Justice versus Law

As I noted in my last entry, I am currently working through my responses to the book, "To Heal a Fractured World" by Rabbi Sacks. Here is the next quotation I wanted to explore.

“Justice in the Hebrew Bible is thus more than a matter of law. It restores a broken order. By suffering the wrong he inflicted on others, the wrongdoer comes to feel remorse. He or she repairs the damage they have done. Exile ends in homecoming, and something of the lost harmony of the world is restored. Jewish mysticism thus shares with the non-mystical side of Judaism a fundamental vision of order disrupted and repaired.” (77)

This idea of justice is perhaps one of the most appealing aspects of Judaism to me. It isn't enough to say who is right or who is wrong: rather, to achieve true justice, the communal order must be re-established. The people who do wrong cannot just apologise, repent, or serve a prison sentence--they must do everything in their power to mend what they broke. By doing so, they repair the world they disrupted, both by fixing what was damaged and thus thereby reintegrating themselves into the community.

Justice here becomes not just for the victim, but for the villain. The community becomes whole. It is practical, pragmatic, and healing. It is completely focused on THIS world, and the actions are wholly (holy?) dependent on HUMAN, not divine action.



What could be more just and beautiful than that?


At our school, we try to implement this concept of justice with our students and their interactions with each other and the staff. Sometimes it works, often it is difficult and frustrating. Yet I can think of no goal that could be higher and more worthy of us as adults and teachers than to impart such a value and concept of justice.