Justice

In our day-to-day encounters, we constantly miss opportunities for meaningful communication, and suffer few ill effects.  Our failure to know the soul of another human being can occasionally, however, have devastating consequences.  In that state of estrangement from each other, we are capable of injuring, oppressing, or destroying each other.  The human capacity for evil is so great that one group of ancient rabbis concluded that it would have been better for our species never to have been created.

            Judaism balances this grim acknowledgment of the human capacity for evil with a radiant optimism regarding our ability to repair the damage wrought by human evil.  This optimism is expressed in the Jewish tradition of justice.   Two related Hebrew words refer to two types of justice: tsedek, legal justice, and tsedakah, economic justice.  Both terms, derived from a single linguistic root, point to the human task of repairing damage and restoring balance in our world.  

              Tsedek, legal justice, is not a lofty and unattainable ideal, but rather a practical system to be applied in the real world by imperfect human beings endowed with learning, insight, imagination, and an instinct for fairness.  Tsedek expects great things from ordinary human judges:  to overcome their personal prejudices and to resist the temptations of power.  The judge is charged with the task of healing the wounds of society and is therefore of necessity entrusted with vast power: to break, to exchange, to make whole and to destroy.  Inevitably, a corrupt judge compounds existing evil; with tsedek, a wise and fair judge repairs the world.

            Tsedakah, economic justice, requires every member of society to set aside a portion of their field for the poor, to redistribute wealth.  We stretch out a hand toward a person or group of people trapped in the quicksand of poverty. 

This act of tsedakah requires overcoming the visceral and natural fear of being pulled down oneself, a fear which afflicts even the wealthiest members of society.  It has been taught that the sacred name of God, yud-heh-vav-heh, can be seen as a pictogram in which the two "heh"s are the hand of the giver and the hand of the receiver, the "vav" is the outstretched arm, and the tiny "yud" is the coin passing between the two.  This is simply to say that tsedakah is a divine process, which occurs between two human beings.  It is triggered in the split second that we hear the voice behind us, turn, and see ourself in the eyes of our hungry neighbor.