RABBI DONIEL FRANK | Director, M.A.P. Seminars, Inc., Marriage and Family Therapist

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The Torah sets up a system of cities of refuge to which people that kill inadvertently can escape. The Torah says there should be three cities on the western side of the Jordan River and three cities to the east of it.

But why would they have the same number of cities on both sides of the river? If 9½ tribes were to settle to the west and only 2½ to the east, then a majority should be put in the west where there were way more inhabitants and, presumably, more unintentional murders.

The Gemara answers that in the town of Gilad, which is on the east, there were many murderers. And so they needed those extra cities.

But does that answer the question? We know that the people that go to the city of refuge are not intentional murderers, so what difference does it make if in Gilad there are many more murderers? Intentional murderers don’t go to the cities of refuge anyway so that shouldn’t affect the population of fugitives that end up going there.

Let’s first understand who it is that actually goes to those cities.

On the one hand, intentional murderers don’t go. But neither do people who kill purely by accident, those who couldn’t have done anything to prevent the deaths. Instead, those cities were only for people who killed because they didn’t take the necessary measures to make sure that no one would get hurt by their actions. Those people are accountable because, to a certain degree, they demonstrated a lack of sensitivity for the value of human life.

But how does that happen?

According to the Maharal, it’s by living in a city like Gilad. When you live in Gilad, in a place of murderers, the overall sensitivity towards human life has to diminish. Even if you’ve got good people there, people who would never consider killing someone else intentionally – the fact that they live among murderers, the fact that the daily headlines are dominated by murders, the fact that their neighbor might be a murderer, or the people in their community are murderers, suddenly the horror of killing someone isn’t as great. They know it’s wrong. But the vigilance that is needed to make sure no one gets hurt by what they do, is no longer there. Their sensitivities are dulled. And that opens the door to fatal accidents.

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The Rambam says, and he writes it as a law, that people are affected by their surroundings. We’re not as strong as we think we are. We’re all vulnerable to negative influences… and the erosion usually happens in insidious ways. We don’t always realize how the things that are important to us slowly lose their importance. And if we believe that, then we have to be vigilant in aligning our friendships and overall associations with our core values, to make sure they support them and not work against them.

So we have to ask ourselves: Who are our friends? What do our surroundings look like? Are we in a place and among people that erode our values or strengthen them? Is there a Gilad in our lives that’s pulling us down and that we need to either change or leave? Those are the questions to ask if we want to live a productive and principled life.

DEDICATED TO A REFUAH SHELAIMA FOR YITZCHAK ben DEVORAH

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