For some, last week marked an important date on the Jewish calendar unrelated to the approach of Passover: the completion on Wednesday of Tractate Sanhedrin in the cycle of daily Talmud study known as daf yomi. This particularly rich volume addresses the structure of rabbinic courts, criminal law, and criminal procedure. David Bashevkin describes a remarkable lecture about one of its themes:

On Friday, September 13, 1957, Chief Justice Earl Warren and the former president Harry Truman attended a Talmud lecture at the Jewish Theological Seminary. The . . . topic of Rabbi Saul Lieberman’s lecture was the Jewish legal approach to self-incrimination, a fitting topic as the High Holy Days approached. Lieberman explained why Jewish courts do not accept self-incriminating testimony: a person cannot “make himself wicked.”

Maimonides offered a psychological rationale for this principle, but Lieberman’s insight was profound: the very act of self-incrimination is a form of repentance. Once a court hears such testimony, the guilty party has already repented for the sin in question. This idea reverberated beyond the lecture hall. Less than a decade later, Chief Justice Warren’s court enshrined the right against self-incrimination in Miranda v. Arizona, citing Maimonides to show the ancient roots of the principle. While Warren didn’t cite Lieberman’s logic, the echoes of that Talmud lecture were clear.

Another outstanding scholar educated in the Lithuanian tradition, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, disputed Lieberman’s interpretation:

Repentance, Rabbi Soloveitchik insisted, is not admissible in court. Nowhere in Jewish law, he explained, do we find that the repentance of someone convicted in court is taken into consideration. While repentance is admirable, if not required, to mend relationships, most especially with the Divine, it cannot reverse a court’s decision or disqualify accepted testimony.

This debate raises an important question: why isn’t t’shuvah (repentance) factored into our legal system?

This dispute, and the answer to this question, according to Bashevkin, gets at the very meaning of Jewish law.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.