In Atlanta, a man opens fire on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; he blamed his health concerns on the Covid-19 vaccine. Authorities said the man was mentally ill.
In Newbury, Vt., a mother of four is killed with a shotgun blast by her father. He was found not guilty, following a psychiatrist’s testimony, on the grounds of insanity.
In Rockville, Md., a woman is charged with the 2014 murder of two of her children. Her lawyer attributes her actions to mental illness.
In Hudson, Ohio, a suspect lunges at a police officer with a hammer. The man, said a criminal defense attorney, was mentally ill.
A long-time resident of New York City’s Queens borough, I have chosen since 2020 to not take the subway into Manhattan.
At first, because of health. Covid, to be exact.
You don’t know how seriously the other passengers, especially in a crowded rush hour subway car, take precautions against getting and spreading the disease, precautions like wearing masks and getting vaccinated and self-isolating when symptoms appear. And I’m not willing to risk my health for the convenience of a cheap (seniors half-price) OMNY card. So I opt for a more-expensive express bus ride, or an even-more-expensive taxi ride.
My other reason for eschewing the city’s lauded rapid transit: safety.
Do I know if the person next to me on the subway is dangerous? Or sane?
Despite assurances of elected political officials and MTA executives that the crime rate on the subway system is significantly declining, weekly headlines about people being stabbed and shot on the trains, and being pushed onto the tracks, leave me – and other former subway riders – reluctant to take a subway ride.
One frequent detail about the perpetrators of the subway attacks, and about other high-visibility crimes committed throughout the Greater New York area (frequently upon MTA workers), make me especially wary about re-entering the subways, and about the city’s overall criminal justice system: many of the accused or suspected individuals, according to annoyingly repetitive news reports, “had a history of mental illness.” These individuals, if apprehended, quickly exit the criminal justice system. To prey on straphangers or other citizens/victims.
In other words, according to the current classification of people diagnosed with various psychiatric disorders (bipolar disorder is the most-familiar one), if they are considered clinically deranged, they cannot be held responsible, legally, for their crimes. Which allows them to commit more crimes.
In other words, if the accused is crazy (to use a decidedly un-PC and perhaps-not-clinically-accurate term), that person cannot be blamed for attacking, perhaps fatally, another, often-innocent, individual – a stranger or friend or family member.
In other words, a person judged to be mentally ill may not be fit to be judged (and convicted) by a court of law. And such people, many of them homeless, will be free to walk the streets, notably into the subway system.
Some recent examples in or near my Queens neighborhood. A headline in the New York Times: “Man Charged in Subway Shoving Had History of Mental Illness.” A story in the New York Post: “Violent crime in the subway is up broadly, and the untreated mentally ill are often involved.” MSN: “To fix the subway, NYC must fix its mental health problems.”
This topic became a national concern – particularly to the Jewish community – earlier this year when a clearly disturbed individual fatally shot two young Jews, employees of the Israeli Embassy, at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington.
In summary: an increase in high visibility crimes, in the subways and in other venues in the city; an increase in out-of-control mentally ill men and women, many of them threatening or harming family members, who lived in fear. But few of the accused individuals had been arrested or taken to a mental health facility, for their own sake or the sake of their eventual victims.
These people should be in anger management classes. They should learn the principles of self-control. They should be kept away from law-abiding citizens. They should take their meds.
But these steps would be seen as an infringement of these people’s individual rights – to inflict pain on other individuals.
That attitude, the prevailing ethos of libertarian society and progressive district attorneys, is seen as a protection against potential violations of people’s rights – if they are insane, they probably cannot be convicted of the crime they have committed.
Traditional Judaism would reject this line of thinking. Traditional Judaism (which is guided by Talmud, Shulchan Aruch and other respected texts and rabbinical leadership) recognizes that people are wont to violate biblical – or in a contemporary context, secular – laws. And traditional Judaism does not give a pass to these people … especially on the grounds of the contrary state-of-mind in which they were when they did a forbidden act.
According to classical Jewish thought, someone who behaves incorrectly – who, in theological parlance, is guilty of sinning, not criminality – is by definition non compos mentis. Temporarily, probably. And is still subject to the Torah’s prescribed punishments. Which means that a sinner, still guilty, cannot plead “I did not know what I was doing” – if that was a valid exoneration, then no one would be culpable for punishment.
Who among us has not had moments of temptation? Succumbing is not a valid defense, says Judaism.
The rabbis of the Talmud recognize in their recorded opinions that a small number of disturbed people operate without intact cognitive faculties, and cannot be held accountable for their actions; but that exemption is limited in scope, and does not expect the Jewish legal structure to accept wide-spread declarations of putative mental illness as an automatic Get Out Of Jail card, or a Don’t Go To Jail In The First Place card for most people.
Reish Lakish says: A man commits a transgression only if a spirit of folly [shetut – also translated as nonsense or stupidity] enters him …
(Sotah 3a)
In other words, if a person – man or woman — is weak, he or she should know better. In other words, according to this widely cited definition of sin, sin is not equated with an evil disposition or inclination, but with what amounts to profound, debilitating silliness. In other words, a person violates a norm of proper behavior if he or she is momentarily unable to overcome his/her impulse for a major or minor moment of satisfaction or self-aggrandizement.
The Talmud recognizes three levels of mental illness: shoteh gamur, completely insane; itim chalim itim shoteh, someone who cycles in and out of psychosis; shoteh l’davar echad, someone who is insane in only one domain.
Another talmudic verse clarifies what sort of egregious action for which a man or woman cannot be held responsible – and be appropriately punished (Chagiga 3b):
The Sages taught: Who is considered an imbecile [shoteh – someone possessed of shetut]? One who goes out alone at night, and one who sleeps in a cemetery, and one who rends his garment. It was stated that Rav Huna said: One does not have the halakhic status of an imbecile until there are all of these signs present in him at the same time. Rabbi Yoḥanan said: He is considered an imbecile even due to the appearance of one of these signs.
Such a person is patur from punishment. Otherwise, according to Jewish thought, if you foul up, you pay the price.
By modern standards, these delineated acts seem like mild examples of diagnosable mentally improper behavior; today, you might cite such acts as conducting conversations with oneself, defecating in public, or engaging in other behavior that is likely to become more-antisocial or harmful. But every generation is host to people who flout the conventions of acceptable – i.e., licit – behavior.
One would think that no one in his or her right mind, knowing the Divine penalties – or today’s secular consequences — as outlined by the Rabbis, in this world and the Next World, would sin.
But sin has not abated.
Our jails are full of sinners. Often repeat offenders: Studies show that the recidivism rate for incarcerated persons with mental health disorders is much higher than for those without. (And the ranks of Judaism are full of people who – often for lack of knowledge – reject or flout the mitzvot.)
Today’s criminals (and their attorneys and defenders in the media) know that a claim of mental illness (an extension of the old insanity defense) will earn them no more than a judicial slap on the wrist. And a declaration of innocence.
Today’s ethos: Ergo sum scelestus, ergo sum innocens. (To paraphrase Descartes, “I am a criminal, therefore I am innocent.”)
The Talmud rejects this reasoning.
To take the current coddling of the putative mentally ill to its illogical extreme, anyone with a sympathetic psychiatric evaluation can escape incarceration.
The recent rise in mental illness diagnoses is a function of the growing strength of the secular, progressive wing of US society. The mental illness label is, in this view, clinical, political, sociological; i.e., people “act out” because of hostile factors in the wider culture or because of physical pathologies in their body.
In other words, there is no such thing as evil.
In other words, if mental illness means that a person is sick (like someone with Covid or the flu), then he or she is absolved of blame. Like someone with a broken leg.
In other words, “I am not a bad person.” But, a), “I had a traumatic childhood.” Or b), “My religious tradition/priest/pastor/rabbi/imam/ holy book sanctions murder/robbery/rape [take your pick!].” “ Or, c), “You don’t understand the context of what I did.” Or … the excuses go on.
JTA reported in early 2024 that “A South Florida Jewish center suffered severe damage in a weekend arson fire that police believe was set by a mentally ill homeless man.”
While this crimes-committed-by-mentally-ill-individuals phenomenon affects society as a whole, as New Yorkers, as potentially subway riders, we are particularly vulnerable to being the target of an unstable individual.
And, as this year’s murderous attacks in Washington showed, Jews are especially vulnerable.
And while this is not ostensibly a Jewish issue, with anti-Semitic incidents visibly on the rise since October 7, this don’t-blame-or-condemn-me mindset is of particular concern to the Jewish community; particularly to Orthodox Jews, who tend to be visibly Jewish and more prone to be targeted by anti-Semites.
We wonder: Can someone who attacks Jews or Jewish sites simply plead “mental illness” and escape punishment? Is there any such thing as hate or a hate crime? Is anyone guilty? Can anyone who attacks a Jew, in an obvious act of hatred, automatically get off the prosecutorial hook? Is anti-Semitism an example of evil, or are people who attack Jews – physically or “only” verbally – simply reacting to historical or economic stimuli that lead to acts of righteous indignation?
“You don’t have to be mentally ill to espouse an ideology of hating Jews and wanting all Jews dead. Look at Hitler and his followers,” psychotherapist Simone Gordon wrote in an essay in the Jewish Press. “Let us not use ‘mental illness’ as the defense against blatant anti-Semitism. We must not confuse mental illness with the espousing of virulent ideology that encourages the hatred and killing of Jews.
“It’s time,” Dr. Gordon wrote, “to call it [anti-Semitism] what it is.”
Evil.
If good and bad are subjective, relative concepts, who – or Who — can determine what constitutes “evil”?
Certainly not the victims.
Or the perpetrators.
Both would be prejudiced.
What does this theological confusion mean? Is anyone who sins “foolish” – and, accepting our faith’s openness to teshuvah, exempt from punishment from a flesh-and-blood beit din, with the hope that the person can be reformed? In other words, is anyone who willingly eats a cheeseburger simply someone overcome by a moment’s hunger pangs non-culpable? In other words, can anyone who pleads “mental illness” or has that plea made on his or her behalf by a competent medical or legal authority go scot-free? In other words, is no one actually rebellious or defiant?
Or, on the other hand, according to the Talmud’s definition of “spirit of folly,” is mostly everyone who succumbs to acting sinfully guilty – can we accept that any law breaker should be subject to legally imposed penalties?
Where is the middle ground? Where do you draw the line? And who gets to draw the line?
Why are there more unstable people roaming free nowadays? It goes back four decades. President Ronald Reagan, as part of a cost-cutting and small-government-emphasis measure, in 1981 led a congressional repeal of many provisions of the year-old Mental Health Systems Act, which provided federal grants to community mental health centers. The result: widespread deinstitutionalizing of mentally ill people who needed to be in places where they could be treated and would not pose a danger to the public. Ergo, homelessness increased; these men and women, who could not care for themselves, slept (and endangered people) on the streets. And in the subways.
Jails and prisons became the “psychiatric hospitals” of the 1990s, according to a report by the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
The New York Times called the result of the president’s action “a cruel embarrassment, a reform gone terribly wrong … a major failure.”
Today there are more certifiably insane people un-institutionalized than four decades ago. Jails and prisons, according to one psychiatrist in California, have become “surrogate psychiatric hospitals.” Where people who need professional mental health treatment are unlikely to receive it.
Blame the conservatives and the liberals.
In more recent times, liberals have asserted that forcing mentally ill people to take their medication, or confining them to institutions whence they cannot strike at innocent people, is a violation of their civil rights.
In Manhattan, Alvin Bragg, the progressive Democratic District Attorney, in 2022 announced a $9 million mental health initiative that would emphasize connecting individuals with “deeply entrenched needs” with such “community-based services” as housing assistance and treatment for mental illness. In other words, a de-emphasis on arresting these dangerous people, of a piece with his effort to release offenders without bail.
The sympathetic program, Bragg said, was designed to “make … neighborhoods safer” and avoid often-fatal interactions with police who are called to crime scenes where the mentally ill are implicated. He said the criminal justice system is “not the most effective way to address the mental health and behavioral health issues of substance use … arrests and incarceration alone will not address the harms caused by untreated mental illness and substance abuse.”
The compassionate, voluntary program also runs the risk of failing to immediately remove people who are threatening – or have committed – acts of violence. It contrasts with the less-“progressive” emphasis of New York Mayor Eric Adams, a former police officer, who has introduced measures that stress having mentally ill individuals, who are unable to behave according to the norms of civil society, forcibly removed from public spaces. The mayor recently introduced his “new vision,” an 11-point legislative agenda that features new clinical co-response teams deployed to the subways, and specifies that “first responders have the legal authority to provide care to New Yorkers when severe mental illness prevents them from meeting their own basic human needs.”
Adams is a Democrat, as is Bragg and many of his fellow Progressive D.A.’s. Reagan was a Republican. So the presence of large numbers of mentally ill people on US streets is not a strictly partisan, lock-‘em-up-or-let-‘em-go, conservative vs. liberal issue; both sides of the political spectrum bear responsibility for unleashing on the US public people who are likely to commit crimes.
And we all are paying the price.
People who commit crimes are clearly deserving of punishment. No one but the most obtuse would disagree with that.
How do we determine who qualifies to be appropriately punished?
Halacha (Jewish law) offers an answer. It prescribes four types of the biblical death penalty for an unrepentant offender. And it prescribes the steps that a witness to a potential sin (or crime) needs to take to make the sinner deserving of the death penalty: the witness must state that the act the sinner is about to commit is a transgression that would warrant the death penalty, and the sinner needs to reply that he/she understands the warning and the consequences. And still intends to carry out the forbidden act.
In other words, defiance=guilt. If a sinner verbally (or by tacit indifference to a warning) shows contempt for an act’s clear consequences, he or she accepts the penalty.
Giving a warning might be the best option available for most people in a situation of potential threat.
This scenario of warning is likely too unwieldly to translate exactly into a modern setting; crimes happen too rapidly, the perps are probably too caught up in the moment (maybe rendered incoherent by drug use); they might not hear a warning that “if you pull the trigger you’ll spend the rest of your life in jail;” the good Samaritan might be risking his or her own life – but it might be less dangerous than trying to escape or wrestle away a firearm.
We live in a (sometimes) forgiving society, willing to overlook the harmful acts and likely threats of people who are not capable of thinking straight – as long as these people do not live in halfway houses in our neighborhood, or cross our paths on our street or subway car; i.e., don’t incarcerate them, but keep them far away from me.
Not in my backyard! Also, not where I work or commute.
We live in an inordinately litigious society, with a record number of people behind bars.
But will suing the mentally ill forestall their crimes?
We live in a society where the number of people behind bars increases every year.
But is it an effective deterrent? Not everyone who has committed a misdemeanor should be in jail or prison. But not all should be released.
In my years of riding the subway, I, thank G-d, never encountered a situation that threatened to escalate into violence; if that happened, I don’t know how I would respond.
The increasing prevalence of such unpredictable situations is why I no longer ride the subway.
Pre-Covid, when I daily did, I would on many days see people who showed signs of being unstable and unhinged; they would typically stare into space or mutter to themselves; or scream disjointed attempts at poetry; sometimes replete with liberal use of expletives. But they were unarmed, unthreatening. If they requested some “spare change,” I’d give them a few bucks; they usually said “thank you” or “God bless you.”
There was little reason to fear them, beyond a general feeling of discomfort, or a conversation interrupted.
Now they pose a clear and present danger. TV news shows why.
If they should be institutionalized (or imprisoned, if they display aggressive, anti-social behavior), I feel sorry for them; they might not be in full possession of their intellectual faculties. But I feel more sorry for the people in the subway cars or on the subway platforms near them.
I understand all the humanitarian justifications for the apparently limitless number of mentally ill people avoiding incarceration. But I understand that my safety comes first.
Have I decided to take the subway again?
No. I am not crazy.
