What is a Life Worth?

The Talmud says that he who saves one life saves the world; as far as I know, there is no comparable wisdom about the cost of a life.

Any life is priceless--at least to its possessor and those who value him or her. And yet, society values lives every day--whether an insurer assessing the likely cost of a claim or a political leader deciding how many people he or she is willing to lose in battle, or how many he or she is willing to kill.

Which leads me--cynic that I am--to wonder how many Darfurian or Congolese lives are worth one Lebanese. Without diminishing the tragedy of civilians killed in Lebanon, the numbers are minute compared with the corpses of those who have died of war, torture, rape, starvation and disease in the two most prominent African conflicts.

They cynic in me also observes that the world pays a lot more attention to Muslim lives taken by Jews than to those lost to fellow Muslims--as in Darfur--or to the depredations of those whose religion is secondary to their rapacious ambition, as in the Congo.

Having said that, I also realize that there is no answer to my original question--and that some of the reasons why the war in Lebanon (and as Jew I am happy that I do not have to write, "the war in Israel") has received so much more attention than the greater conflicts in Africa have nothing to do with religion. It's a lot easier to cover the Lebanese conflict, for one thing. And the Arab propaganda apparatus--fueled by oil wealth but having nothing necessarily to do with a particular faith--has been effectively keeping the world's attention.

Would the world pay as much attention if hundreds of Jews had been killed in Hezbollah and Hamas rocket attacks? Let's hope we don't have to find out.