Jury Duty
August 15, 2008
Congregation Bnai Brith, Santa Barbara CA
At 9:30 this past Tuesday morning I took my seat in the Jury Assembly room on Santa Barbara Street together with about 150 fellow citizens, and only yesterday, Thursday, at 11AM did I finally know for certain that I would not be sitting on the case to which we were assigned.
When I was younger, whenever I was called for jury duty, my friends would all assure me “they will NEVER pick a rabbi”…but they were completely wrong. Over the years, I’ve served on not just one, or two, but THREE juries …so when that summons arrives, which it seems to do promptly every two years, my heart sinks. Some cases, I am well aware, can run for six or seven weeks, which would just wreak havoc with my life.
We sat from 9:30 to 11:00, watched the little juror training movie, which I now know by heart, and then the jury assembly staff woman announced that there had been a delay and we should leave and be back at 1:30. I think that is when I began to steam. After all, I had cancelled appointments and cleared my busy calendar to be down there; what was I going to accomplish in two and a half hours downtown? And I thought to myself, what would happen if I just don’t come back? I’ve checked in as present ….maybe they would give me credit for showing up. Are they really going to hunt me down…the juror missing in action?
But I did come back, and we were marched into the courtroom, where they took roll again...which made me feel I had done the right thing. We then heard the simple outline of the case: a medical malpractice suit. I glanced quickly at the plaintiff…who looked kind of shifty….and the doctor, who looked very professional, and leapt to my own conclusions. Immediately my resentment started to burn again. All of these dozens of people…including me, especially me!....being taken away from our work, our responsibilities, being enormously inconvenienced, and all this taxpayer money being spent just so that this plaintiff could squeeze some money out of this doctor’s insurance company.
I know that the very first teaching in Pirke Avot, the Ethics of the Sages, is “hevei m’tunim badin. Take your time before rendering judgement.” But that teaching did not come to me just then.
I tried to settle down and just hoped that my name would not be chosen. The first eighteen names were picked, I was not among them, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. The judge asked the eighteen people a series of questions that I thought were excellent, and I was beginning to cool down, but then the attorney for the plaintiff began his questioning, and I was quickly outraged again. He was repeating questions the judge had already asked, asking questions that I considered pointless, and waiting for long periods of silence while he consulted his notes…..and every minute was a minute of my day, a minute of my life, wasted in this pointless exercise. Then to top it off, just as I thought that the stage of jury selection was about to finish and the rest of us would be dismissed, the judge called things to a halt at 4:20 and instructed us all to return two days later to continue!
I went home furious about my lost day. But I kept thinking about the questions that the judge had asked the potential jurors: do you think you could judge this case fairly? What feelings, preconceptions, notions and experiences do you bring that might influence you? If you were a party in this case, either a plaintiff seeking damages or a doctor who was being sued, would you be happy to have a jury of twelve people like yourself judging your case?
When I returned on Thursday morning, I noticed that for some reason my attitude had shifted. First of all, I recognized the other people in the room. Not all of them, but many were beginning to feel….familiar. We were going through this experience together. And I noticed that the judge, in particular, had a gift for creating a sense of community among all of us in the room.
Secondly, I began to be struck more and more by the remarkable diversity in our jury pool. I think I had seen it but not really appreciated it on Tuesday. It was only as each prospective juror was asked a series of very personal questions about their life…..what do you do for a living?, what does your spouse do? Do you have children? Have you ever had a medical operation? How did it go? Do you have strong feelings one way or the other about doctors? …Through these questions, we were all given a profound and intimate look into these people’s lives. And the diversity came fully into focus. A retired magazine publisher. A fireman. An event planner. A man whose wife of fifty years died recently of a brain tumor. A young Hispanic man studying graphic design at City College. Two men who had immigrated from India, both software engineers. A young mother who needed to arrange childcare for her sixteen month old daughter. A sheet metal worker. A former Boeing executive. A woman whose husband is right now undergoing tests for a mysterious and frightening neurologic disorder. Many told stories of tragedy, of loss, of people they love, their feelings about their work, and about human beings in general. Listening to each of them tell their story I slowly started to feel a sense of warmth, even love, for each one of them.
One of the highlights, to be honest, came at about 10AM on Thursday, when after several prospective jurors had been “thanked and dismissed” a new prospective juror was called and he was given the microphone and asked to tell about himself. “My name is Jackson Browne. I’m a singer.” The whole room sat up….none of us had had a clue. One of Santa Barbara’s most famous citizens…the world famous singer Jackson Browne. He explained, “I don’t really live all the time in Santa Barbara, but I vote here.” And he continued “I have the utmost respect for these proceedings, and I would like to explain why serving on this case would be an unusual hardship for me.” He told about his upcoming record release, the press work already scheduled for the next few weeks, in Holland, in Australia, and in Japan. We were hearing a little bit first hand of what it is really like to be Jackson Browne….
The attorney for the plaintiff began his questions: “Mr. Brown…I’m a fan.” And the attorney for the defense began her questions “Mr. Brown, I too am a fan…” Well he was excused, but his words “I have the utmost respect for these proceedings…” echoed in my ears. Would I say the same thing? I had been so full of contempt for the idea of a malpractice suit, and so full of resentment about the waste of my valuable time. But slowly, somehow, I too was developing a new respect for the proceedings.
I was grateful for the chance to meet and just begin to get to know, a small but I think extremely representative slice of the people among whom I live….in all of their diversity, and to catch a glimpse inside their lives.
But even more, I was deeply moved by the opportunity to witness one person after another being asked to reveal in front of a room full of strangers their innermost thoughts, fears, and hopes. To tell how they felt about the death of their husband or wife, or about the work their children were doing. And I saw one after another struggling to tell the truth, to answer honestly the profound question: “Would you be able to be impartial and fair in this case?”
This week’s Torah portion includes the six most important words in our religion: Shma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. Hear O Israel, Adonai our God , Adonai is One. Those words were first spoken by Moses as he approached the day of his death, and after three thousand years, we still not know exactly what he meant by them. But one important clue to the deep meaning of the Shma is to be found in the way the words are written by the scribe in every Torah scroll ever written….a calligraphic peculiarity. The last letter of the first word Shma….ayin….and the last letter of the last word, Echad….dalet….are written extra large. Those two letters stand out boldly, rising above the other letters of the verse, to form a new two-letter word ayin dalet….ed. Which means witness.
This old, mysterious calligraphic tradition teaches, I think, that the heart of the Torah, the essence of our religion, is to bear witness….to speak the truth, about what we have experienced, and how it has shaped what we think, what we feel, what we know.
We live in a world full of falsehood, especially in the public sphere, in which no one believes that anyone else is really what they seem to be. Just this past week, we have seen yet another public person, Jonathan Edwards, confess to a huge lie. But for a brief time, this past Tuesday and Thursday, in the Santa Barbara courthouse, I found myself in an extraordinary situation. There in that very public place, most of us were meeting each other for the first time. I have no doubt that over the course of that trial, there will be plenty of spin, deception and innuendo. But at least during the process of jury selection, I felt privileged to be sitting in a world in which words still matter, in which an oath still matters, in which the truth still matters.
As he dismissed those of us who were not needed for the jury, the judge turned to us and said “I know this has been an inconvenience, and I am sorry for that. But I am a big believer in the jury system. I believe it is our best protection against corruption.” I came out of his courtroom, once again, also a believer in the jury system. Out of my initial anger and resentment, I experienced the ancient shift described by the prophet Isaiah in this week’s haftarah: Nachamu, nachamu ami. “Take comfort, take comfort, my people.” May God bless us on this Shabbat Nachamu, this Sabbath of Comfort, with the truth and love that were there in the Santa Barbara courthouse this week.