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