If Someone Comes to Kill You,
Rise up and Kill Him First
Rise up and Kill Him First
Gemora, Sanhedrin 72
Habah l'hargecha hashkem l'hargo -- "If someone is coming to kill you, rise against him and kill him first.”
derived from Deuteronomy 22:26)
*(This law applies equally to someone coming to kill someone else -- you're obligated to kill the murderer in order to save his intended victim.)
Mr Rosenblum writes:
[. . .] I could forgive an American reader who felt that the wild dogs currently harassing residents of Ramat Beit Shemesh is a bit too parochial. And I confess that the importance of the issue for me has a good deal to do with the fact that I have four married couples and a healthy percentage of my grandchildren living in Ramat Beit Shemesh Gimmel, one of the afflicted neighborhoods.
Five or six people have been attacked and had to undergo a painful regimen of rabies shots so far, and many others have been chased by these dogs, which are large and menacing. Parents will only let their children play in the parking lots adjacent to their buildings. A 12-year-old boy was recently dragged to the ground and bitten six times. An elderly lady fell and broke her collarbone when surprised on the street by a dog pack, and others have run blindly into the street in the same situation.
One of my daughters-in-law, who leaves for work early in the morning, has been chased and had to swing her purse hard to drive away wild dogs on at least one occasion. Another won't get off a bus at night unless her husband is there to meet her. Though the dogs, which travel in packs of between three and nine, are most prevalent at night, they have also appeared at the public parks where kids play in the afternoon.
So far all the Beit Shemesh municipality’s efforts to rid the various neighborhoods of the dog packs, over a period of two years, have been unsuccessful. Dr. Maya Kimchi, the municipal veterinarian, began her tenure by vowing that there was no way Beit Shemesh would resort to shooting the dogs with deadly fire. But after six months of futile efforts to shoot them with tranquilizer guns and capture them, she too has admitted that there is no alternative. The city also tried large cages baited with meat, but those were stolen by animal-rights activists. Finally, the municipality petitioned the Agricultural Ministry to dispatch sniper teams in the early hours of the morning to shoot the dogs.
A warning posted by the municipality to pet owners to make sure that their dogs were inside the night of the planned shootings set off a frenzied response on social media by animal lovers castigating Beit Shemesh as a “dark, medieval city” and the mayor as “Satan incarnate.”
“I hope your G-d gives Ramat Beit Shemesh a bloodbath,” one animal-rights supporter offered.
Even Sara Netanyahu, the wife of the prime minister, got into the act by posting a message urging Agricultural Minister Uriel Ariel to find a better, more sensitive way to protect the public. And as inevitably happens in Israel, petitions were filed to the Supreme Court and an order issued to block the shootings, at least for the time being.
I GREW UP with not one but two Norwegian Elkhounds. And almost 60 years later, I can still remember the burning tears in my eyes, when Old Yeller, the eponymous canine hero of a Disney movie of the same name, had to be put down after saving its youthful owner from a rabid wolf and contracting rabies himself.
Yet I find myself amazed by those animal lovers who can conjure up so much sympathy for wild, potentially rabid dogs, but none for the thousands of children and adults terrorized by them. Do any of them have children of their own? Can they imagine what it is like to feel imprisoned in one’s own home, afraid to allow one’s children to go to the local park or even to accompany them there?
In general, necessity has forced upon Israelis the recognition that a society’s first imperative is survival, and that ensuring the survival of one’s loved ones and oneself often entails difficult choices. That willingness to deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it were, is one aspect of Israel’s greater health and brighter future compared to other Western nations. Should the moral preening of animal-rights activists become more typical in Israel I would be fearful for Israel’s long-time survival.
The anti-human bias so prevalent in Western society today has not infected Israel to the same extent. Israel’s fertility rate is by far the highest of any of the developed countries in the OECD, and over twice that of many Western European countries.
The Western environmental movement consistently portrays man as an unwelcome interloper into pristine nature, and the Greens’ most consistent policy recommendation is that we all have fewer children. And make no mistake, the animal-rights activists share that anti-human bias. At the first hearing in the Supreme Court over the dog issue, one of the animal-rights activists hissed at a Ramat Beit Shemesh resident, “Why is your life more important than a dog’s life?”
Another activist wondered how Jews, whose people went through the Holocaust, could shoot dogs. But she had her Holocaust analogies all mixed up. The Nazis were great animal lovers; it was human beings they killed with industrial efficiency. On a visit to Berlin in the ’20s, Rabbi Yerucham Levovitz saw dogs dressed in pants and sweaters, and commented, “Where they treat animals as humans, they will slaughter humans as animals,” citing the verse in Hoshea (13:2). “Those who slaughter men will kiss their calves.”
If common sense and a preference for children over wild dogs does not prevail soon in Ramat Beit Shemesh, it is time to be very worried about Israel’s future.
Source: From an article in Mishpacha Magazine,
Chase of the Wild Dogs: They shoot dogs, don’t they?
by Yonoson Rosenblum, Wednesday, August 02, 2017
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* I also think this could be applicable to the ‘Azaria’ case, and to the many terrorists that come to kill Jews, and the terrorists who are in the act of doing so.
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