The death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in yesterday’s helicopter crash has generated a large quantity of celebratory material online. Memes, tweets, blogposts and the like are being happily shared among his enemies and opponents. This is not surprising since he was an implacable foe of the State of Israel, a Holocaust denier and no lover of the Jewish people.
But is it right to rejoice?. At
Avot 4:24 Shmuel HaKatan says,
“Don’t
be happy at the downfall of your enemy and don’t let your heart rejoice when he
stumbles, in case God sees you [literally “him”] and it’s bad in His eyes, and
He turns His anger away from him [i.e. your enemy].”
These words are a direct quote from Proverbs (Mishlei 24:17-18)
and they make us stop in our tracks and ask ourselves if our gleeful celebrations
are in order or not.
To feel joy is both normal and natural. When King David wrote, “I will exalt you, God, since you have raised me up and did not let my enemies rejoice over me” (Psalms 30:2) he must have understood what such joy felt like since he was able to project that feeling on to the feelings which he expected his enemies to have.
Purim is not a precedent for rejoicing over our enemies’
downfall, since it does not focus on the death of Haman. Rather, we are
supposed to direct our joy to the issue of a royal decree that the Jewish inhabitants
of Ahasuerus’ empire were empowered to take up arms and defend themselves
against the wider population.
So what should we do? Here’s a clue. If we cannot channel
our joy from the downfall of our enemies to some other source of happiness, it
is still open to us to translate it into gratitude. Rather than celebrate the
death of President Raisi, we can offer our thanks to God that He has removed one
of the many threats that face the Jewish nation and its homeland. Sadly, many
such threats remain—but each represents the potential for future thanks to our
one and true Protector.
In the Book of Psalms (Tehillim 27) we find an example of
how a person who is acutely aware of God’s presence and of His intervention in events
responds to the downfall of his enemies. The psalm in question uses the same
Hebrew words as this mishnah for ‘downfall’ and ‘stumbling, and it is hardly
likely that King Solomon, compiling the Book of Proverbs, would not have been
familiar with the text of a psalm penned by his own father.
Psalm 27 can be seen as a paradigm for an ideal response to
the fall of one’s foes. In it, King David acknowledges the facts on the ground—his
enemies have been beaten and their malevolent intent foiled—and then does the
following things:
• He affirms his continued trust in God;
• He requests further protection and sanctuary from evil;
• He proposes to offer joy-sacrifices to God and to sing His
praises;
• He calls on God to lead him along the path of integrity,
since his foes are ever-watchful;
• He calls on others to strengthen themselves by placing
their hope in God.
There is no triumphalism here, no personal judgement of the wicked
by King David, no wagging of fingers or naming of names and no suggestion that
God has only eliminated his enemies because he has asked him to do so. This
response is dignified, restrained and responsible: there is a strong case for
arguing that we should work hard on our own feelings in order to channel our
own responses to triumph over our enemies in an equivalent manner.
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