A person’s dignity – as well as his good name – is not a virtual matter. There can be serious damage to a person if his dignity has been injured and our sages reckoned the damage to dignity just like any other tangible damage.
“When two men strive against each other and the wife of one man draws near to deliver her husband out of the hand of the one who smites him and puts forth her hand and takes him by in his private area, then you shall cut off her hand – your eye shall not have pity.” Deuteronomy: 25:11-12
These verses, which appear chauvinistic and barbarian, are taken from one of the more difficult passages that appear in the Bible. Here is the picture: two men are fighting. The wife of one of the men, who cares for her husband’s welfare, interferes and hits the opponent in the groin. The Torah commanded that a woman who dared to intervene in a man’s fight would have her hand cut off. This is the pshat, the superficial explanation.
However, sages learned through the Oral Law that the Torah conveys an eternal spirit in those texts that were written for a particular place or at a particular time. The eternal foundation of the Torah is not centered in the body or appearance of the verses but rather in their undisclosed spirit which our Sages call ‘Midrash.’
Our sages, Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Judah, disagreed about the covert spirit behind these verses but on one point they certainly agreed: in the here and now, it is neither appropriate to apply the rules at face value, nor does the Torah intend it to be so. In this case, the time that has elapsed requires an explanation which will reveal the hidden, inner spirit – the spirit which is to be implemented in a changing world. We focus on the explanation of Rabbi Judah, inSifri:“… ‘have no pity’ – this means monetary compensation.”
Rabbi Judah understood that a woman must pay a particular payment when she takes this kind of action. This explanation has created a new Mishnaic definition of payment to be made for damages. This payment is called “shame-money.” From the hard-line attitude taken by the text towards the action of the woman, our Rabbis learn that there is a special penalty for the shame that one person causes another.
The case of this woman is just one example of shaming another individual irrespective of other actual damage. The Mishna makes a distinction between “shame-money” and other payments for damages. The perpetrator pays “shame-money” in addition to other fines resulting from the damage. A person’s dignity is thus worth money!
The Sages in the Gemara applied this principle by grading the payments to be made in accordance with the tool or object that caused the blow. “He slapped another person, he must pay 200 zuz. If he slapped him with the back of his hand, 400 zuz. If he shouted in his ear, pulled his hair, spit in his face, removed his garment or uncovered a woman’s hair – he must pay 400 zuz. It all depends on his dignity.” (Baba Kama 8:6) For these subtle psychological differentiations, our sages decided on different amounts of compensation for “shame-money.”
Today, this sounds completely irrelevant. We are, after all, pragmatic people and the damage is, after all, exactly the same damage: – a slap is the same slap and violence is the same violence.
But has the technique of the violence become unimportant to us because we have “progressed”? Or maybe the opposite is true – maybe we have blocked our senses from an entire field of reality – a field which, in our case, concerns metaphysical matters such as “dignity.”
Could it be that 2000 years ago there was a certain understanding about human dignity and freedom, which has become lost today? An entire dimension of the way we perceive reality has become lost – the spiritual dimension. We no longer feel, we no longer understand its importance and strength – and thus we have become unable to grasp the danger and the damage. In our world today human dignity has no importance unless we can also prove that loss of dignity has caused financial damage to the victim, in a tangible, quantifiable way. Material things have value – dignity has none.
The Torah, however, appreciates the dignity of man and makes the point “your eyes shall not have pity” to demonstrate the importance of punishment for the person who humiliates his friend. The same is true of anyone suspected of any other offense: If we really valued a person’s honor, we wouldn’t rush to “shed his blood” so lightly in the press before he’s been proven guilty in the name of “the public’s right to know” – just as we wouldn’t rush to take his money. Maybe it would be worthwhile to “cut off” the long arm of “the public’s right to know” in order to defend the privacy of the individual citizen.
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