I'm happy to report that my week started well when I found the following piece in the weekly posting of My Jewish Learning, one which fits quite nicely into our effort:
But nothing could keep me from writing my own...
Shabbat shalom,
Jeremy Milgrom
Tzedek zedek tirdof is on everyone's short list of feel-good biblical quotes , running neck-and-neck with another Deuteronomic favorite, Uvaharta bahayim. Our verse goes there as well: l'ma'an tihyeh, and beyond, v'yarashta et haaretz asher Hasem elohecha noten lach. Justice, life, inheritance, God's beneficence, the land -- the complete package; who could ask for more?
Of course, this last phrase about the land, which God gives you, is shorthand for what has been spelled out over the last few weeks. A slighty fuller version would read, "which Hashem takes from them and gives you (a la R.Yitzhak's polemic quoted in Rashi's opening comment on Genesis 1:1 -- thank you, Stephan Parnas, for reminding me of it). And here the completeness of the blessing begins to unravel. The absence of the other is not just a matter of style: Deuteronomy states clearly that not only must he disappear in order for you to inherit the land; God makes your own survival, l'ma'an tihyeh, conditional on his disappearance. As opposed to Va'etchanan and Ekev, our parasha spares us the gory details, and employs the phrase the land which God gives you. This formulation (which appears frequently in Deuteronomy) lets us imagine that God will take care of things so that we won't have to get our hands dirty*.
One short phrase from the opening verse establishes the framework and sets out the goal of the entire parasha: v'shaftu et ha'am mishpat tzedek. That this is God's justice is clear from the mixture of juridical instructions and ritual matters in which the prohibition of idolatry is dominant. It is an uncompromising justice, in which the death penalty recurs almost like a refrain. Human beings are referred to here as ha'am, a collective which mostly connotes the mass that must be ruled via intimidation, v'chol ha'am yish'm'u v'yira'u, lest it become unruly. And it is exclusive to the extreme: ha'am means Israel but astonishingly covers everybody -- because the indigenous amim don't exist any longer.
Clearly, there are two ways of incorporating these verses in our lives: we can either stick to the ethnocentricity of the p'shat, and claim privilege, as some do, or we can claim the privilege of embracing and furthering the development of the ideas of justice and compassion which have been the pride of Judaism for the rest of us. Slowly (too slowly for many of us) but surely (an overstatement, without a doubt), the rabbis moved us away from absolutist, violent intolerance to humane, peaceful coexistance, as they:
-- understood that Joshua boldly modified the herem pronounced in our parasha (20:10-18) against the indigenous Canaanites;
-- cancelled the herem completely because of how Sennacherib shuffled the nations;
-- virtually eliminated the death penalty that was anyway not being applied;
-- and recognized Islam and Christianity as sister monotheistic religions.
These are just some of the stations along a road that has led us to a Judaism that is not set on warring against the world but rather believes in being a part of the human family.
Recognizing that tzedek tzedek tirdof was once less inclusive Jewishly than it is today means more than just adding a footnote on the page. It demands that we be aware of the natural tendency of human societies to wear blinders that cause us not to see the other, that limits our own beneficence to those most like ourselves. While it is painful for us to find such deficient notions of God in our sacred texts, it is sobering to realize that despite our superior perspective, we are no less likely to continue to maintain, in practice even if not in theory, a sad inheritance: the tradition of exclusion.
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* interestingly, in Zionist parlance, "getting your hands dirty" can carry positive connotations: "The Zionist ideal was for Jews to return to the land. This didn't simply mean living in the land to extend the rule of their home countries (as colonists did across the world), it meant returning to the land in a far more literal sense - actually farming it and getting their hands dirty in person". (); I recall hearing a member of Peace Now speaking proudly of armed self-defence as a rightful act of getting ones hands dirty.
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