Killing Myself
Before I executed others
The Israel Prison Service is building an execution facility. Death by hanging for Palestinians within 90 days from sentencing, with no appeal, no lawyers physically present, and anonymity and immunity for the executioners. All procedural and legal. Politicians wore golden noose pins to the vote and handed out dessert when it passed. The facility has been nicknamed “the Israeli Green Mile.”
Three officers will press an execution button simultaneously so no one knows exactly whose button triggered the hanging.
I couldn’t push buttons on Shabbat so a “shabbat goy” did it for me, or I used my elbow instead of my finger. I couldn’t own bread in my home on Passover so I sold it on paper to a non-Jew and it never left my pantry. I couldn’t lend with interest so I restructured it until it was technically, technically, not interest.
I started secretly breaking these rules when I was four or five years old. Nothing happened. And at the same time I watched the adults around me find the workaround for every rule they taught me God didn’t want me to break.
The workaround mentality doesn’t stay in the kitchen. It becomes how we relate to reality and the story we tell ourselves about it.
If you can technically not own bread, you can technically not own an execution.
You can distribute the procedure across three buttons, but you cannot distribute the truth. I know because I tried. I built my own procedures, loopholes, stories, my own ways of not looking at what I was doing. But the pain of the truth became so unbearable I wanted to kill myself.
What needed to die was not me. It was the version of myself I had built to avoid looking at what I was doing.
I couldn’t bypass my own conscience. Eventually we either execute the story we’ve told about ourselves or we find a workaround to execute someone else.
פתח
اِفْتَحْ
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Daniel,
I understand the parallel you are making, but I wonder whether it's a stretch to compare faking the "no bread on Passover" and Shabbos goy rules with a state execution. Yes, they use some of the same logic; no, they are not in the same universe.
I don't know what you did in your life that you feel so much guilt for, but - in my view - it's important to keep a sense of proportion and to use parallels and metaphors when appropriate. Otherwise, they lose their impact.
As a reader who doesn't know the full story, I'm confused. This is why I am sharing my reactions. I very much respect your creative efforts to deal with the past and take ownership.
Oh Daniel, you are so pained by it all. So am I. The noose to me has always signified the devils act, the Shoah, the Nazi's. Can we truly be doing this? It's such a chilul Hashem. But yes, we think we can cheat Hashem. I do't think so.