To be sure, Jewish law has an enviable past, particularly in promoting the sanctity of human life. It was Jewish law, after all, that first crowned each human life with absolute value. While their neighbors drenched their altars with the blood of small children to propitiate their gods, the prophets of ancient Israel thundered their formula for pleasing the Almighty. "Let the oppressed go free...Divide your bread with the hungry...When you see the naked, cover him." For Isaiah and his colleagues, G-d was best served by enhancing the quality of the lives of others.

The earliest rabbinic writings continued the tradition. "Whoever saves the life of a single person is considered as saving the entire world," claimed the Mishna. Jewish law regarded life as so sacred, that all precepts of the Torah could be suspended to save it, excepting three cardinal transgressions. And one of those three was murder.

Jewish law was so loath to take a human life, that criminal procedure was hopelessly stacked in favor of the defendant. If the twenty-three judges managed to reach a guilty verdict in a capital case, they were required to fast the entire day. And if they found for guilt unanimously, charges were dismissed. A court which could not produce someone to back the defendant obviously was not doing its job well.

The Talmud sums up its internal audit of procedure in capital cases appropriately enough. "A court that takes a life once in seventy years is a killer court." This is the lenient view. Others suggest an even longer interval.

In the course of history, these lessons were not lost to the Jewish people. The effect that the law had upon individuals was magnified by a feature that is not shared by modern codes. Because Jewish law has a religious basis, and answers to a Higher Authority than the State, it can easily intertwine the ethically upscale with the purely legal. Feeding the poor, visiting the sick, helping a neighbor were not just admirable acts. They were demanded by statute, and became part of the fabric of daily life. Legal texts recognized both the law and what lies beyond its letter - and then made both normative! It is no surprise, then, that murder was never a popular Jewish vice, even among those who jettisoned their observance of much of the rest of Jewish law.

The Devil, however, can cite Scripture; his disciples turn to case law and statute. Somehow, Yigal Amir thought that he found justification from the law itself. Amir decided that Mr. Rabin's negotiations with the Palestinians posed an immediate threat to the lives of tens of thousands of Israelis. Jewish law (as well as many other codes!) allows (actually demands) anyone to take the life of a murderous pursuer - or rodef - of his innocent victim. Amir thus claimed that Mr. Rabin was a rodef, and that it was a mitzvah to kill him.

The argument is specious, and was denounced as such by virtually every major and minor Jewish legal thinker. To be a rodef, the pursuer must perform some act that is objectively life-threatening. The models in the literature make it clear that one cannot be a rodef to some, and a savior to others. Arguably, there are as many Israelis who believe that the peace process will save lives, as those who believe that the consequences will be insufferable. Besides, one argument alone justifies taking the life of the rodef: the certainty that the pursued will be saved. No sane person could have guaranteed that killing Rabin would stop the peace process in its tracks. If anything, killing Rabin has had the opposite effect, dramatically increasing popular support for the Labor position.

Suppose, though, that all of this evaded Yigal Amir. Suppose he found support for his argument from a handful of sympathizers well-read in the law. What would the law expect of him?

On the eve of Rosh Hashanah in 1944, the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz purged the camp of all teenage boys who were not tall and strong enough to work. The victims of the selektion were herded together in a special cellblock, without food or drink, with the understanding that they would be sent to the crematoria the next evening.

A father turned to Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Meisels for a halakhic (Jewish legal) decision. He had valuables hidden away with which he could bribe the guards to release his son. Should he do so, another boy would have to be snatched to replace the one who was missing, since an exact count had been taken. Was it permissible to do so? He was ready to submit to any decision rendered by the rabbi.

Rabbi Meisels implored the man not to ask him the question. How could he decide on such a weighty matter in the hell of Auschwitz, without consulting texts or colleagues. A matter of life and death required the sitting of a veritable Sanhedrin to decide! The father insisted, but Rabbi Meisels was just as firm in his reluctance.

The next day the man returned. "Rabbi, I have done what the Torah has obligated me to do...If you cannot tell me that I may ransom my child, it is a sign that in your own mind, you are not certain that Halakhah permits it...So for me your evasion is tantamount to a psak din - a clear decision - that I am forbidden to do so...I accept G-d's decree with love and with joy. I will do nothing to ransom him at the cost of another innocent life, for so the Torah has commanded." (In Irving Rosenbaum, Holocaust and Halakha, pg. 5)

The father, unlike Yigal Amir, demonstrated an understanding of what Jewish law is all about. When in doubt, you have no right to act. Throughout the history of Jewish legal responsa, you never win arguments by the strength of your reasoning alone. Halakha demands that you first consider every nuance of every objection to your argument, and overcome these objections. The more important the issue, the higher the stakes, the greater evidence you need to amass, both against the opposing position, as well as in support of your own. And nothing is weightier in Jewish law than the taking of a human life.

It is not clear just how Amir managed to pervert the law as he did. Perhaps, despite the enormity of the issues, despite all the attendant doubts, he decided not to ask questions beyond his own small circles. Had he inquired in the Jewish legal world at large, he would have been stunned by the ferocity of his rejection. If this is what he did, he clearly contravened the very process of Jewish law. Alternatively, he did not have any doubts at all, because he already had answers, and had no need to ask. In this case, his actions had much less to do with Jewish law, than with the First Law of Computer Science: Garbage in; garbage out. Amir, student of both Jewish and Western codes, practiced bad law before practicing murder.