Balancing the Scales

I have been immersing myself in thoughts about “justice” for the past many weeks as I prepare to chant from Shoftim, this week’s Torah portion. (If you’re curious enough to go read it, it is Deuteronomy 16:18 - 21:9.)

It so happens that some of the very best Torah portions always fall in the summer, when only the most faithful show up for services. That’s the time at Temple Micah when the service leaders are not the rabbis, but rather just lay people from the congregation. Tomorrow my husband David and I are those lay leaders. There will be around 25 other people in attendance if this is a typical August Shabbat morning.

The first of the three sections I am chanting contains the line “justice, justice shall you pursue.” The thought of pursuing justice makes it seem like some sort of elusive quality that can never really be attained. This same section describes the establishment of a judicial system and admonishes the judges not to take bribes. Whoever wrote this (D, the Deuteronomist?) obviously understood human nature quite well.

The second section in chapter 19 describes a novel idea for those who have accidentally taken the life of another: the establishment of three cities of refuge. These would be places where the guilty person could go in safety while the friends and family of the victim cooled off. The murderer would be safe as long as he didn’t leave the confines of the city to which he had fled. This seems like such a sane way to stop the violence that all too often occurs as people take the law into their own hands.

The third section is perhaps the most controversial. It begins by requiring more than one witness to convict someone of a crime. It stipulates that the consequence for lying under oath is the very thing the person was falsely accusing another of. This is where the old “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life” comes from. This is the passage that some have used to justify capital punishment. Maybe the application of this passage today would influence the recent tendency of people in high places to bend the truth.

I searched for some pearl of wisdom to offer people as they pray silently at the beginning of the service. I found these 4 quotes:

Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just. Blaise Pascal (French mathematician, philosopher, and physicist, 1623-1662)

Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin. Dwight David Eisenhower (American 34th President, 1890-1969)

If you want peace, work for justice. Henry Louis Mencken (American humorous journalist and critic of American life) And here I thought the Justice Department had coined this one...

Peace is not the absence of war, but the presence of justice. Harrison Ford (American actor, b. 1942)

Do you have any thoughts on justice?