I really enjoyed your D’var Torah, India, I appreciate your struggle to come to terms with the tragedy, in your family, during the Holocaust and your coming to terms with it/ through your own definition of justice.
Justice is the topic I try to avoid in my sermons because it is a difficult topic to talk about so I prefer to work for it rather than talk about it.
Everyone agrees that justice or a just society is a foundation of our human existence but why then do we struggle to be just or to build a just society?
On the one hand, universally, most people, probably even the worst tyrants of our times, would agree that justice as a concept is one of the most important in our world. The Torah urges us in the book of Deuteronomy, Parashat Shoftim: “justice, justice you shall pursue.”
But on an individual level, each of us has our own understanding of justice too. Apparently, a sense of fairness is wired into our brain. So each of us can sense when something that is happening is not fair, is not just.
We learn about the unfairness of the world since our childhood.
Tell me, how many of you said “that’s not fair!” when you were a child? Were you ever punished in school when other students misbehaved but the whole class had to pay for the consequences of their behaviour?
Did you have a teacher who didn’t like you and picked on you? Were your friends mean to you or did people accuse you of something you hadn’t done? How many people do you know who have done many wrong, unethical and immoral things and yet they have not been punished or reprimanded at all.
What about good people who become gravely ill? Is it fair that so many good people suffer? Life can be very unfair.
According to the Greek philosopher, Plato, Justice exists in two forms: in an individual and in a more visible form in the society. Individually “justice is “a human virtue” that makes a man self-consistent and good. Socially, justice is a social consciousness that makes a society internally harmonious and good.”
We all wish to live in an harmonious and good society so how come that there is so much injustice happening right now around the world: Ukrainian and Russian young people dying, Yugurs and Falun Gong ethnic and religious minorities being persecuted in China and 23 thousand dead people in Turkey and Syria after Monday’s earthquake, hundreds of thousands are left homeless after the earthquake and many mourn their family members – to name just a few.
Some of the injustices and tragedies in the world we cannot prevent from happening but some we can, but don’t do.
For example, this week, for the first time in history, tens of thousands of nurses went on strike. Is it fair on us? I am not even going to ask you this question because it is a Jewish congregation so we would be disagreeing on this in the best traditions of Shamai and Hillel’s schools until tomorrow.
What I would like to tell you is that about 5 or 6 years ago Nottingham Liberal Synagogue and I joined the campaign of the Royal School of Nursing.
On the one hand, there was a 14 thousand shortage of nurses around the country; on the other the Government cut bursaries for the nurses in training, thus stopping many people from disadvantaged backgrounds from retraining if they wished to do so because on top of taking a loan many of them needed to feed their families. Then add to it Brexit and today, even if the government hits its target of securing 50,000 more nurses by 2024, there will still be a 38 000 nurse shortage.
As you know India read today from the Czech scroll, whose community perished in the Holocaust.
So many more Jewish lives could have been saved, and perhaps including the members of India’s family and maybe many members of the Jewish community in the Czech republic if in the summer of 1938 the Evian resort conference had had a different outcome.
Delegates from thirty-two countries met at the French resort of Evian. Most countries, including the United States and Britain, offered excuses for not letting in more refugees.
Responding to Evian, the German government was able to state with great pleasure how “astounding” it was that foreign countries criticized Germany for their treatment of the Jews, but none of them wanted to open the doors to them when “the opportunity offer[ed].” [1]
In our Torah portion for this week the justice system was masterminded and implemented through a successful and respectful interfaith collaboration of two human beings: Yitro, a Mediante priest, Moses’s father in law and Moses himself.
In order to create a just judicial system Moses needed to find…other people of worth: trustworthy, with the sense of integrity and an inner moral compass. It was not God who installed or restored justice in the Torah but the people who feared God.
The Torah commands us: “justice, justice you shall pursue.”[2] We often miss the third very important word in this sentence. It is YOU.
It is our responsibility as individuals to nurture this virtue of justice within ourselves but also it is our responsibility as a community to pursue justice together: to help the needy (have you signed up to volunteer in our night shelter yet, have we donated money to the earthquake relief charities, can we support more refugees as a community?), to look after the sick, to stand up to injustice and racism.
India, life might not always seem fair to you and other young people from your bar/bat-mitzvah class but I know that the inner compass, that your parents, our community and the teachings of our tradition passed on to you, will help you to stand up to injustice and make your voice count when it will be needed to make a difference. And we, your community, will lead our young people by example.
[1] Évian Conference – Wikipedia -read more here
[2] Deuteronomy 16:20
