Justice In America, Justice For America

 Justice In America, Justice For America

A Conviction in the Murder of George Floyd

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

April 23, 2021

Our vaunted civilization stands on a foundation of ethics and ideals. Without them, human beings would be no more than a pack of wild animals, each of us in pursuit of our individual needs and desires, with little or no consideration for anything or anyone else. 

Justice, possibly the most important of these ideals, is more than a word. It’s actually a complex set of customs and rules. Its function is to ensure that our individual needs do not conflict or clash with those of others. Justice establishes boundaries but also attempts to restore matters to where they had been prior to an infraction—or even, ideally, to make them better.

If the idea behind justice is simply restoring the past, then it becomes impossible to achieve. After all, a law has been broken; a crime was committed. Something—trust, an object or a life—was broken. Even after the culprit is “brought to justice,” the process of rebuilding and restoration is going to take time and work. Once broken, justice cannot be simply restored: A guilty verdict is only the first step.

The conviction of Derek Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd will certainly bring relief to some, but long-lasting satisfaction to few. Will the conviction return Mr. Floyd to his family, alive, unbroken and still breathing? More importantly, will any punishment that the court will impose restore justice when justice has been missing for centuries? 

The Torah teaches us that the pursuit of justice is of the highest civil importance. “Justice, justice shall you pursue,” we read in the book of Deuteronomy, followed by a large number of rules that still form the basis of our judicial system today.  What’s most amazing is that this was written at a time—about three thousand years ago—when we hadn’t yet learned to examine a case from every angle and perspective; when we weren’t taught yet to hand the process over to a duly-appointed judge or a body of peers; when the most effective means of obtaining satisfaction was revenge. 

Still, the laws of Deuteronomy deal only with a present and immediate crime: A thief in the night, damage caused accidentally, through carelessness, or physical harm sustained in a quarrel. But what can we do when an injustice goes back not a day or two, but centuries?

For too long, Black lives were outside the jurisdiction of civil or criminal law. The murder of George Floyd is one of only a handful of cases in which a police officer was convicted of killing a Black man. The first in the entire history of the State of Minnesota. But we need to ask ourselves, how many others were acquitted? And how many weren’t even brought to trial? We don’t need to look far to understand how common the killing of Black people has been in America, and how rare for justice to be served for such killings. “Strange fruit,” wrote a Jewish poet and sang a Black woman singer as they observed the bodies of Black people hanging lifeless from trees, strung up by wild mobs for the slimmest excuse, for the slightest infraction of laws meant to demean and dehumanize people of color.

We Jews know about dehumanization. We know about slander, the blood libel, and genocide. We understand only-too-well how a system can be skewed against minorities, against people who for millennia were ostracized, detested, banished, and exterminated en masse. 

When Adolf Eichmann of cursed memory—the evil mastermind of the Nazi Holocaust—was hanged in Jerusalem in 1962, some people felt relief of sorts. Others, however, saw this “supreme penalty” as no more than an empty gesture. So many supported or participated in the murder of millions of Jewish men, women and children, yet so few paid any price for their crimes. And even if they had—would that be enough? Could the tortured lives ever be restored? Would broken bodies or spirits be revived? Would the trauma—passed through generations to children and grandchildren—be soothed by a guilty verdict?

Justice is essential if civilization is to endure. This most elusive of human concepts is fundamental to our ongoing existence and survival—but only if we see it as a starting point for the rest of the path: rebuilding and restructuring.

Racism in America IS endemic, very much as anti-Semitism is endemic all over the world. Exclusion from schools, health care and economic opportunities are built into this system. Today’s “crowded” inner cities are not very different from the Jewish ghettoes of the Middle Ages. They share a common purpose: to keep “undesirables” out, or at least out of view, of otherwise-respectable society. Anti-Semitism began as religious persecution. It took on its modern version, however, when the Jews were finally permitted to leave the crowded ghettoes and integrate with the general population. Almost overnight, we turned from outcasts into trespassers. Visibility became our sin. Our presence in their midst became so offensive that measures had to be enacted to eradicate our very existence.

Anti-Black sentiment in America is similarly built into our society. Unseen boundaries are drawn for the sole purpose of keeping Blacks out of “respectable” eyes and institutions. A Black student enrolling in an all-white school; a Black family seeking to purchase a home in an all-white neighborhood; a Black driver or jogger straying into an all-white suburb—all these automatically become objects of suspicion. Add to this: the proliferation of guns, the inbred mentality of racism and routine patterns of bullying and harassment—and what you have is a culture where violence and brutality become normative behavior. 

Without a doubt, the verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial sends a strong signal to our society. Injustice can never be tolerated, and it must never become acceptable, in any of our institutions. The role of the police must be redefined: Officers are not judges. Their responsibility is not to implement justice, but rather to apprehend a suspect and bring them to court. This delineation must become clear to all who might think they are the law—or worse, above it.  

In the past few years we’ve been watching our society split along fault lines that have become deep chasms. If peace and stability are to be restored, we need to examine the biases and intolerance that have divided us for far too long. We need to change the way we look at one another, to see beyond skin color, religious belief or gender identification. We need to build—from the ground up—a new America, a new and re-energized nation founded on open acceptance of the infinite diversity of the human race; a society that looks not at the differences between us, but rather at the unique potential embedded in each and every one of us.

The Rabbis have taught: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.” For justice is more than a sentence: It’s a way of life that we must follow for the rest of our life.

© 2021 by Boaz D. Heilman

3000 Years Old, 73 Years Young: Israel’s Independence Day 2021

 3000 Years Old, 73 Years Young: Israel’s Independence Day 2021

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

April 16, 2021

The connection between the People of Israel and the Land of Israel goes back more than 3000 years. First stated in the Torah, it extends to the period of the Patriarchs—and despite claims to the contrary, has never been broken.

Attempts to delegitimize this connection occur throughout our history. And while the size of the Jewish population in the Land of Israel has gone up and down through the centuries, the truth is that Jewish life in cities and villages spanning the breadth and length of this much-contested land has continued unabated since the time of Abraham.

In ancient days, for nearly 60 years, the Judeans were exiled from their homeland by the Babylonians. Edomite tribes invaded the land, and even after the Persian King Cyrus permitted the Jews to return and restore the country, the invaders continued hampering the resettlement and rebuilding until they were subdued by the Hasmonean kings, descendants of Judah the Maccabee. Two centuries later, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and, after killing hundreds of thousands of Jews, enslaved and exiled a large number of the survivors. The Romans renamed the land “Palestine,” hoping to erase from history the memory of the land and people that they had subjugated. But they too, failed. Jewish presence persisted in the Four Holy Cities—Hebron, Jerusalem, Tiberias and Tzfat—and elsewhere throughout the land. 

During the Crusades, hundreds of thousands of lives were lost and many Jewish communities were destroyed. But after the conquest of the Holy Land in the 1500’s by the Ottoman Turks, stability returned and with it also a return of Jewish life and prosperity. 

Then, as the Ottoman Empire began to crumble in the 1800’s, Arab riots took the lives of many Jews. In 1929 and then again in 1936, under the British Mandate, anti-Jewish pogroms cost even more lives. Hebron—the city where Abraham bought a family burial plot and where Jews had lived ever since—was completely emptied of its Jewish population in 1929. The Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem—a city where Jews were always the majority of the population—was conquered by the Jordanians in the 1948 War of Independence and its entire Jewish population was evicted. The Jordanians denied Jews access to the Western Wall, the ancient Jewish cemetery and many other sacred places—until the Six-Day War of 1967, when we returned yet again.

For two thousand years, religious persecution, ignorance and intolerance tried to prevent Jews from returning to our homeland. A forlorn and desolate Judea was seen by Christians and Muslims alike as God’s punishment for our refusal to recognize the divine or prophetic nature of their messengers. In 1904, when Theodor Herzl met with Pope Pius X, Pius told the father of political Zionism that, since “The Jews have not recognized our Lord we therefore cannot recognize the Jewish People.” He continued by vowing that if Jews were to settle in Palestine, “the Church would make sure there were churches and priests there to baptize them.”  

The Vatican stayed true to its word and did not recognize the State of Israel until 1993, nearly a century after that meeting.

Tragically, the Arab-Israeli conflict continues to this day. Some propose a two-state resolution to the conflict, not realizing that the Arabs have rejected this idea time and time again since 1917, when partition was first put on the table. Others go much farther, however; for them, nothing short of the total annihilation of Israel will do.

It isn’t only Iran, the world’s number one exporter of war and terror, that seeks Israel’s destruction. Through its relentless pursuit of nuclear armaments as well as through military and financial support of its proxy militias, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, Iran seeks hegemony over the entire Near East. Closer to home, however, the Arabs living in the very area where some would like to see an independent Arab state established, continue following the all-or-nothing policy set by the man whom the British in 1921 appointed as Grand Mufti—the supreme religious leader—of Jerusalem: the infamous Haj Amin al-Husseini. Husseini was adamantly opposed to a Jewish state and was unyielding in his refusal to negotiate with the Jews. Instead, Husseini aligned with Hitler and offered him the support of the Arabs. A direct line of thought and action extends from Husseini to his followers: Yasser Arafat, the founder of the terror organization known as the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO, and Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, the current head of the Palestinian Authority.

Israel, meanwhile, has taken in millions of refugees fleeing anti-Semitic persecution and genocide—from Europe, from the ex-Soviet Union, from Latin America, and not least, ¾ of a million Jews who were evicted from their homes in Arab countries.

But Israel today provides more than safe harbor. It’s the only country in the world where Jews can practice Judaism openly, without fear of bullying and discrimination; where Judaism can develop on its own terms, not bound by the whims and caprices of local leaders and surrounding cultures. Israel’s resolve to help humanity and make the world a better place gives its existence extra purpose and meaning. Its many contributions to the arts and letters; to medicine, science and technology; to environmentalism; and to the empowerment of women and minorities the world over make it a leader among the progressive nations of the world.

To ensure its survival, Israel maintains one of the most efficient and powerful armed forces in the world. It has to. But at the same time, the Israel Defense Force lives up to the strictest code of ethics and morality, more so than any other country in the world. In doing so, while committed to the principle and right of self-defense, Israel has sustained tremendous, tragic damage to life and property. It’s a heavy price, but one Israel is willing to pay.

Throughout its existence, Israel has served as a model not only for the world at large, but also specifically for Diaspora Jews. To those of us who live outside its boundaries, Israel provides not only a sense of safety and security, but also pride. Israel—not perfect, plagued by the same woes as many other countries—is desolate no more. One need only read Mark Twain’s description of the land as he saw it in 1867 to understand the nature of the miracle that has taken place there since his visit. The deep roots of the Jewish People in our homeland have sprouted once again and the Land has been revitalized. And we are all the better for that.

A popular meme on the social media reminds us that Israel today is 3000 years old and 73 years young. On this occasion, as we celebrate the State of Israel’s 73rd Independence Day, we thank the Almighty for enabling us to reach and witness this miraculous occasion: Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu Melech Ha’olam, shehecheyanu v’kiymanu v’higi’anu layman hazeh. Amen.

© 2021 by Boaz D. Heilman