January 26, 2011: The Evolution of Justice

Dear Chevre (Friends):

After an hour of studying the Torah’s laws of slavery (Exodus 21:1-11) in this past week’s Rabbi’s Study class, a participant raised his hand and said: “I have to say, I am deeply disturbed by all this.” I responded: “you have every right to be deeply disturbed.” I encountered a similar challenge at my entry interview for Rabbinical School, when the rector asked me to justify Leviticus 18:22: “you shall not lie with a male as with a woman: it is an abomination.” How can we revere the Torah, with its resounding exhortation: “justice, justice you shall pursue!” (Deuteronomy 16:20), when some of its own commandments are so unjust? If the presumptive Word of God fails the test of right and wrong, just where are we supposed to turn in our own quest for truth?

From our high moral perch at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we look down upon the benighted ethics of prior generations. We shake our heads at our American Jewish forbears in the Deep South, who celebrated Passover even as their Negro slaves waited upon them at the Seder feast. All of us today condemn human slavery; nearly all of us in this country advocate racial equality; most of us argue for equal opportunity between men and women; some of us believe that gays and lesbians deserve basic civil liberties, including marriage; very few of us would argue that all life forms on the planet deserve equal protection. However, as far back as 1936, the humanitarian Albert Schweitzer proposed the following definition of the universal ethic: “evil is anything that annihilates, hampers, or hinders life. Goodness, by the same token, is the saving or helping of life”—any life, from the sparrow to the human being. (cf. The Ethical Mysticism of Albert Schweitzer, pp. 180-194) Who’s to say that several centuries from now, they won’t look back at us and shake their heads, when they see us cut off the prized dorsal fin from the hammerhead shark and throw the still thrashing, still living carcass overboard as if the creature were trash? (http://www.channel4.com/programmes/gordon-ramsay-shark-bait/) I don’t necessarily equate the slaughter of animals with murder, but maybe they will in the twenty-third century.

Nobody has a monopoly on the Truth—not the Torah, as written, and certainly not us. As Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote: “the Bible was God’s first word on the subject [of right and wrong], not His last.” (Who Needs God, p. 85) When Dr. Martin Luther King stated: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it tends toward justice,” he didn’t mean that someday, the entire world would come to embrace his vision of justice. He meant that all visions of justice, including his own, were necessarily imperfect and incomplete, but that over the long haul, they progressed and converged upon Absolute Truth. We need the humility not simply to admit that our civilization fails to live up to its own standards of justice. We need the humility to admit that our civilization lacks complete knowledge of what justice is.

Rabbi Brian
rabbi.brian.besser@gmail.com