revenge 1

“pleasure in revenge is always proof of a weak and narrow mind” (Juvenal Satire 13)

In 1986 David Blumenfeld, a kindhearted New York rabbi, was shot by a Palestinian in Jerusalem. He got off lightly with a wound to his head. One more inch and he would have been dead. He soon put it behind him, but his daughter Laura could not. She needed revenge—or at least that’s what she thought. She needed to show that “you can’t fuck with the Blumenfelds”. So when, twelve years later, she arranged to spend a year in Israel, she had revenge in mind (it was also her honeymoon), and a plan to generate a book as she went along: Revenge—what is it, how is it done, why is it required, who does it involve?[1]

One view is well known: “Life for life; eye for eye; tooth for tooth; hand for hand; foot for foot; burning for burning; wound for wound; stripe for stripe.” The rule is ancient Babylonian, older than the Old Testament, but it is almost universally misunderstood. It is a counsel of restraint, of moderation in retaliation. Take an eye for an eye, it says, but no more. Measure for measure; retaliation not revenge.

Blumenfeld travels widely and interviews high and low. Yitzhak Shamir [the former Israeli Prime Minister] quotes the rule and approves it, but he doesn’t seem to have got the point. In the Biblical story he tells in illustration, a beating is avenged by a death: “Blood for blood”, he says, thumping the table. Ariel Sharon [the then current Israeli Prime Minister] doesn’t do much better, on the available evidence: in his youth he led Squad 101, which specialized in reprisals and responded to the killing of three Israeli civilians by killing sixty-nine Arab civilians.

Rafi Eitan, one of the Mossad agents who captured Adolf Eichmann, is straightforward: “An eye for an eye gives you nothing. You have to go after the head.” A deep revulsion at victimhood underlies the Israeli toughness; as Blumenfeld sees. It can seem hard to fault, after so many centuries of persecution. There are circumstances in which it can provide a powerful justification for retaliation. But not revenge.

Blumenfeld, however, wants revenge. How much is enough? she asks her interviewees. “None”, says Leah Rabin, widow of the assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. “Because there’s not enough revenge in the whole world.” No eye for an eye for her. And those murderous big babies in Sicily [the mafiosi] agree: “Here we have no limits on revenge”, the mayor of Palermo tells Blumenfeld.

She travels on to the Roman Catholic north of Albania, another “revenge capital”, another country subject to the pathetic Mediterranean vendetta culture, and asks a member of the provincial Blood Feud Committee about turning the other cheek:

Mark cupped a hand over his mouth to catch his laugh. The other men in the room tittered. “In Albania we have “Don’t hit my cheek or I’ll kill you.”

On again—to Iran, to the grand ayatollah Abdul Karim Mosavi Ardebily in Qom, head of the first Islamic Justice Department under Khomeini, a true eye-for-an-eye man, as precise as Portia in The Merchant of Venice. Blumenfeld’s father can shoot back at his aggressor, he rules, but he must not injure his aggressor “one millimeter more than the Palestinian had hurt him”. The same principle is applied to Nahid, an Iranian divorcée obliged by law to hand her seven-year-old daughter Arian to her ex-husband. Eighteen months later Arian is dead, starved, brutalized, fractured skull, broken arms, cigarette burns, fork-tine burns, and worse. Arian’s older stepbrother is convicted, and Nahid wants him dead, but a girl’s life in Iran is worth only half that of a boy’s, and Nahid needs six thousand dollars to make up the blood price. If she gets it, she can have his life. She’s saving up.

Blumenfeld’s research runs in parallel with her own project of revenge. She identifies her father’s shooter, Omar al Khatib, who is in prison. She visits his family in the West Bank, concealing her identity. They take her to visit him in prison, but she is turned back. She corresponds with him, the letters smuggled in and out in plastic capsules swallowed by members of the visiting family. But she still doesn’t know exactly what she wants to do. Her dominant image is of taking him by the collar and shaking him. At other times she wants to get him to know and like her family without knowing who they really are. Her first real coup (she sees that she is “unhinged”) is to get her father to eat the chocolate wafers that al Khatib has sent her as a present.

Finally she meets him; the outcome (for which you will have to read the book) is remarkable. The source of her family anger is not what she thinks; the moral is complex. She has talked to the revenge specialists, but also to Friar Dillon in the Garden of Gethsemane, whose view—“I wouldn’t attempt to get even. It wouldn’t make me even”—doesn’t depend on forgiveness, or any sort of Christian belief, but simply on being a grown-up, having some sense of perspective under the stars. She has talked, also, to Isaac ben Ovadiah, whose wife was killed in 1986 by the same gang that targeted Blumenfeld’s father. Taped above his desk he has “Love your enemies. It really gets on their nerves!”

Some people are naturally vengeful, some aren’t. These are deep differences in individual temperaments, hard to shift. But we needn’t accept these traits in whole cultures and societies. Those cultures that demand and glorify revenge while talking of honour stand condemned: for their institutionalisation of the worst in human beings, for the sheer vulgarity (in the largest sense) of their outlook, for the fabulous pettiness, the error about life, that long-term vengefulness requires.

Revenge: a story of hope, makes this clear. It is thorough, courageous, intelligent, well written—with an honesty that manages to stop short of exhibitionism. It clearly identifies the central evil: righteous indignation felt on behalf of others—friends, family, religious group, ethnic group. Human beings feel impeccably justified in sustained anger and intransigence when the harm has not been done to themselves (or not just to themselves). They become intoxicated by the sense that they are standing up for others, and experience their extreme violence of feeling as wholly selfless and morally upright, unaware of what Laura Blumenfeld discovers: that the feeling is rotten and full of ego if it does not soon evolve into something moderate, practical and constructive.

[1] Laura Blumenfeld Revenge: a Story of Hope (New York: Washington Square Press)

review by Galen Strawson The Financial Times August 2002; slightly revised.