A society reveals itself not only by the laws it enforces, but by the fear it is willing to tolerate in order to enforce them.
This month, that fear turned lethal in Minneapolis.
Yesterday morning, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and caregiver, was killed by federal agents during an enforcement operation. According to reporting and video footage, he was holding a phone and attempting to assist others during a chaotic confrontation when he was repeatedly shot and killed. His death follows other recent incidents in the same city in which federal force has resulted in grave injury and loss of life, including the killing of Renée Good earlier this month. Taken together, these events describe not an isolated tragedy, but a pattern of enforcement marked by escalation, fear, and lethal consequence.
Moments like this demand more than outrage. They demand ethical accounting.
The Torah begins with a radical legal claim: “God created the human being in the divine image” (Genesis 1:27). The rabbis insist this verse is one of civic architecture. They teach that Adam was created alone so that no one could say their life mattered more than another’s, and that one who destroys a single life is considered to have destroyed an entire world. In Jewish law, human beings are never abstractions. They are irreducible moral ends.
At the same time, Jewish tradition does not reject authority or enforcement. The Torah commands the appointment of judges and officers in every generation. Order matters. Public safety matters. Law matters. Yet the Torah is equally insistent that power must remain bounded by fear of its own excess. Might does not confer moral license.
The Talmud draws this boundary with clarity. Communal authority exists to reduce fear, not to generate it. When public action causes people to live in terror, unable to move freely, go to work, or remain in their homes, Jewish law treats that condition itself as a public danger requiring remedy. Safety is not measured only by control. It is measured by whether people can live without dread.
That distinction matters now.
In recent weeks, federal enforcement actions in Minneapolis have included raids on families and children, civilians caught in violent escalation, and the use of lethal force in residential spaces. These moments horrify and terrify. And they also reveal what happens when fear becomes a governing principle and when people are treated first as threats rather than as bearers of dignity.
Compounding this fear has been the refusal by federal authorities to permit full, independent investigations into the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. When lethal force is used against civilians in the course of an enforcement operation, and independent investigation is refused, it becomes impossible to determine whether the law itself was being faithfully carried out. Authority depends not only on power, but on accountability. When clarification is foreclosed, legitimacy erodes.
Here, Jewish moral philosophy sharpens the claim. Emmanuel Levinas taught that justice begins with the face of the human being before us. “The face,” he wrote, “is what forbids us to kill.” Law that no longer encounters a person as a face, but only as a threat or an obstacle to be managed, may retain force, but it loses justice. When this happens, legality and humanity come apart.
We grieve the killing of Alex Pretti. We grieve all who have been harmed in recent weeks. We hold the complexity of law and responsibility while refusing to surrender the moral heart of our tradition.
A just society is not measured only by what it controls, but by whom it protects.
May we never lose sight of the human lives at the heart of the law.
Rabbi Ben Spratt is the senior rabbi of Congregation Rodeph Sholom.
