Ask the Rabbis | Does Jewish Thought Recognize a Concept of Collective Guilt or Collective Responsibility?
INDEPENDENT
Yes. The raw narrative of our history tells it quite clearly: I mean, we spent 38 extra years in the desert because some of us whined about not being able to take over Canaan. And we got collectively kicked out of the Promised Land twice because some of us violated the terms of our stay. And those are just a few examples. As the sages of yore taught us: “All of Israel are guarantors for one another” (Shavuot 39a). Some 3,200 years ago, our people went to war against the tribe of Benjamin for their refusal to arrest some hoodlums responsible for the rape-murder of a woman. In the ensuing battles, more than 65,000 died on both sides, and virtually all of Benjamin was wiped out completely (Judges 19-20). So, yeah. Collective consequences are not foreign to us.
It is written: “The matters which are hidden are for Hawayah our God, and the revealed things are for us and for our offspring” (Deuteronomy 29:28). To paraphrase Rashi’s comments on that passage: We may ask, “Why punish all of us for the deeds of others?” but the Torah tells us that what is hidden from your knowledge is not your responsibility and will be handled by God privately, but what is revealed to you and you do nothing about, well, that’s on you.
Rabbi Gershon Winkler
Walking Stick Foundation
Golden, CO
HUMANIST
Jewish law—and lore—reflects many attitudes. The Torah is filled with examples of collective punishment, some divine, some human. From Jacob’s sons’ slaughter at Shechem, to the death of Egypt’s firstborn, to the exile of the entire biblical nation of Israel, our stories reflect an ancient reality: Individuals are often swept into a collective fate.
Our sages were not united on these questions. Some denied that such stories were genuine examples of collective punishment. Others argued that collective guilt justifies collective punishment when nations refuse to rise up against evil. Humanistic Jews, like many others, are generally guided by the view that responsibility rests with individuals alone. As Ezekiel (18:4) declared, “Only the person who sins shall die.”
Accusations of collective guilt have been a pervasive tool of antisemitism. But we must also be cautious about accusations of “collective punishment.” All wars are calamitous for the innocent. Yet, one of the great ironies of the Israel-Hamas war is that even as Israel has repeatedly claimed to have taken extraordinary pains to prevent noncombatant deaths, it is singled out for condemnation—and collective guilt—by false charges of inflicting collective punishment on Gazans.
Certainly, responsibility cannot be transferred to others. But the reality of warfare is that there will always be collective consequence. Leaders and their followers can bring disaster upon entire societies. The consequences are tragic. But they are not collective punishment.
Rabbi Jeffrey Falick
Congregation for Humanistic Judaism of Metro Detroit
Farmington Hills, MI
RENEWAL
Jewish law recognizes collective guilt and punishment but prefers the notions of individual guilt and collective responsibility. Certainly, there is plenty of collective guilt and punishment in the Torah. What is the Noah story, after all? Not only is all of humanity outside the ark destroyed, but so are all other living creatures, on account of human sins. In the flood story, God learns the lesson that the guilty should pay, not the entire collective.
But it’s not a settled matter, is it? The Bible struggles mightily with the issue of individual vs. collective liability. All the firstborn of Egypt are doomed to destruction, whether or not they individually enslaved Israelites. In the wilderness, Moses must continually intercede to keep God from destroying the nascent nation for the sins of the few. Much later, King David comes to realize that the people of Israel should not suffer retribution because of his own sin—but not before 70,000 people die in a plague.
Our rabbis worked hard in their commentaries to uphold the law that parents should not be put to death for the sins of their children or vice versa (Deuteronomy 24:16). They interpreted problematic sections of the Bible, such as the commandment in Deuteronomy 13 to wipe out an Ir Hanidachat, an idolatrous city, in ways that make it impossible to carry out such violent collective punishment.
In our own time, we continue to struggle with the limits of guilt and responsibility, particularly how much accountability people bear for decisions made by their leaders. How guilty were all Americans when the Trump administration abruptly halted foreign aid, leaving thousands of people overseas to die? How guilty were all Gazans when their Hamas leadership launched its hideous attack on October 7?
How responsible are all Israelis for the military decisions of their government? We are intertwined in an intricate web that eludes easy understanding, yet the consequences are profound.
Rabbi Gilah Langner
Congregation Kol Ami
Arlington, VA
RECONSTRUCTIONIST
Collectivity is at the heart of Judaism. We stood at Sinai together. We engage in our most important rituals together. And we are in covenant with God together. That’s where the joy and the richness reside. In the Hebrew Bible’s relationship of Israel to God, there is collective guilt and punishment, but also collective teshuvah, collective forgiveness and collective redemption.
This kind of collective responsibility can have a dark side, however, since in the natural and tragic course of things, innocent individuals can suffer the consequences of actions of those who do wrong. If one person drills a hole in the boat, as the rabbinic parable says, the rest of the shipmates are in danger. Our wrong actions do have consequences for others. We sink or survive together.
But beyond the natural consequences of wrongdoing, there is indeed an ethical issue with intentional collective punishment. I think the strongest voice in the Torah on this subject is Abraham’s argument with God in Genesis. The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are the paradigmatic examples of a sinful society. Yet even here, Abraham asks God: “Will You sweep away the innocent along with the guilty?…Far be it from You to do such a thing…Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?” For human beings in conflict, I believe the Torah is telling us here that collective punishment is fundamentally wrong and unjust. We should therefore challenge ourselves as Abraham challenged God and ask: Shall not the children of God deal justly with one another?
Rabbi Caryn Broitman
Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center
Vineyard Haven, MA
REFORM
The priest and prophet Ezekiel was captured and exiled in Babylon during the Babylonian reign over Israel around 597 BCE. He and his fellow exiles might well have longed for God’s collective punishment upon their captors. Yet Ezekiel 18:20 records, “The righteousness of the righteous shall be accounted to him alone, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be accounted to him alone.”
Torah chronicles several examples of collective punishment (the Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Egyptians drowning in the Sea of Reeds). Later Jewish commentators debate the morality of it, ultimately concluding, like Ezekiel, that collective punishment is immoral. But when it comes to collective responsibility, Ezekiel missed something. According to the Talmud, one who can prevent someone from sin and fails to do so is morally liable.
Wouldn’t the opposite be true, then—one who enables someone else to act righteously might share credit for that act? Our daily liturgy captures this notion when we pray the Avot prayer, asking God to grant us goodness because of the merit of our ancestors.
Collective punishment? No. Collective responsibility? Yes. As the Talmud teaches (Shavuot 39a) Kol Yisrael arevim zeh b’zeh—all of Israel is responsible for one another.
Rabbi Dr. Laura Novak Winer
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion
Fresno, CA
CONSERVATIVE
The Torah presents several examples of collective guilt and punishment. Recall the story of the 12 scouts who were tasked to explore the Promised Land (Numbers 13). Ten scouts were frightened at what they saw, while two offered a favorable report. As a result of the ten scouts’ lack of faith, the entire Israelite population was forced to wander for 40 years. Recall, as well, when Jacob’s sons unleash a collective punishment upon the men of Shechem after the town’s prince rapes their sister, Dinah. The medieval commentators Maimonides and Nachmanides disagree about such matters. Maimonides states that collective responsibility is a given feature of all societies, while Nachmanides argues that it is neither universal nor advisable.
A citation found in every mezuzah and tefillin set is the second paragraph of the Shema (Deuteronomy 11:13-21), which asserts that if the Israelites obey God’s commandments, then God will grant rain in its season. But if the Israelites worship other gods and fail to live by the commandments, God will stop the rains. While this theology has been questioned throughout the ages, starting perhaps with Job, the lesson is clear: We rise or sink together.
That theology may be hard to stomach at times, but I have come to appreciate this idea of collective responsibility. Indeed, in an era of hyper-individualism, numerous Jewish practices and texts remind the modern Jew that we have a responsibility to the collective and at times will face the harsh realities of what happens when members of our own circles—leaders in particular—fail to uphold the best of what God expects from us.
Rabbi Amy S. Wallk
Temple Beth El
Springfield, MA
MODERN ORTHODOX
In biblical times, there are recognized cases of collective guilt or punishment. God self-describes to Moses as “the loving God, the loving God, Lord gracious and merciful, slow to anger, overflowing with lovingkindness and truth…forgiving inquiry, transgression and sin but will not clear the guilty, and will punish this iniquity of the fathers on children, onto the children’s children, to the third and fourth generation” (Exodus, 34:6-7).
In the Flood story, God learns the lesson that the guilty should pay, not the entire collective.
However, the rabbis later concluded that a loving and fair God would punish only the actual sinner. At the center of the High Holy Days prayers, they placed a revised version of God’s self-description. The liturgy of repentance, repeated dozens of times on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, reads, “The loving God, the loving God, Lord gracious and merciful…forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin and will clear the guilty.” They accomplished this transformation by leaving out the second half of the verse that spoke of punishing the next generation, and by citing Deuteronomy 24:16: “Fathers shall not be put to death for children; nor shall children be put to death for fathers. Each person shall be [punished] for his own sin.”
Incidentally, this example should put to rest the Haredi definition of Orthodoxy as standing for no change in the Torah ever—a definition ironically echoed by secular/liberal stereotyping. Orthodoxy stands for the continuity of the Jewish journey and the sacredness of the whole tradition. We bring all our past teachings, laws and events with us into every historical era, including our own time, and we learn even from those we no longer practice.
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg
J.J. Greenberg Institute for the Advancement of Jewish Life/Hadar
Riverdale, NY
ORTHODOX
The concept of collective punishment jumps out at us from Joshua 7:1. After destroying Jericho, Joshua forbids the soldiers from looting anything from the city. One soldier, Achan, violates the prohibition by taking some items. God declares that the Jewish people have sinned, transgressed and denied the covenant, and they lose the next battle. But if only one person misbehaved, why were they all considered sinners? The traditional explanation is that no individual can act against very strong social pressure. If others had taken God’s proscription seriously enough, there would not have been even a sole perp—so the action of that individual reflected the sin of the many. That’s one kind of collective punishment.
Another kind that’s harder for some people to swallow is the promise that in a redeemed world, people will turn their swords into plowshares; this implies that until the redemption, there will be wars. And wars are fought not against the individuals who start them—we don’t fight wars against a president or a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—but against populations. It’s clear elsewhere in the Bible that national groups will continue to exist even after messianic redemption. So human beings function in polities, political units, and when action is taken, regrettably, because of our human frailty or worse, it’s taken against an entire population. It’s not the people who caused the war whom you fight against, or who suffer.
Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein
Cross-Currents
Los Angeles, CA /Jerusalem
CHABAD
The one-word answer is no. Judaism focuses on individual responsibility and therefore individual consequences for individuals’ behavior. We find this in Genesis 18:23 when Abraham protests God’s wish to destroy the entire wicked city of Sodom. Abraham says, “Will you sweep away the righteous, the innocent along with the guilty? What if there should be 50 righteous innocent people within the city—will you then wipe out the place and not forgive it for the sake of the innocent 50 who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing…Shall not the judge of all the earth deal justly?” So the idea of collective punishment, collective guilt, is not the Jewish way.
However, collective responsibility is. For example, in the Torah there is a mitzvah called eglah arufah. It’s a particular offering that has to be brought as atonement in a case where somebody is found murdered on the road outside of a city by unknown hands. The closest city to that place has to bring an atonement offering because it carries collective responsibility for not protecting this person, not making sure that he was escorted properly. But that’s not guilt or punishment; it’s a community responsibility to make sure justice is preserved.
Silence is complicity. We can’t say, “Someone else is doing something about this, so I’ll ignore it”; where people were silent in the face of crimes, yes, we hold them responsible. But the bottom line is the emphasis on individual responsibility.
Rabbi Simon Jacobson
Meaningful Life Foundation
Brooklyn, NY