A Mitzvah Behind the Price of a Soldier’s Freedom

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/us/pidyon-shvuyim-validated-the-price-of-shalits-release.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=a%20mitzvah&st=cse

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 7:54 AM
Subject: re: A Mitzvah Behind the Price of a Soldier’s Freedom
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

   The matter of Gilad Shalit was never going to be easy. The Talmud calls ransoming the captive a great mitzvah, yet forbids paying more than his value.  Abraham risks his own life to redeem his nephew Lot, but he does with at swordpoint, paying no ransom. Likewise when God redeems Israel from Egypt, it is with signs and wonders and eventually violence, not with cash.

  Benjamin Netanyahu's own brother died at Entebbe freeing the captives held there in a military raid, as Abraham freed Lot. This Israeli government however pays ransom like a powerless ghetto Jew. It is them that Meir ben Baruch warned seven hundred years ago. He forbade his friends to pay the exorbitant ransom demanded because to do so would make every Jew a kidnap target. He died in prison, but he was right.

Barry Haskell Levine