it always invite overindulgence at the revenge table. Avengers are quite able to appreciate the consequence of violating the talion. Indeed, there is both poetry and an elegant logic to the Bible’s an-eye-for-an-eye formula for measuring revenge. The law of the talion is old but not outdated. Vengeance can run its proper course without setting off new and untamable fires of revenge.
Peter French has suggested that it was not so much the fear of recycled revenge that convinced more modern societies to favor a model of institutionalized legal retribution. Payback didn’t have to be taken out of the hands of individuals; it wasn’t inevitable that the settling of scores could only be confined to legal arenas. Had the state not monopolized revenge, most people would have simply deferred to the talion, as they had always done in the past. French identifies several reasons why the private settlement of disputes was forced into retirement. First, having a single entity handle the unpleasant chore of tracking down and punishing wrongdoers proved itself to be far more economically efficient than leaving it up to private avengers. Second, most people are not courageous enough to avenge the wrongs done to them, and society itself is often guilty of moral cowardice, if not squeamishness, when faced with the question of what to do about wrongdoers. All of this was only compounded by the tenets of Christian forgiveness and the willingness to wipe the slate clean rather than hold wrongdoers to account. Over time the necessary backbone that vengeance required collapsed into a puddle of spinelessness. The preservation of honor, which typically sparks the human impulse to avenge, was squelched and forgotten. French writes: “The fact that most of us have so readily turned these important matters over to impersonal, procedurally-structured technologies should not be exhibited as one of our great moral accomplishments.”25
And, to some degree, and for many individuals, it wasn’t even necessary. Few avengers are looking to start a war. Most human beings know when to stop, when the revenge they have taken leaves them satisfied. Robert C. Solomon has written that humankind is not given enough credit for knowing what it means to get even without creating further debts.26 Most people will satisfy their need for justice by way of a single act of vengeance. Charles K. B. Barton, in Getting Even: Revenge as a Form of Justice, writes that in world cultures where acts of personal vengeance are lawful, avengers know not to retaliate beyond measure because otherwise they would become subject to “stiff moral and social disapproval from their communities.”27 Rare is the case, Solomon suggests, when vengeance knows no moderation, when revenge becomes a bottomless pit that can never be filled.
In 1996, William Bonin, Southern California’s notorious Freeway Killer, was scheduled to be executed. He had confessed to killing twenty-one boys and young men. The victims were largely hitchhikers he had picked up, raped, and, finally, strangled to death. At his sentencing hearing Bonin not only failed to exhibit any remorse, he placed the parents’ of his victims in further agony by withholding information about their sons’ deaths. (Clint Eastwood’s film The Changeling (2008), starring Angelina Jolie, had a similar scene and plotline, based on a true story also set in California about the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders of 1928).
Sandra Miller, the mother of one of the boys who Bonin had raped, tortured, and strangled sixteen years earlier, said that at the moment right before Bonin received the lethal injection she hoped to experience the relief that now “he’s finally going to pay.” In a letter to Bonin that she wanted him to read right before his execution, she wrote: “You taught me a few things: How to hate, and that I feel I could kill you, little by little, one piece at a time. You’d best get down on your hands and knees and pray to God for forgiveness. I don’t know if even He could forgive you. But I hope the Lord can forgive me for how I feel about you”28