#992: Justice and Mercy

Buy my book!

Make a one-time donation

Check out my apps!

Note: This is a sermon from my vault. I delivered it on Sept. 3, 2022.

Shabbat Shalom, this week’s Torah portion is Shoftim, and it includes the well-known verse, “Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land that your God is giving you.” צֶ֥דֶק צֶ֖דֶק תִּרְדֹּ֑ף לְמַ֤עַן תִּֽחְיֶה֙ וְיָרַשְׁתָּ֣ אֶת־הָאָ֔רֶץ אֲשֶׁר־יְהֹוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֶ֖יךָ נֹתֵ֥ן לָֽךְ׃

Why does the verse mention the word justice, tzedek, twice? There are lots of interpretations. Ibn Ezra says that it means justice remains justice whether you happen to agree with the decision or not. The Talmud in Sanhedrin says it refers to two kinds of justice, one in which justice imposed by a court, and the other where a compromise is reached by the litigants.

I do think that the the repetition of the word tzedek refers to two different kinds of justice, one kind that focuses on mercy and the other that focuses on righting a wrong that has been committed. Let’s start with the kind of justice that is based on mercy, on rachmonus.

Earlier this week, you may have noticed helicopters in our immediate area. That’s because something terrible happened less than a mile from where we are sitting. For the twenty-second time this year in our country, a child, this one just two years old, died because her parents forgot her in hot car on a ninety degree day, which would make it about 138 in a car, hotter than the Mojave Desert, which has never gotten above 126.

It boggles the mind to think that this is possible, but the child was left there for seven hours unattended in the burning heat. There was a heartbreaking picture of the child’s mother, who collapsed on the ground screaming when the police told her what had happened to her baby. She was so despondent, and with good reason, that they had to take her away in an ambulance.

Some say this is a crime and the parents should go to jail because their unfathomable negligence caused the death of an innocent baby. I believe that mercy is called for. This was not a deliberate act, and it was not caused by drugs or alcohol. This was an accident, a terrible one, but an accident nonetheless. These poor parents have been punished enough, and we should let them grieve in peace.

The most shocking thing about these hot car deaths is that they can apparently happen to anybody. We think that it would never happen to us, but the brain does not work the way we think it does. We think that the welfare of a baby is the kind of thing that our brains would protect at all costs, that a baby would be at the top of some kind of neurological duty roster and would never slip our minds.

Alas, that is not how the brain works. We forget important things all the time. We forget what floor of the garage we parked the car. We forget where we put our keys. We forget anniversaries and appointments that we really need to go to.

What’s supposed to happen is that three parts of the brain, the cerebral cortex, which handles planning, the hippocampus, which controls memory, and the basal ganglia, which govern our routine habits, are supposed to work in sync. One part is supposed to hand off impulses to the next.

But if that path is disrupted somehow, that’s when we forget important things. For the cerebral cortex, a baby is the center of our lives. For the basal ganglia, it’s just another boring routine, something that we deal with a hundred times a day.

I know, it’s still hard to believe that parents could let a defenseless two-year-old to die in a hot car, no matter what neuroscience says. I mean, my wife wouldn’t let me disappear for seven hours let alone a baby. And while I could understand one person having this brain breakdown, how does it happen to two people at the same time? I think the answer is that both people thought the other person was responsible for the baby.

Justice and mercy are not opposites. Sometimes, mercy is justice, and I think it is in this case. So we put them in jail, what does that do? Would a prison sentence punish them for something they might otherwise do again? No, it wouldn’t. Would a prison sentence send a message of deterrence to the community, a warning that if you forget your baby in a hot car the law is coming to get you? No, it doesn’t. If it did, we wouldn’t lose 40 kids a year in hot cars.

There shouldn’t be a punishment for them at all. There’s a consequence, of course. The consequence is that they have to live with the fact that they killed their baby, and I hope they are able to forgive themselves.

So that’s merciful type of justice. Now let’s look at the other kind of justice, the kind that demands we right a wrong that has been perpetrated. My example for this kind of justice is the mess with the water in Jackson, Mississippi.

In case you haven’t been following the story, the main water pump for Jackson failed under the stress of flooding, and now 150,000 people don’t have potable water and there’s a city wide boil order.

The water there is so bad that it has been declared unsafe even for the purpose of brushing one’s teeth. It’s so bad that they have to distribute bottles of two kinds of water. One kind is for drinking, and one kind is not safe enough for drinking but it is safe enough for washing the body and flushing the toilet.

This was not some sort of tragic accident. It’s not like the water pump was working great and then it suddenly got hit by lightning and fried. This water pump has been in a state of progressive failure for years.

There has never been enough money to make the incremental repairs that have to be made from time to time on these huge machines. There’s not enough money because they base their water spending on property taxes. The rich whites left town and left a city that 82% poor and black. Funding water with property taxes is immoral, because it means those with property get water and those without property don’t.

Clean water shouldn’t be something that progressives and conservatives fight about. This is America, not Bangladesh, and every single American should have access to clean water, whether it’s the governor of Mississippi or a meth addicted homeless guy on the streets. If we can’t provide clean water for everybody, then something has gone wrong.

I stress that we’re talking about water, you know, that molecule that if you go more than a few days without it you die. We’re not talking about cell phones or other luxuries. It’s just about plain old water.

Think how you would feel if there weren’t clean water to for drinking, cooking, washing, flushing, and all the things we use water for? We would raise holy hell, and with good reason!

If Jackson doesn’t have the money to provide clean water, then the State of Mississippi needs to pony up. And if the State of Mississippi doesn’t have the money, then the Federal government needs to do it.

The problem in Jackson is not a lack of water, that’s just a symptom of the real problem. The real problem is a lack of justice. Justice is not served automatically on a motorized lazy susan. It has to be obtained actively.

That is why the Torah says Tzedek, tzedek tirdof, you have to be a rodef when if comes to finding justice. A rodef in other contexts is someone who is coming to get you like an axe murderer.

When it comes to injustice of the sort that they have in Jackson, we have to be like an axe murderer who is chasing after a victim.

I went to the Bristal yesterday to visit our congregants there and do their Shabbat program. They always give me a bottle of water, and it’s usually a normal bottle of Poland Spring or Deer Park or whatever ordinary brand.

Yesterday, however, they for some reason gave me this huge bottle of ionized ph balanced water called Life Water, so fancy that it has someone’s name on it as if it were a fine bottle of wine, and the word Water has no vowels on the label. It’s the Rolls Royce of water.

I drank it, and it was water. It didn’t taste any different from our local tap water. I hope they didn’t spend too much on it, because it’s just water. But then again, what happened in Jackson has reminded us that we should never say, “It’s just water.” Water is precious. The Sages say that water is a form of Torah. It’s definitely a form of justice. Shabbat Shalom.

•••

Leave a comment

Share