Mending the world: a Jewish approach to social justice.

There is no authoritative Jewish statement on economic justice, nothing at all analogous to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops' 1986 pastoral letter Economic Justice for All. Nor will there be, nor can there be. That is not because Jews do not care about economic justice; far from it. It is, instead, because we do not care for authoritative statements.

The well-known fact is that we lack the structure to promulgate such statements. By and large, we live comfortably with that fact; now and again, it is disconcerting to us. That is exactly what it has been during these past several years for that small number within the Jewish community who are aware of the bishops' pastoral, for that smaller number still who actually have read it, and for that tiny number who are aware that seven other church groups have issued studies and/or statements on the matter of economic justice.

I rather doubt that any of us would trade our anarchy for others' hierarchy, but there is no denying our envy of these fruits of that hierarchy. Would that we were capable of a systematic, thoughtful, and, above all, authoritative dogma on so pressing an issue. Would, even, that we were capable of a systematic response to the statements of others.

But to let the explanation for our apparent silence rest wholly on the structure of Jewish communal life is to say both too much and too little. The explanation lies rather deeper than that, and the nature of our silence and the reasons for it merit consideration. From a sociological or an organizational perspective, it is surely the case that the critical structural phenomenon that characterizes Jewish life is that ours is an entirely nonhierarchical community. But from a theological perspective, nothing could be further from the truth. Theologically, ours is surely the quintessential hierarchical tradition, and organizationally by far the most straightforward: There are the people, and there is God--and you can't get more hierarchical than that.

There is God, and there is God's law. And what that means is that when it comes to economic justice or to any other kind of justice, the first thing to understand about the Jews is that classical Judaism has no distinctive tradition nor any need of ethical teaching. Ethics are subsumed under law. Even the prophets, when they called the people to justice, were calling the people to obedience rather than to conscience. Indeed, until modern times, there was no word in the Hebrew language for "conscience." For that matter, the word for "law" in its classical sense is "halachah," which translates as "way of life," and accurately captures the ancient understanding that everything that is required of us has been commanded us by God. So, for example, Judaism has no "preferential option for the poor"; we have, instead, commandments that govern, in minute detail, our response to poverty.

Those Jews for whom the commandments are still the unbent and unbroken truth are today few in number. But for the vast majority of us, the advent of the Enlightenment two hundred years ago radically transformed our relationship to the Giver of those laws, to the Commander of those commandments, hence transformed also our relationship to the laws and commandments themselves. The word mitzvah, originally understood as commandment, has now come to be understood in a very different way; mitzvah these days, to the vast majority of Jews to whom it means anything at all, means a "good deed." Moses is thereby transformed into a kind of BadenPowell, the stiff-necked People of the Book become good scouts.

That represents a radical break from the classical view. Classical Judaism was never intended as an appeal to the individual conscience; it was a doctrine for collective behavior. Yet for two centuries now, that doctrine has been fighting a losing battle with the claims of individual citizenship and with Western culture's celebration of individual autonomy. In an earlier time, each community had a beth din, literally a court of law, which handled the case law of the Jews by reference to the common law of the Jews, the Torah, and its authoritative interpretations. In the United States today, however, the beth din--a structure that still exists---has almost everywhere been reduced to the utterly routine confirmation of divorce and to the issuance to restaurants and caterers of certificates of compliance with dietary laws. Each congregation of Jews is entirely autonomous, so the congregational pulpit has replaced the communal beth din. But the pulpit rabbi is hardly viewed as a figure of authority-- or, in more precise keeping with the modern view, he or she is viewed as a figure of religious authority only so long as religion is understood as a compartment of our lives rather than as a way of life. The Ten Commandments have been reduced to the ten suggestions.

So, the classical understanding, save for a small number of us, is no longer available. It is no longer to the community's law we must look if we seek to know what Jews believe, but to the individual's conscience.

The conscience of the Jews: There are any number of individual Jews and Jewish organizations that engage, more or less actively, in the pursuit of economic justice. But it should surprise no one that the Jewish community's attention is these days distracted by other commitments and other issues. The easy explanation for this seeming indifference is that we have become too comfortable, that the sweet smell of our success acts as a kind of chloroform to our righteous indignation. But that is a superficial, a mistaken explanation; the real explanation lies elsewhere.

The Jewish people has always lived where particularism and universalism intersect. We are the tribe that discovered the universal God, but chose to remain a tribe. By and large, our neighbors have failed to understand the urgency we have attached and continue to attach to the tribal boundaries. No small part of our historic quarrel with the church has issued from that lack of understanding: It is as if the church had said to us, "Now that you have discovered the universal God, why not become God's universal people?" only to have us respond, "Thanks for the invitation; you can have our God, but you can't have us. We are a people apart."

But it is difficult in the extreme to figure out how to be, or to want to be, simultaneously, apart from and a part of the larger society. The intersection where we have sought and seek to stand is not a steady place with a sure footing. We acknowledge that if we are not for ourselves, no one will be for us, and that if we are only for ourselves, we are nothing, but the working out of those twin perceptions in the real world is no easy matter.

Although neither of Hillel's famous questions can stand by itself, there was, in rough historical terms, a division of labor in responding to them. The priests, and then the rabbis, were principally concerned with the first question "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?"---hence with the work of selfpreservation, with Jewish interests, with social stability, with the binding up of Jewish wounds, with Jewish particularism. The prophets as we have come to understand them took the second question --"If I am only for myself, what am I?"--as the more urgent: Their concern was with Jewish universalism, with Jewish values, with social justice. The rabbis taught that there can be no justice without stability, and they were right; the prophets taught that there can be no stability without justice, and they, too, were fight. One can usefully study Jewish history as the story of the tensions between the two rights, the tension and the competition. Pendulum-like, we have swung now in this direction, now in that; the midpoint where we are meant to live our lives has been a hard place to stand, to keep our balance; the pendulum is not easily calibrated.

Alas, in our time, the dominant swing has been in the direction of particularism, toward interests and away from values, toward stability and away from justice. (And, given the galloping disorder of our times, that swing will likely accelerate in the years just ahead.) Those Jews (and there have been and are still many of them) who have taken justice as their mission have been, in general--I need to emphasize that there are many exceptions, but the general rule holds--those whose ties to the Jewish community have been most attenuated. Organizationally and institutionally, many--again, not all, by any means, but many--of the agencies of the community have been preoccupied, perhaps even obsessed, with the issue of Jewish survival. This should come as no surprise. The specific torment that is the legacy of this bloody century is profoundly disabling; we are a people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. We are a battered people, a people that has taken as its slogan, really as its oath, two words: Never again.

I can readily understand that others may be impatient with our tendency to wrap ourselves in the shroud of the Holocaust, to seek on medical grounds to be excused from the work of redemption. It is now nearly half a century since the Kingdom of Night came to an end. How long will our alibi, however authentic it was for a decade or two, remain valid?

Yet for all my own preference for and commitment to a more expansive view of what Jews ought to be caring about and doing, for all my commitment to tikkun olam, to mending the world, as the most energizing and compelling of the themes of Jewish life and literature, I understand our contemporary confusions. It is not just that the enormity of the event we recall is so devastating. It is, as welt, that in the years that have intervened, our healing wounds have time and again been rubbed raw. There have been among my own people those who have sought to rip off the scabs and refresh the wounds for their own political or ideological purposes. And there have been those, outside the Jewish community, who continue to pick at those scabs.

In Budapest, forty-eight years ago, two men encountered each other. One was Adolph Eichmann, the chief technician of the Final Solution. The other was Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat whose courage and decency led him to save more than 10,000 Jews--some say as many as 100,000--who would otherwise have been slaughtered. As a teacher, how can I help my people understand that in addition to saying "no" to Eichmann, we have to learn to say "yes" to Wallenberg? How can we be certain which of these two men will ultimately prove the victor? How can Jews be confident that the future lies with Wallenberg, given the continuing evidence that Eichmann is not over?

These are difficult questions, but not unanswerable questions. "Never again" is, after all, an insufficient slogan; it tells us what to avoid, but does not tell us what to embrace. And if we are today more concerned with resistance than with redemption, that is, God-willing, a phase and not a destiny. Indeed, there is evidence that we know that. There is evidence of a new stirring, a resumption of the work of mending, and it is to a tiny example, just a piece, of that evidence that I want now to turn.

In October 1986, a new Jewish organization came into being. Called "Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger" (mazon means "sustenance"), it was the product of a startling statistic and a disarmingly simple idea. In the aggregate, American Jews spend many hundreds of millions of dollars each year on catered celebrations. Some of these are celebrations of Goodbye, Columbus proportions; most are considerably more modest. For years, rabbis have railed against excessive consumption; for years, at virtually every level of income, people have been seized by a "Can You Top This?" fever.

What would be the response if celebrants were encouraged voluntarily to add a 3 percent surcharge to the cost of such functions, thereby creating a fund with which to make war against hunger? Out of the statistic and the idea the organization, a grassroots effort, came into being. In its first year, it raised $40,000; in this, its eighth year, it approaches the $2 million mark.

What can we learn from the Mazon experience? We learn first that there are people, in substantial numbers, who continue to care. Indeed, a significant number of the contributions Mazon receives are accompanied by letters expressing the thanks of the donor. And we learn that very many people are accessible to the traditional appeal that our bread is to be shared with those in need. Mazon quite specifically avoids asking people to sacrifice for the sake of the poor; its appeal emphasizes, instead, that the joy of the celebrants is enhanced if their celebration includes this act of kindness toward the stranger. More specifically, Mazon makes its argument in classic language: at the Passover seder, we say, holding up the matzah, "This is the bread of affliction; let all who are hungry enter and eat." Citing the verse, Mazon asks whether we can expect the hungry to hear the invitation if we do not seek them out. Citing Isaiah 58--"Is this the fast I have chosen?"--Mazon, through congregational rabbis, asks that on Yom Kippur we turn toward those whose fast will not conclude at day's end, whose fast is not the holy fast of repentance but the tragic fast of utter poverty.

The language resonates, and the number of contributions grows apace. Once, we left corners of our fields to be gleaned by the poor. Once, in Eastern Europe, it was routine to invite the beggars to join in our wedding celebrations. Today, far from the fields and afraid of the beggars, a new device. Perhaps, then, things are not so bleak; apparently, people may still be moved by the language of kindness. Mazon speaks that language in the familiar formulas of a particular community; it speak to Jews in a language they understand. But its message in that particular language is radically universal.

That rescues that emphasis on particularism from becoming a narcissistic preoccupation with self-interest is the prophetic tradition. We are anchored by our language-and liberated by it. We nurture both the particular structure and the universal ideology that is the prophetic mandate as we in our time have come to interpret and understand it and accept it as our legacy. That is not to say that there are not some among us who resist, who object to the notion that this particular people has any obligation to others. Mazon comes to help refute the obsession with self, but the obsession is deeply rooted. Now and then, it reveals itself to us in the form of people who object to Mazon on the specific grounds that Jews as Jews have no business worrying about "other people's" problems.

I had, until a few years ago, been quite unsuccessful in countering such objections. Neither the words of Isaiah nor the words of Amos (nor my own more feeble words) were adequately persuasive. And then, several years ago, a woman from Wisconsin wrote Mazon a letter, which reads, "Dear Mazon: The enclosed $90 check is in memory of my brother, whose last known communication was a letter smuggled out of Buchenwald, addressed to a former neighbor of his, a Christian baker, begging for a loaf of bread because my brother was starving. It gives me immense satisfaction to do for my neighbors, wherever they are, what no one did for my brother."

I cannot claim that all the objections dissolve in the face of this eloquent statement. But I have taken to copying it and sending it to anyone who raises the question, and, once again, because it speaks in so specific and so resonant a language, it is considerably more powerful than a general appeal to universal conscience. That, it seems to me, is the first lesson of the Mazon experience. But for all my pride in Mazon, its second lesson is a lesson of limits: Mazon, after all, is an endeavor to increase g'milut hassadim, acts of loving kindness. It is, if you will, the Jewish equivalent of a thousand points of light. And just as a thousand points of light, though they may also be a thousand points of warmth, are not yet the fires of justice, so, too, Mazon is a very long way from riduftzedek, from the pursuit of justice which is our mandate.

How, if at all, can we move from the language of kindness to the language of justice? How can we move from philanthropic sensibility to political commitment? Hunger in this country persists, after all, not because either kindness or food is lacking, but because the will to justice is lacking. How can we connect the pulpit to the public square, for it is only then that we move from the conscience of the individual to the policy of a community, then, therefore, that we move from loving kindness to justice?

Issuing statements, thereby generating debate and raising consciousness, is one beginning. Sponsoring a soup kitchen or making of participation in something like Mazon a ritual behavior is another. But, as the bishops' pastoral letter itself acknowledges, the work of justice, the more so if it is to be on a scale that warrants calling it "a new American experiment" (95), requires as its first step "the development of a new cultural consensus" (83). Over and over again, the bishops place the call for justice in the context of community. And they are quite fight; it is difficult to imagine any serious move toward economic justice, however defined, save as it arises out of a sure sense of community.

The story of Mazon comes to teach how the latent sense of community can be energized, how, that is, the collective conscience of this people can be nurtured through joining Jews with other Jews in the work of repair and redemption, and how a largely affluent Jewish community can be joined to the communities of largely non-Jewish poor people in an extended family of humankind. For the community of Jews, this gentle reaching out is a new beginning, a tentative reaching out to our neighbors, wherever they are, a way of again recalibrating the pendulum, of restoring the creative tension between self and other, of renewing the journey from kindness to justice.

And I dare say that for those of us who believe, as I do, that the narrow self-interest of the Jews points plainly to the assiduous pursuit of the values of the Jews, the statements of our neighbors are, finally, a source not only of envy but also of strength and energy and inspiration, just as, so I would like to think, the ongoing work of any number of Jewish groups--never enough, but truly more than I can count--becomes in itself a statement to energize and inspire others. Mending this, God's fractured world, is the collective calling of all the faith communities, each with its own particular vocabulary, all seeking together the grammar of justice.

Earthly Effects

Again the birch trees practice dying, their emptied limbs paler than the winter dark. My daughter, returned to college, has left ajar of Ovaltine--like an amber memory from another house far from here, where boots stomp in from the barn, the radio atop the Frigidaire statics on, hot milk pours to the cup, and the malted scent yearns through the night farmhouse. It's good for you, says her note, and my movement and thought are let loose from the clock, shadows on the floor turn straight-backed and spare. Windows narrow, web over with lace. Lamplight goes on ripening the bated space between objects, as though endings are written with beginnings, blonde daughters the dark mothers we bore.