In typical Talmud style a story is told of two camels ascending a hill. If they go up at the same time one of them will tumble down. One must precede the other. The question raised is, “How do you choose which one will go first?”
The one carrying the lighter load will let the other go first.
Talmud teaches an important lesson about justice. Even with animals our sages teach us that we are to treat them justly and with care. Our faith demands, for example, when an animal is in our care, i.e. dependent upon us, we must care for their needs before our own. It is no great leap of logic that our children’s needs must precede ours, as they are not capable of fulfilling their requirements independent of us.
What then comes to mind are questions of other people’s animals and children. Do we have any responsibility toward them? “If you find another person’s animal, you must return it to them.” (Deut. 22). The Rabbis go on to expand that if you find any lost item you must return it to the owner and if they cannot be found you must care for the object until they can be located. It is logical that the rabbis go on to teach that if this is true for an animal, how much more so must it be true for children?! We have a responsibility (read: mitzvah) to help children return home- whether that means literally bringing them home when they are lost or returning them home by teaching, feeding or even housing them if they are homeless. I have met such people in my life who have taken children into their homes when their family of origin could not, or did not, care for them. This too is justice.
“A judge must be guided by what he actually sees.” -Talmud, Sanhedrin 6b
This is an axiom of Torah. Hearsay, prejudice and whispers are disregarded.
For those who have lived through the fifties and sixties we are painfully aware that African Americans were oppressed, discounted because their race. They did not enter a store or conversation without a predictable and undeniable bias. We are now witnessing with the spiraling rise of anti-Semitism prejudice is passed on from generation to generation. The suffering at the hands of Nazis, and Cossacks before them, can still be found widely available in the media. So it is with African Americans, Asians and Muslims today. Hatred is not limited to any group. And we are insistently taught to judge each person on their own merit, “by what s/he actually sees.”
An apocryphal story is told about Mayor Fiorello La Guardia when he was serving as a night court judge. A woman was brought before him on charges of stealing food to feed her hungry children. La Guardia heard the case of the victimized storekeeper and the hungry mother. He declared, “I fine you,” he said to the woman, “ten dollars for stealing the food. And everyone in the courtroom are fined as we are responsible for living in a city where a mother is forced to steal to feed her family.” The extra money was then given to the poor woman.
La Guardia was not Jewish he was emphasizing a Jewish principle: we have a responsibility for the people who live in our community. That too is justice. The homeless, mentally ill, and hungry are our responsibility. They are the woman squatting down late at night next to the closed store, the veteran who holds up a cardboard sign at the corner, the children wandering aimlessly through dark alleys, the children and women forced into slavery, another Columbia victim of gunfire…
That is why I am insistent on working with MORE Justice. We have the means to fix all these ills. They are not insurmountable. In fact, many of them are as simple as getting our public officials to acknowledge what we propose (training our police officers, allotting money for affordable housing, improving gun control…) MORE Justice has “on the ground” proposals that are simple to implement and only require our elected officials to pay attention and put into action what will benefit our entire community.
The culmination of a year of research to determine best practices are now reaching their climax and we will be approaching those who wield the power to make real change at our Nehemiah Action on April 4. Contact Nina Grey or me if you wish to be part of the change. As Elie Wiesel taught, “The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.”
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