Jewish Choices, Jewish Voices: Social Justice

Conclusion: The Ethics of Social Justice

141 Conclusion: The Ethics of Social Justice WE HOPE that this volume has demonstrated, beyond any doubt, that compassion for others is a Jewish value. This value comes out of the commandment, “Love your fellow as yourself” (Lev. 19:18), which is a manifestation of the core Jewish belief that each of us is created in the image of God (Gen. 1:27 and 5:1). As such, we must preserve not only the life and the health of others, but their dignity as well. Some of the ways that we are obliged to do this are straightforward. For instance, we must take care of people in our society who are poor, abandoned, or sick. Even so, as we have seen in the discussion of Case 1, carrying out this duty is not always as simple as one might hope or expect. Because everyone has a limited amount of time, energy, and resources, we must make choices about whom to help and how to help them. There are, as we have seen, a number of different ways to approach this dilemma. Yet, Jews are obliged not only to take care of others, but also to treat them fairly. The Torah commands: When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I the LORD am your God (Lev. 19:33–34). Case 2 raises many questions about how to live out this idea today, grappling with the subtleties and intricacies of doing right by the “others” in our culture, particularly in complex, ambiguous situations. Beyond that, the Torah asserts that we have an obligation to care not only for other people, but also for the land, as well. This begins with God’s command to Adam and Eve with respect to the Garden of Eden, “to till it and tend it” (Gen. 2:15), and it continues with the Torah’s demand that, even in war, fruit trees must be preserved (Deut. 20:19–20). The Rabbis expanded on this idea, creating rules dealing with air and water pollution (e.g., Mishnah, Bava Batra 2:9; Talmud, Yevamot 44a), and ultimately saying, using God’s voice, “Pay attention so that you do not spoil or destroy My world, for if you spoil it, there is none to fix it after you” (Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7:19). Case 3 raises some contemporary applications of this mandate, which is all the more urgent and complex in our day. Jewish Choices, Jewish Voices: SOCIAL JUSTICE 142 Identifying the mechanisms to sustain human life in a world of more than six billion people, many of whom are polluting our air, water, and food on a daily basis, is a task whose breadth would boggle our ancestors’ minds. The essays on Case 3 offer a few different perspectives on how to confront this task on individual, corporate, and civic levels. Finally, from the time that Cain killed Abel, human beings have done bad things—sometimes with violence. As a result, every society in history has had to deal with criminal justice. The United States currently imprisons a higher percentage of its citizens than any other nation, and federal courts have begun to intervene to force states either to improve their prison facilities or to deal with offenders outside of prisons. Case 4 explores a number of possibilities for meeting these challenges—including alternative sentencing, restorative justice, and victim compensation—that classical American treatments of offenders have ignored. The Jewish tradition has laid out a robust system of justice, and it demands that this system be administered fairly. While it is optimistic that people can change for the better, it also insists that criminals take concrete steps toward rehabilitation before they can again become full members of society. Jewish law also provided for the application of the death penalty, even though it gradually circumscribed the conditions under which that punishment could be used. The responses to Case 4 not only explore the rationales for punishment in contemporary society, but also tackle the controversy regarding the death penalty, a controversy that echoes the ambivalence of Jewish tradition toward that practice. For each individual and community, determining how to respond to the seemingly endless demands of social justice can be overwhelming. Addressing humanitarian and environmental concerns requires much of us, as does battling discrimination and...