Do Justice
I was thinking about the directive of Micah 6:8, “do justice.” If you read the earlier verses, you can see that people were asking Micah questions about rules and regulations. Their questions were very specific. They were asking, “What do I need to do to get right with my God? What do I need to do in order to lead a meaningful life?” But they were asking in the language of their day: “How many more rams do I have to sacrifice?” Sacrificing in those days was an important part of religious ritual. They wanted to know, “What do we need to do to be in right relationship; what are the rules and regulations of this religion you are asking us to follow?”
Micah responds by saying something that might sound like this today: “Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is, what’s required of you, what life expects out of you, is not nearly as legalistic as you think. It’s not nearly as legalistic as you’ve been used to,” he tells them. “It’s not an issue of how many rams you sacrifice or how many prayers you say. That’s the good news. The bad news is, religion is no longer a private affair. It’s not so pietistic any more. What’s expected of you is to relate to other people. And while that may sound easy, it’s a lot harder than dotting every ‘I’ and crossing every ‘T.’ Your religion is no longer private. You are expected to be public. You are expected to be with other people.” He continues by describing what he means by this and the first thing he says is that they are expected to do justice.
The word for justice in ancient Hebrew is “mishpat.” You lose a lot in the translation. When Micah told the people to “do justice,” they knew exactly what he meant. You see, there are two words that are used in the Hebrew Scriptures for justice. One of them, tzedakah, means “righteousness.” This is almost a state of being in justice. The other, mishpat, means, “to do justice.” It’s active. Everybody listening to Micah understood that.
In order to understand what it means to do justice, we’ve got to understand what justice is. Justice can be understood on three levels. One is the rational, or intellectual. Another is the spiritual. And a third level is the physical, or material notion of justice.
Abraham Heschel was one of the great Jewish theologians and his was a rational or intellectual approach (he was also a mystic and social activist). Heschel writes about how justice is an interpersonal relationship. As a relationship it’s composed of two things: duty and rights. And that’s also what Micah’s talking about. The word mishpat encompasses both of these. You can’t separate: duty and right. It’s the right of someone to have justice and it’s the duty of someone to provide justice.
Lawrence Kushner tells this story: A long time ago in the northern part of Israel, in the town of Safed, the richest man in town was sleeping through Shabbat services. He awoke just long enough to hear the chanting of the Torah verses from Leviticus 24:5-6 in which God instructs the children of Israel to place 12 loaves of challah on a table in the ancient wilderness tabernacle.
When services ended, the wealthy man thought that God had come to him in his sleep and had asked him to bring 12 loaves of challah to God. The rich man felt honored that God should single him out. He went home and baked the bread.
Upon returning to the synagogue, he arranged the loaves and said to God, “Thank You for telling me what You want of me.” No sooner had he gone than the poorest Jew in town entered the sanctuary. He spoke to God. “O Lord, I am so poor. My family is starving; unless you perform a miracle, we will perish.” Then he opened the ark, and found 12 loaves of challah! “A miracle!” exclaimed the poor man. ” Blessed are You, O God, who answers our prayers.” The challah ritual continued for many years. Then, one day, the rabbi, detained in the sanctuary longer than usual, watched the rich man place the dozen loaves in the ark and the poor man redeem them.
The rabbi called the two men together and told them what they had been doing.
“I see,” said the rich man sadly, “God doesn’t really eat challah.”
“I understand,” said the poor man, “God hasn’t been baking challah for me after all.”
They both feared that now God would no longer be present in their lives. Then the rabbi asked them to look at their hands. “Your hands,” he said to the rich man, “are the hands of God giving food to the poor. And your hands,” said the rabbi to the poor man, “also are the hands of God, receiving gifts from the rich. So you see, God can still be present in your lives. Continue baking and continue taking. Your hands are the hands of God.”
The rabbi doesn’t call the rich man and the poor man together and tell them they are fools. He does not send them on their way, insisting that they give up their belief that God is actually present in their lives. Instead he tells them, “You’ve got to have both the person baking the bread and the person receiving the bread.” He tells them to continue doing what they’re doing if they want to participate with God.
On a spiritual level, justice is the recognition of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, one of our Unitarian Universalist principles. It means recognizing every individual’s integrity and value.
There’s a wonderful story about Peter Maurin, who was one of the early workers in the Catholic Worker Movement, one of the more radical social justice movements within the Catholic Church. The name usually associated with the Catholic Worker Movement is Dorothy Day. Maurin recalls his first meeting with Day, which is an example of this spiritual notion of justice. He had never met her before. She was sitting at a table, talking with a woman who was, he quickly realized, quite drunk, yet determined to carry on a conversation. The woman had a large purple-red birthmark along the right side of her forehead. She kept touching it as she uttered one exclamatory remark after another, none of which seemed to get the slightest rise from the person sitting opposite her. He found himself increasingly confused by what seemed to be an interminable, essentially absurd exchange taking place between the two middle-aged women. When would it end-the alcoholic ranting and the silent nodding, occasionally interrupted by a brief question, which only served, maddeningly, to wind her up? Finally silence fell upon the room. Dorothy Day asked the woman if she would mind an interruption. She got up and went over to Maurin. She said, “Are you waiting to talk with one of us?”
“One of us.” She recognized the inherent worth and dignity of the woman she was with. And Peter Maurin says that is how Dorothy Day was unique. She understood that every individual has integrity. This is another form of justice.
And finally, justice understood at the third level-the physical or material level-is balance. Walter Bruggeman, who is a wonderful biblical scholar, talks about justice as the sorting-out of what belongs to whom, and returning it to them. I was struck with this idea while attending a conference recently. A man attended, a FirstAmerican who lives on a reservation just outside of Denver. He also has a Ph.D. and teaches at Iliff School of Theology. During one of the conference’s discussion periods, individuals were talking about their sense of justice as wholeness, atonement, (at-onement), of a time in our lives when we will have wholeness or completeness. After everyone had spoken about what this meant to him or her and as a vision of justice, the FirstAmerican man said, “You know, we don’t think this way. We are more temporal. We understand justice as balance. Balance is here and now, not in some future time.” Right now. Justice is sorting out what belongs to whom and returning it to him or her. And certainly FirstAmericans have a rightful claim to that.
So, on the intellectual level we recognize justice as interpersonal relations; on the spiritual level we see justice as recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and on the physical level, we see justice as balance.
Now how do we incorporate a sense of justice into our lives? There are four ways we can do it. The first way is one I’m sure everyone is familiar with, and that is doing justice as social service, what we often think of as charitable work.
At the end of the year people write out checks to different organizations. That’s a form of charitable work, as are collecting baskets for hungry people, or volunteering at an HIV-AIDS program. We do all kinds of charitable work. And it’s important, really important.
What can come after social service work is social education. There is a story that makes the connection between social service work and social education. It’s the story about a small village, a wonderful place, right by the river. Everybody knew everybody and there was a sense of fulfillment. One day a peasant was walking by the river. He looks over into the river and sees a baby floating in the water. He jumps in, pulls the baby to shore, and rescues the baby. The next day he’s walking by the river in the same place and there are two babies floating in the river. He calls out for help and eventually two of the villagers jump in and pull the babies ashore rescuing them. The next day there are four babies, the next day eight babies. This continues with more and more babies coming down the river. Soon it reaches the point where the whole town has to organize in order to rescue the babies that are increasing in number. This goes on and they keep rescuing more and more babies and become so well-known throughout the area that clergy people would come and bless them for what they were doing.
Finally one day somebody says, “You know, maybe we should go upstream to find out where these babies are coming from.” But the elders of the town say, “We can’t do that. If we take a group upstream there won’t be enough people to rescue the babies here.” Now the person who had made the suggestion was a lone voice. “I’m still sure that we really should go up the river because even though we may lose a few babies, we’ll find the out what source of this is and we can put a stop to it, and there will be no more babies floating down the river.” But the elders said, “No, we can’t afford to do that. We must stay here and continue to perform the social service of rescuing these babies.” So they continued to rescue more and more babies, but it got so overwhelming that they couldn’t rescue them all.
Social service eventually reaches the point where you have to do social education. You have to go to the root cause to figure out why is this happening. So you study, and you do research. Eventually, you reach a point where you have to do your justice at a third level, and that is the level of social witness. You have strong convictions. You have to go and witness, you must take your values, what it is you believe, into the public arena. After social service, social education, and social witness then, there’s social action. This is when a group comes together to change policy, to change the minds of the decision makers, to change underlying cuases. In doing these four kinds of justice, encompassing the three definitions of justice, ti often is very easy to get sidetracked. We have to stay aware and focused. We have to become, in the words of Kushner’s story, “God’s hands.” Or in my interpretation, we need to become the “hands of life.” We need to do justice as interpersonal relations. We need to do justice as recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We need to do justice as balance. We need to stay focused. We need to be the hands of life because there is only us.
- Do Justice - November 27, 2014
