Midnight Laws

Friday January 23, 2026 – ה׳ שְׁבָט תפש”ו

There are a few verses in the book of Exodus that haunt me every time I hear them.

“Toward midnight I will go forth among the Egyptians, and every [male] first-born in the land of Egypt shall die, from the first-born of Pharaoh who sits on his throne to the first-born of the slave woman who is behind the millstones; and all the first-born of the cattle. And there shall be a loud cry in all the land of Egypt, such as has never been or will ever be again; but not a dog shall snarl at any of the Israelites, at human or animal—in order that you may know that GOD makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel.”
(Exodus 11:4–7)

מכת בכורות, the killing of the firstborn—the Tenth Plague—is the moment when power reaches its most terrifying expression. This violence is not chaos or random. Rather, it is targeted, systematic, and final. Death arrives not as collateral damage, but as an all-encompassing policy from which there is no appeal or escape.

The Torah lingers on that night. There is a “great cry” throughout Egypt—אֵין בַּיִת אֲשֶׁר אֵין שָׁם מֵת. No house is untouched. And despite the story’s focus on our liberation, this moment is meant to unsettle us. Redemption comes—but at a terrible cost. The Torah does not sanitize that truth.

And it is precisely because our foundational story treats state-sanctioned killing with such gravity that we should be paying close attention right now.

Because while many of us have been busy—busy with war, with grief, with hostages, with exhaustion, the Knesset has been moving quickly. Quietly. Methodically.

At the center of it is a bill proposed by Justice Minister Yariv Levin (Likud), Knesset Constitution Committee head MK Simcha Rothman (Religious Zionism), and MK Yulia Malinovsky (Yisrael Beiteinu), and championed by Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who has made this the flagship of his agenda.

Under the proposed law, a special judicial panel, led by a retired Central Court judge, would have broad powers to hear cases involving crimes such as genocide, violations of state sovereignty, assisting the enemy during wartime, and acts of terrorism – and is now making its way through the Knesset at lightning speed.

The argument is familiar. It is visceral. It appeals to rage, to pain, to the very real trauma Israelis are living with since that tragic and fateful day, and the two years of war since. It promises deterrence. It promises justice. It promises that killing will somehow restore moral order.

But Jewish tradition, shaped by millennia of powerlessness and survival, is deeply suspicious of that promise.

The Torah records only one moment when mass death is wielded as an instrument of justice—and it is not held up as a model. Even God’s power, in that moment, is bounded. The Israelites are instructed not to leave their homes. The angel of death is not something to celebrate, not something to emulate, not something to unleash lightly. The memory of that night is ritualized every year not with triumph, but with restraint. We spill wine at the Seder to diminish our joy.

Because the lesson of מכת בכורות (Killing of the firstborn) is NOT that killing redeems or should be used as pressure.  It is that power over life and death corrupts—even when exercised for a cause we believe to be just.

That is why, throughout the evolution of Jewish law, capital punishment has been effectively abolished. The rabbinic sages of the Talmud bent over backwards and went to great lengths to find legal loopholes to make executions impossible. The Sages addressed the question of capital punishment and adopted a resolute stance.

Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva stated: “Had we been members of the Sanhedrin, no person would ever have been executed.” (Makkot 7a)

A Sanhedrin that executed once in seventy years was called “bloody.”

Rabbinic Judaism understood something modern states often forget: once the state claims the right to kill in cold blood, the moral ground shifts irreversibly. Maimonides wrote: “It is better and more desirable to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to execute one innocent person on a single day” (Maimonides, Sefer HaMitzvot, Negative Commandments 266/296).

This should not be seen as softness, but rather hard-earned wisdom.

And this is why the death penalty bill should alarm us—not only because of what it authorizes, but because of how it is being advanced. This week’s Constitution and Law Committee saw a particularly vicious discussion regarding a theoretical case of how they might handle a “pregnant terrorist” – whether to execute her right away or wait until after giving birth.

Yes, that was the discussion in a Jewish state.

The bill is structurally discriminatory. It creates different legal regimes for the same crime based on the perpetrator and the victim. In practice, it mandates the death penalty primarily for Palestinians, allows discretion when both perpetrator and victim are Israeli, and excludes altogether cases in which Jewish perpetrators kill Palestinians in the West Bank. The message is unmistakable: some lives are treated as more valuable than others. That is not justice. It is a betrayal of the democratic and Jewish commitment to human dignity and equality before the law.

The bill is being pushed through at speed, amid war, trauma, and exhaustion. It is being framed as inevitable, as obvious, as beyond debate. It is detached from broader questions of due process, discrimination, international law, and the corrosive effect such power has on democratic institutions themselves.

This is not about deterrence. Every serious study shows the death penalty does not deter terrorism, especially those who are willing to martyr themselves for their cause. This is about spectacle. About demonstrating force. About asserting dominance in the most irreversible way possible.

The bill is fundamentally flawed because it violates the sanctity of life and human dignity. The death penalty is a cruel and irreversible punishment, incompatible with the values a Jewish and democratic state claims to uphold. This proposal goes even further, limiting judicial discretion and pressuring courts toward execution even without full consensus. It rests on a false promise of deterrence, ignores the global move away from capital punishment, and treats death as a tool of policy rather than a tragic last resort—which Jewish tradition has long refused to do.

In Exodus, death comes at midnight—when no one is watching clearly, when fear overrides reflection, when power moves unchecked.

That is the danger of this moment.

Israel is fighting a just war against terror. It has the right—and the obligation—to defend its citizens. But defense is not vengeance. And justice is not the same as killing.

If Zionism is to remain a moral project—if a Jewish state is to remain Jewish in more than name—then the restraint of power must matter as much as its exercise. Especially when emotions run hottest. Especially when pain tempts us toward absolutes.

The Torah does not tell us to forget the tenth plague, as we are instructed to remember each and every yearso that we do not become Egypt in our moment of strength.

While we were focused elsewhere, or distracted, or overwhelmed, a midnight law began moving forward.

The question before us now is not only whether this bill passes, as it definitely has a strong likelihood of doing so. It is whether we still believe that Jewish power must answer to Jewish ethics, and whether we, as mere mortals, can act as God.

And whether, even in the darkest nights, we are willing to say: not this.

Shabbat Shalom.