Moses encounters two men locked in imminent physical confrontation. To one of them, the Torah records Moses’ admonition: "Why would you strike your fellow?" (Ex. 2:13). The verb tense is telling—no blow has yet landed. Yet the Torah already labels this individual "rasha," the wicked one. From this episode, the Talmud (Sanhedrin 58b) derives a remarkable prohibition: "He who raises his hand to strike another, even though he has not actually struck him, is considered wicked."

This law is surprising. Jewish law generally does not criminalize mere intent; crimes that are planned but not executed carry no label of guilt. Moreover, if no blow is completed, no injury is inflicted—seemingly, no offense has occurred. Why, then, does halakhah treat the raised hand as an independent transgression?

Some authorities view the prohibition as protective, designed to prevent threatened harm from being actualized. Others suggest it addresses the fear instilled in the potential victim, a violation of ona'at devarim, the prohibition against causing distress through words or actions. Still others, like the Lubavitcher Rebbe, understand that raising one's hand in violence is "intrinsically ugly," a misuse of the human hand that God designed to be an instrument of kindness.

Yet there may be something deeper still. A person who raises his hand in threat has fundamentally altered the tone of human interaction. He has signaled his willingness to introduce violence into the equation, to reduce human discourse from the level of words to that of physical force. The civil relationship between human beings has been corrupted, lowered to an animalistic conflict in which violence is no longer anathema.

Sigmund Freud once observed, "Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock." In that, he took a cue from his ancestors and from one of his most famous subjects, Moses.  The essence of the prohibition Moses conveyed with his language is that it identifies the moment of civilizational collapse not when the rock is thrown, but when violence becomes a conceivable response to conflict. This is not merely preparation for a crime; it is the declaration of a philosophy. It announces that the threatening party has opted out of civilization itself.

This understanding may explain why, according to many, such an individual is disqualified from serving as a witness in Jewish law. Maimonides frames the prohibition not just as calling someone wicked, but as establishing actual rasha status with all its implications. One who raises his hand against another has revealed himself as someone who operates outside the framework of civil society, someone whose entire orientation toward human relations has been compromised.

The work B'Netivot HaRishonim offers an additional perspective: the prohibition of hitting derives from the biblical command not to exceed the prescribed number of lashes when administering punishment. This situates the offense within the framework of unauthorized punishment: striking either the guilty excessively, or the innocent at all. Extending this logic to the raised hand, the very suggestion that one will issue punishment to another outside formal authorization (and absent justification like self-defense) constitutes its own violation. As Rashi notes in his commentary, Moses’ choice of words, "Why would you strike your fellow?", emphasizes that "a wicked one just like you" has no standing to act punitively toward another of equal culpability.

This framework illuminates our contemporary challenge with terrorism. Terrorism represents the ultimate expression of the raised hand: not merely the threat of violence against an individual, but the systematic introduction of violence as a tool of political discourse. It declares that civilized modes of resolving disputes—negotiation, compromise, legal process—have been abandoned in favor of intimidation and bloodshed.

The terrorist seeks to normalize violence, to make it thinkable as an option in addressing grievances. By targeting civilians, by celebrating brutality, by rejecting the most basic distinctions between combatants and innocents, terrorism announces its fundamental rejection of the civilizational compact. It represents a reversion to the pre-Mosaic world where might makes right, where the stronger simply prevails over the weaker without recourse to justice or law.

In his Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud wrote that "civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another." He understood that civilization's task is to erect barriers against human aggression, to channel violent impulses into productive forms. The halakhic prohibition against raising one's hand serves precisely this function—it draws the line not at the point of contact, but at the threshold of intent, declaring that the very contemplation of violence as a solution corrupts the one who entertains it.

When Moses confronted the man about to strike his fellow, he was not merely preventing an assault. He was defending the boundary between civilization and chaos, between a society governed by law and one ruled by force. The lesson of that moment echoes across millennia: A culture that tolerates the raised hand, whether in individual disputes or in political terrorism, has already begun its descent from the world of words back to the world of rocks.

The challenge is not merely to respond to violence when it occurs, but to recognize and reject the mentality that declares violence a legitimate option. As Moses taught, wickedness begins not with the blow itself, but with the willingness to change the conversation into something else, and to take civilization down with it.