In ancient Israel, a man sits in chains accused of murdering his neighbour. In front of a crowd of witnesses, he is led into the hall of hewn stone to face his judgement from a tribunal of 70 Judges. This is the Sanhedrin, the Great Rabbinical Court of Israel. The accused stands with his head bowed, and is certain that the overwhelming array of evidence against him would result in a guilty verdict. The Nasi, or Chief Justice, seated in the middle of the semicircle of Jurists asks for a vote to be counted. The three secretaries ready their quills and begin to count: one guilty, two guilty, 10 guilty, 30 guilty, all 70 judges proclaim him guilty. All eyes turn to the Nasi for the final deciding vote, and he too responds with a guilty verdict. Unanimous! The bailiff walks over to our guilty party, removes the cuffs from his hands, and tells him that he is free to go. End of story.
WHAT?!
I can hear your incredulity all the way over here in Essex. Is this justice? Rabbi can you please double check your sources. Explanation is in order as to why a unanimous guilty verdict in a trial which can end in the death penalty results in a full acquittal.
Although there are a number of reasons given, we will focus on one. The judicial process must be a rigorous one, in order to be able to pass judgement with clarity. Therefore, even in a trial in which the verdict seems overwhelmingly obvious, a court still has a requirement to find some form of merit for the accused. And if the verdict is unanimous, it is a signal that it did not fully carried out that obligation.
In a new paper to be published in The Proceedings of The Royal Society A, a team of researchers from Australia and France investigated this complex idea, which they call the "paradox of unanimity."
"If many independent witnesses unanimously testify to the identity of a suspect of a crime, we assume they cannot all be wrong," says co-author Derek Abbott, physicist and electronic engineer at The University of Adelaide, Australia. "Unanimity is often assumed to be reliable. However, it turns out that the probability of a large number of people all agreeing is small, so our confidence in unanimity is ill-founded. This 'paradox of unanimity' shows that often we are far less certain than we think.’’
The authors are pointing out that if something seems too good to be true then it probably is.
The Great Rabbinical Court had 70 members. What is the significance of this number?
The Torah tell us there are 70 nations with 70 languages who stem from the unity of the builders of the Tower of Babel. Their common purpose to wage war against God, and to prioritise society over individual rights. It resulted in total disagreement and fracturing of the very society they aimed to build, resulting in 70 separate nations.
Seventy is also the number of people the Torah records who came from the house of Jacob down to Egypt, the pre-story to the Exodus. The verse states "All the offspring of Jacob, seventy soul." The word soul is used in the singular. Not seventy souls. They were as one man with the same goals. One people, with a unity of mission.
So why not embrace this sort of unanimity in the Great Rabbinical Court?
The Rabbis teach us that there are 70 perspectives to Torah. No one man can ever claim that his way is the only path to acquire truth. No one has a monopoly on the truth.
We tend to believe that consensus of opinion is the ideal. This attitude, although it may be noble, can be misused. We may find ourselves subduing our real opinion and taking on the opinions of those around us because we want to be the same, not wanting to rock the boat. We may decide that what we truly believe in doesn't matter if it will make us stand out. Sadly, we may even forget who we truly are, unique. As the esteemed scientists pointed out, if everyone has the same opinion then it is probably too good to be true.
The lesson of the Sanhedrin is that we need more than one way of viewing this world however unpopular that may be.
As the great Maimonides wrote in his Guide to the Perplexed “Truth does not become truer by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.”
