Jewish Law Exempts Self-Incrimination Not Testimony, Rabbis Say After Fauci Pleads ‘No Comment’ 111 Times
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Excerpt: "Mark Goldfeder, a rabbi and CEO and director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, told JNS that rabbinic law “would be more protective of Fauci than the Fifth Amendment, and that is exactly what convicts him.”
“Jewish criminal law does not merely permit a defendant to stay silent,” according to Goldfeder, who is known to cite medieval rabbinic commentaries in footnotes to court documents. “It refuses to hear his confession even if he volunteers it.”
Moses Maimonides, the 12th-century Spanish Jewish scholar and physician, offered “his own psychological rationale about tortured souls confessing to crimes they never committed,” Goldfeder told JNS.
In 1966, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren “cited exactly this tradition in Miranda v. Arizona,” Goldfeder said, quoting from Rabbi Norman Lamm’s journal article, from a decade prior, “The Fifth Amendment and Its Equivalent in the Halakha.”
In 1789, Virginia congressman James Madison, who later became president, penned legislation that would become the Fifth Amendment.
“So the Talmud got there 18 centuries before Madison. But in Halacha, the right against self-incrimination was never a right against providing an accounting, especially for a public servant,” Goldfeder told JNS.
The Talmud states, in Aramaic, that the admission of a party in a monetary or civil case “is like 100 witnesses,” he said. “Congressional oversight is not a capital trial”
Goldfeder added that the Mishnah states that officials who entered the chamber of the Temple to collect public tithes had to dress in clothes without hems, pockets or cuffs, so no one could suspect them of theft. The rabbis inferred that practice from a verse in Numbers, which states that “you must be clean from God and Israel.”
“A public servant’s obligation requires demonstrable innocence, Goldfeder told JNS.
Even Moses, “whom God Himself certified as trusted in all His house, nevertheless stood and gave a voluntary line-item accounting of every ounce of Tabernacle gold,” he said.
The rabbinic concept of “silence as admission” has “civil-law limits,” according to Goldfeder, but the rabbis “understood that silence in the face of accusation does carry some meaning, and the meaning depends on what the silence protects.”
Refusing to confess a crime is protected under rabbinic law. “A man refusing to state the color of his own tie is not invoking a privilege,” Goldfeder said. “He is holding an institution in contempt.”"...
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