Justice, not vengeance

Editorial

"Justice, justice shall you pursue," the Torah demands, which may account for a preponderance of Jews in the legal profession. Justice is at the heart of all things Jewish, lawyerly or not and, if this is true throughout the year, it is the very essence of the High Holy Days.

As we begin a new year and prepare for the solemn accounting of Yom Kippur, justice is the measuring stick for our personal and communal reflection. And the quickening pace of information media bringing us the world's misfortune so immediately makes injustice seem more prevalent than ever.

For Canadians, the end of Steven Truscott's horror story last week provides a bittersweet reminder of the fallibility of justice, even in a place like Canada. At the age of 14 in 1959, Truscott was sentenced to hang for the murder of a 12-year-old Ontario girl. He spent his formative years in prison, with a sentence of death hanging over his teenaged head. In 1969, he was paroled, with no comment as to his innocence or guilt. Only last week was Truscott formally acquitted. Even so, Truscott has not been declared innocent of the crime. As governments ponder what remedies could possibly compensate for the loss of childhood caused by wrongful imprisonment and the threat of execution, legal observers say the failure to exact a conclusion of innocence will likely affect what damages this victim of injustice might receive in the years he has left.

While we seek justice and atonement for ourselves and those around us, Judaism demands a similar test for the stranger. To a scoffing gentile who asked Hillel to know the content of the Torah while he stood on one foot, the great rabbi responded: "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary." What is justice, if not the treatment of all people with the fairness and humanity we seek for ourselves?

This is the central crisis facing Israelis in their dealings with the Palestinians. And while Israelis struggle with the contending forces of justice, on one hand, and the security of their state and its citizens on the other, they provide a model of how a society confronts difficult moral terrain under intolerable conditions. It is imperfect, like all human endeavors, but it is an attempt to behave righteously in a time and place of unprecedented challenge.

While Jews mark the beginning of a new year, so do students across Canada. In British Columbia, a new elective course called Social Justice 12 began in seven Vancouver schools this week. The provincial government created the course as part of a settlement in a human rights complaint by a couple, Murray and Peter Corren, who held that they suffered discrimination based on an absence of information around sexual orientation in school curricula.

Sadly, the world today is a rich laboratory for students of social justice and its failures. From the poverty that we face in our communities to the genital mutilation of girls taking place around the world, justice remains too often a purview of the privileged. In Iraq and Afghanistan, hopes for a just society introduced by force seem to be failing in varying degrees. In Darfur, North Korea and so many other places, life hangs in the balance because malevolent powers control food supplies and arms. In Ottawa, the Canadian War Museum caves to the demands of veterans who wish a more agreeable (that is, historically revisionist) analysis of wartime truths. Everywhere we look, there is justice in need of advocates.

Too often, it seems, what passes for justice is precisely the opposite, as it was for Truscott in 1959. One of the unspoken fears some of us have about the Social Justice 12 experiment centres on the fact that, far too often, "social justice" has been used as an affirmative-sounding façade from which to launch pogroms against Israel and Jews, as was the case in Durban in 2001 and to lesser degrees around the world ever since.

The reputation of justice suffers from such affronts and from a tendency to misconstrue it with vengeance. Justice is deliberative and likely to be injured in the frenzy that too often surrounds high-profile criminal cases. And in these times of 24-hour news and rampant blogging, what criminal case or international justice issue isn't high-profile?

But false prophets of social justice must not be permitted to destroy the values that truly reflect the meaning of the word.

However remote the goal may seem, it is our obligation to pursue justice, an obligation to which we recommit ourselves in the coming days. As it is written in Pirkei Avot: "You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it."

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