What’s Jewish About Justice?

Remarks Presented by Rabbi David Rosenn,

Executive Director of AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps

At the 2000 Hillel B’nai B’rith Spitzer Forum on Public Policy

When I looked at the program for this session and saw that was the title for this part of the session, I began to wonder what, exactly, that question might mean. Because it can’t be asking whether there is anything in Jewish history or Jewish tradition that promotes the pursuit of justice. Of course there is. Obviously there is. It also can’t be asking what makes the pursuit of social justice uniquely Jewish, for it’s not. There are lots of folks in the world working for justice, and thank God for that, since we certainly can’t do it all on our own.

So what does that question mean?

I am going to answer the question, “What makes justice Jewish?” in the only way that makes sense to me: By sharing some comments on why the pursuit for justice is really at the core of Jewish life, connected at such a deep level to so many of the basic themes of Jewish life that our pursuit of justice evokes those themes and brings us into contact with the heart of what it means to be Jewish.

Let me be very clear. I am not saying that work for social change is somehow better or more central than prayer or study or any of the other things that lie at the heart of our culture. What I am saying is that work for justice has the capacity to tie all of the areas together, so that they begin to make sense as a coherent whole. And we need that coherent whole, that larger picture, because if we are to even care about questions like, “What’s Jewish about justice,” it’s going to have to be because Judaism helps us to answer certain larger questions, like: Why am I here, and, What should I be doing with my life?

Now, everybody knows that you can’t find the answer to those questions in books. Answers to those kinds of questions come only from experience. And by constantly urging us to pursue justice, Jewish tradition wants to have a say in what the quality of that experience will be.

Pursuing social justice would command our time and energy even if it didn’t illuminate any of these larger issues. But the fact is that it does. When we seek justice, we know that we are engaged in life’s most important work—work that takes us beyond ourselves and into something much larger. It is in the possibility of taking part in something larger, something better than our present broken reality offers that Jewish life sets as its goal.

Since we are concentrating on literacy this evening, I’d like to show how teaching people to read involves four basic Jewish themes: survival, revelation, democracy, and holiness.

First off, survival. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that literacy is responsible for the survival of both Judaism and the Jewish people.

For a long time, in ancient Israel, there was a battle over where the center of Jewish life should be. Some argued that the temple in Jerusalem, with its sacrificial rites and priesthood that could trace its ancestry back to Moses and Aaron was the obvious choice. After all, once the temple was built, God commanded that all other places of worship be shut down. The temple was literally the meeting place between God and human beings; it was God’s dwelling place on earth.

Others argued for another center, one that wasn’t so much a physical space as an activity. They felt that Torah study was the real of holy of holies, and that God dwelled wherever people opened up a sacred scroll and began to search in it for the meaning of their lives.

In the year 70 CE, the Romans burned the second temple, and the argument between these two sides was effectively put to an end. If it hadn’t been for those who clung to the Torah and emphasized the important of study, Judaism may well have been destroyed along with the Temple. And as for the Jewish people, who can measure the way that placing study at the center of our culture has helped an immigrant people to survive? If the American Jewish immigrant experience is any indication, the Jewish drive towards literacy has probably made the difference between mere survival and our community’s ability to flourish and prosper.

So when we teach young people to read, we know from our own experience that we are helping them to acquire far more than better grades in school. We know that we are helping them to develop survival skills that will ultimately enable them to do more than just survive. Literacy will help them to flourish and prosper, as we have been blessed to do.

Survival is the bottom line, and prospering is a worthy goal, but teaching literacy goes beyond even these to something deeper. And that is a revelation.

This is what the Talmud has to say about teaching young people:

Rabbi Yehoshuah ben Levi said in the name of Rabbi Yehudah Ha-Nasi: When a person teaches Torah to his grandchild, it is as though he received that Torah directly from Sinai; for the verse, “And you shall teach it to your children and your children’s children” (Deuteronomy 4:9) is followed immediately by the words, “On the day you stood before God at Horeb” (Kiddushin 30a).

Horeb is just another name for Sinai, and Rabbi Yehudah is saying that when we teach the next generation, the act is revelatory.

And not just for them, for us, too.

If you look carefully at the wording of Rabbi Yehudah’s statement, you’ll notice that it’s unclear who is receiving Torah directly from Sinai, the grandparent or the grandchild. We are tempted to assume that it’s the grandchild, since the grandchild is the one who is in the learning position, and the grandparent is a kind of living Sinai. That’s true, of course, but Rabbi Yehudah is actually making a deeper point, one we might not so readily assume. He is claiming that the experience of teaching is revelatory of the grandparent, too. When the grandparent passes knowledge on to the next generation, it’s as if he is standing at Sinai receiving the Torah himself.

Another Talmudic passage makes this point directly:

Rabbi Nahman bar Yitzhak said: “Why are the words of Torah compared to a tree, as in the verse, ‘She is a tree of life to those who hold fast to her?’” (Proverbs 3:18). In order to teach you that just as a small tree can set a big tree on fire, so do the less learned spark the minds of the more learned. This is in accordance with what Rabbi Haninah said: “I have learned much from my teachers, and from my students most of all (Taanit 7a).

Revelation is, by definition, the meeting point between two parties. It is a particularly intimate meeting, as the name implies. We reveal ourselves to the other in hopes of strengthening the connection between us.

Literacy tutoring is revelatory in just this way. And, as is with all intimate relationships, it eventually becomes unclear who is doing the giving and who, the receiving. There is giving and receiving no both sides.

Jewish tradition describes the revelation of the Torah on Sinai as the wedding between God and the Jewish people. I think is meant to teach us that learning develops not only survival sills, but also deepens relationships. It helps us discover over and over how powerfully we are connected to one another, at the same time that it makes those bonds and connections even stronger.

In addition to survival and to producing revelations, teaching people to read taps into another core Jewish value—the democratization of knowledge.

I’m not going to stand here and tell you that democracy, in the 1-person, 1-vote form that we know and love, is an ancient Jewish institution. It is not. Jewish support for democratic forms of government is a hiddush, a legitimate and wonderful new development in Jewish thought. What is not new, however, is an impulse to democratize the social bases of power by democratizing access to knowledge.

Judaism has long recognized that there will always be some groups that have more power than others. There just seems to be no humane way to eliminate social imbalance.

But Judaism has also recognized this: the social advantage of some people over others becomes intolerable only when the imbalances are permanently fixed. For example, when social power is distributed on the basis of immutable characteristics such as ancestry or race.

But if you can find a way to unfix the way that power is allocated—in other words, If you can find a way to democratize the distribution of social power—you will remove the most pernicious forms of social injustice: those in which certain groups or individuals are permanently kept down by others, with no hope for change.

Judaism found a way to do that by declaring that the highest social good is learning, and then by proceeding to democratize access to knowledge in dramatic and revolutionary ways.

It starts with the giving of the Torah on Sinai, which was a public revelation, something given to the entire people, not to some restricted set of priests or prophets. Centuries after Sinai, a leader of the Jewish community named Shimon ben Shehatch lived in an age when parents were responsible for teaching their children what they needed to know.

Shimon ben Shehatch realized that many parents were unable to provide a good education to their children, especially parents who were struggling to put food on the table or who hadn’t themselves received proper schooling. So he created what was in essence the first public school system, in order to make sure that every child would receive an education, not just children whose parents could afford it.

Unfortunately, it took about 20 more centuries for the democratization of knowledge to reach Jewish girls and women, but eventually it did, starting in 19^th-Century Poland, when Sarah Schenirer convinced some of Europe’s leading rabbis to endorse a network of schools for Jewish girls, which called Beis Ya’akov.

Today, efforts like the National Jewish Coalition for Literacy carry on the fundamental and fundamentally Jewish impulse to work for social justice by making real the promise of education for all children, regardless of birth or background.

Finally, we come to reverence.

Teaching people to read is not only necessary for survival, revelatory and democratic, but it also puts us in touch with the holy.

I could not dream of expressing how this works better than the way it was said by members of a Jewish senior center in Venice Beach, California, whose life wisdom is preserved for in Barbara Myerhoff’s awe-inspiring book, Number Our Days.

On page 91, Myerhoff transcribes some of the remarks made at a siyyum ceremony, held to celebrate the conclusion of a period of study:

“Rabbi Kominsky finished his remarks by explaining the importance of the law and learning to all Jews:

‘For Jews, study is the most sacred thing. The poorest Jew, the most humble, in the old country learn to read. This you couldn’t necessarily say even for the richest gentile. Among us Jewish, the highest honor we could give to man was to call him Rov, which means teacher. All of us here were raised this way. A Jew is always learning. Above everything, we are people of the book.’

Jacob Koved, as President Emeritus, was called on next:

‘What Kominsky has told you is basically true. All us were raised this way. Even those of us who don’t believe in God—we have religion because we have the Law. For us all, books are religious. Study is religious. Each page and each letter on the page has its own special character. Even the white spaces between the letters are holy. A little boy is honored when he carries his papa’s prayer book to the synagogue on the Sabbath. In the family, when papa opens his book, all the house becomes quiet. “Sha, Papa reads

,” the Mama says to the children, and all the house respects when there is study inside.’

“When a book is left open, we put a cover over it for respect. When it is worn out, we give it a burial. It’s like a living thing. All writing has something of holiness. Even when it’s only a newspaper, it shouldn’t be used for anything but study. So it is in the marketplace, also. Because we are Jews, we don’t wrap herring in a printed page.”

So there you have it. In the relatively straightforward act of teaching someone to read, we live out and are transformed by such central Jewish themes as holiness, social equity, revelation and survival.

It’s a set of themes that goes a long way towards providing answers to some of life’s larger questions, answers that emerge out of our vigorous engagement with the world. I would like to suggest that it is precisely those themes and that ongoing engagement that make seeking justice deeply and thoroughly Jewish.