Rishon Rishon

Pursuit of justice

It is a continual theme of our lives, of great drama, folktales, a minor key in our music and art, a driving force in our religions, worldviews, and ideologies: the pursuit of justice.

צֶדֶק צֶדֶק תִּרְדֹּף לְמַעַן תִּחְיֶה

Sedeq sedeq tirdof l'ma`an tihye

Justice, justice you shall pursue in order that you might live

Deuteronomy 16:20

And its thematic beauty is its persistent tragedy: we persist in believing, against all evidence, that justice can be done. This, I think likely, is one of the driving forces our religions: the necessity of reconciling our deep belief in justice (not merely its temporal imperfection, but even its platonic ideal) with the terrible foreboding that in fact there is no justice, and it cannot be done.

When I cast my eye over the world's problems I see numerous root causes, for the most part quite different from those seen by they who like to proclaim them - and I wonder what blinds so many people to things so obvious. I think this is one: the unwillingness to abandon the notion that justice can be done in this world, and its corollary: a villain must be found.

I didn't pay much attention to the Schiavo story until the last week or so, when its ubiquity made it unavoidable. Frankly, I found it boring, and I think that Amritas put his finger on its fascination for so many when he speculated about it last week: It is a psychodrama in which the villain has committed a heinous crime against the victim - but we don't know which is which. If only we can figure it out, though, justice will be done.

Such an analysis makes good fiction, unfortunately it doesn't have much to do with reality. Reality: The injustice had already been done, Terri Schiavo was in a "vegetative state", nothing could undo it. And most likely, there were no villains - indeed, the real injustice is the appetite of the public to find one. It is this injustice, this human-created injustice that we find in every difficult story - not least the one I live in: the Middle East.

In fact, neither legal nor ethical systems exist in order to create justice. Note that the passage above does not say, "pursue justice in order to establish it" - it says, "pursue justice in order that you might live". Their purpose is to create a system that is most conducive to living. Righting wrongs is rarely within the realm of possibility, but a good system will minimize their occurrence in the first place.

This is where justice comes in. Justice is not something that is administered, as we so often hear. The only thing that can be administered, in fact, is injustice. The only moral reason we have for administering injustice is to keep the system from disintegrating, to prevent, as much as possible, injustice from happening in the first place. And this, as the repetition of the word "justice" in the passage implies, is an unending task:

לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמוֹר וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין לִבָּטֵל מִמֶּנָּה

Lo' `aleykha hamlakha ligmor v'lo' ata ben horin libatel mimena

You are not required to complete the work and you are not free to desist from it

Pirqey Avot 2:16

Posted by David Boxenhorn at April 2, 2005 11:30 PM