In a classic thought experiment of modern ethical philosophy, a person must choose between allowing a trolley to run over five people or pulling a lever that would divert it to another track, where it would kill  only one. To its critics, this highly contrived dilemma has little practical bearing. Yet this might not always be so, writes Shmuel Reichman: if, as many expect, self-driving cars become a reality, they will be equipped with algorithms for dealing with such situations. Reichman, with this in mind, explores the halakhic ramifications of the famous “trolley problem,” beginning with a similar scenario addressed by the Talmud:

A man comes before [the sage] Rabbah with the following case: the ruler of a city commanded him to kill another person or else sacrifice his own life. Can he do so to save himself? Rabbah answers that this man must give up his own life rather than kill his fellow man, since “who are you to say that your blood is redder? Perhaps the blood of that person is redder than yours.”

Trying to parse Rabbah’s cryptic statement, Reichman notes that some commentators read it to mean that human lives indeed differ in worth, but it is not for other humans to determine which are more worthy. He also cites a different possibility:

God created all people equal, and in His eyes, everyone possesses the same right to life. A person is not judged based on past or future actions; a human being always retains his or her innate, infinite value. Furthermore, even if it was thought that human value was determined based on the amount of future time a person possesses, [in which case, for instance, it would be better to save a young and healthy person than an old or ill one], each moment of time is of infinite value. Therefore, one minute and one year are each valued at the same nonaggregatable infinity.

Hundreds of years later, the great 20th-century halakhist Abraham Yeshayah Karelitz (known popularly as the Ḥazon Ish) concocted his own version of the trolley problem, and could not come to a definitive answer. But, notes Reichman, the problem has very real halakhic ramifications, since it could be forbidden to drive a car programmed to make faulty moral decisions.

In 1946, Julius Streicher, a high-ranking SS-officer and a chief Nazi propagandist, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg. Just before he was executed, he called out “Heil Hitler!” and the odd phrase “Purimfest, 1946!” It seems the his hanging alongside that of his fellow convicts put him in mind of the hanging of Haman and his ten sons described in the book of Esther. As Emmanuel Bloch and Zvi Ron wrote in 2022:

Julius Streicher, . . . founder and editor-in-chief of the weekly German newspaper Der Stürmer (“The Stormer”), featured a lengthy report on March 1934: “The Night of the Murder: The Secret of the Jewish Holiday of Purim is Unveiled.” On the day after Kristallnacht (November 10, 1938), Streicher gave a speech to more than 100,000 people in Nuremberg in which he justified the violence against the Jews with the claim that the Jews had murdered 75,000 Persians in one night, and that the Germans would have the same fate if the Jews had been able to accomplish their plan to institute a new murderous “Purim” in Germany.

In 1940, the best-known Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda film, Der Ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew”), took up the same theme. Hitler even identified himself with the villains of the Esther story in a radio broadcast speech on January 30, 1944, where he stated that if the Nazis were defeated, the Jews “could celebrate the destruction of Europe in a second triumphant Purim festival.”

As we’ll see below, Jews really did celebrate the Nazi defeat on a subsequent Purim, although it was far from a joyous one. But the Nazis weren’t the first ones to see in the story of Esther—in which, to prevent their extermination, the Jews get permission from the king to slay those who would have them killed—an archetypal tale of Jewish vengefulness and bloodlust. Martin Luther, an anti-Semite himself, was so disturbed by the book that he wished he could remove it from the Bible altogether, although he decided he had no authority to do so.

More recently, a few Jews have taken up a similar argument, seeing in the Purim story, and the figure of 75,000 enemies slain by Persian Jews, a tale of the evils of vengeance, and tying it directly to what they imagine is the cruelty and vengefulness of Israel’s war against Hamas. The implication is that what’s wrong with Israel is something that’s wrong with Judaism itself. Jonathan Tobin comments on three such articles:

This group is right in one sense. In much the same way as the Jews of ancient Persia, Israelis have answered Hamas’s attempt at Jewish genocide with a counterattack aimed at eradicating the terrorists. The Palestinian invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7 was a trailer for what they wished to do to the rest of Israel. Thanks to the courage of those who fought back, they failed in that attempt, even though 1,200 men, women and children were murdered, and 250 were kidnapped and dragged back into captivity in Gaza.

Those Jews who have fetishized the powerlessness that led to 2,000 years of Jewish suffering and persecution don’t merely smear Israel. They reject the whole concept of Jews choosing not to be victims and instead take control of their destiny.