Truth, Justice and Peace
Friday night, June 5 2020
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA
Two thousand years ago, Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel was the leader of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. Living during a time of tremendous upheaval and instability, Rabban Shimon asked: What are the foundations of any stable human society? “The world stands,” he taught, “upon three things: upon the truth, upon justice, and upon peace.”
Tonight I want to propose that if we hope for a livable world for ourselves and for our children, we must consider Rabban Shimon’s three pillars: truth, justice and peace. In that order.
First, the truth, and it is brutal.
A first truth: between the years 1500 and 1800, somewhere between 9 and 12 million African blacks were brought to the Americas in the cargo holds of slave ships. That ocean journey, called The Middle Passage, which can only be described as a living hell, during which many died in agony, took anywhere from 4 weeks to 4 months. It went on for 300 years and it was at the very heart of the founding of this nation.
A second truth: when African slaves arrived in the New World, they were herded like animals, with whips and clubs, and sold at auction, like animals, shaved and rubbed with oil to improve their appearance and to increase their sale value, and then would go through a process called “seasoning,” in which with violence their will to resist was ruthlessly crushed.
A third truth: slavery in this country depended completely upon a regime of terror and violence, which was absolutely legal, sanctioned and authorized by the government for 250 years until Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
A fourth truth: Lynching became a fact of Black American life after Reconstruction and it did not happen in secret. Black men, accused of no crime, were tortured and murdered in front of picnicking spectators, including elected officials, prominent citizens and children, for such offenses as bumping into a white person or wearing their military uniform after World War I, or not using the correct title when addressing a white person. Between 1877 and 1950, over 4,000 black Americans were put to death by lynching, in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. Lynching postcards were in widespread production in this country for fifty years…and are still prized in white supremacist circles today.
A fifth truth: According to the most recent statistics, from 2014, African Americans who make up about 13% of the total US population, constituted 2.3 million, or 34%, of the total prison population. African Americans are incarcerated at 5 times the rate of whites. Nationwide, African American children represent 32% of children who are arrested, 42% of children who are detained, and 52% of children whose cases are transferred from juvenile to criminal court.
A sixth truth: nationwide, African Americans are dying from Covid-19 at a rate two times greater than what would be expected based on their share of the population.
A seventh truth: On May 25, 2020 George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, died in Minneapolis, Minnesota after Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, knelt on Floyd's neck for almost nine minutes, with his hand in his pocket, while Floyd was handcuffed face down in the street.
I could go on all night, with truth after truth, and still not reach the end of the horror, the pain, and the trauma that has been suffered by our black sisters and brothers at the hands of this nation that we want to love.
Perhaps with all of this truth we can begin to speak of justice, the second of Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel’s three pillars for a stable world.
Our Jewish doctrine of justice makes a stunning claim.
From the time of the Torah three thousand years ago until this day, we Jews have held the view that while we human beings are capable of terrible evil, we human beings also have the ability to repair the world. We can correct a wrong.
Not completely, not perfectly. But with a just verdict and a just sentence, we believe that it is possible to begin again. This is what Judaism means by justice.
The Torah acknowledges the immense difficulty of such repair. Difficult because justice in this world can only be rendered by human beings. Human courts. Human witnesses. Human judges. Human beings full of their own weaknesses, biases, prejudices, and frailties. But this is fundamental to Jewish faith: we entrust our human courts with powerful tools, to punish, to exact payment, to restore, to make whole.
Underpinning this doctrine of justice, the Torah three thousand years ago set forth a series of immutable principles which have endured until today.
The human being, every single human being is an image of God, of infinite value and holiness.
You shall not murder.
You have one universal law, applying to everyone: the rich and the poor. The king and laborer. The citizen and the immigrant. The police and the accused. Mishpat echad yihyeh lachem. You shall have one law, for everyone.
We are forbidden to oppress the stranger.
We are forbidden to oppress our worker.
We are forbidden to oppress the poor.
We are forbidden to deprive another of their freedom.
We are forbidden to expand our own power, privilege and good fortune at the expense of a fellow human being.
Our prophets, the founders of our religion thundered to the people of ancient Israel and their thunder can still be heard. But it was a black man, Dr. King, who taught us all, including us assimilated American Jews, to hear the old voice of our Biblical prophets, “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Dr. King reminded us of the Torah’s ancient promise, that a wrong can be corrected. The world can be repaired.
But tonight we are struggling to believe it.
How can we correct the vast, incalculable wrongs of the Middle Passage, and the whip of the sugar and cotton and tobacco plantations, the terror of lynch mobs, the widespread and despicable practice of redlining to prevent black home ownership, mass incarceration and racially driven police brutality? How do we repair this brokenness, in which a man in a uniform can kneel, with a smile on his face, placing the full weight of his body on the neck of another human being for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, until he dies, while his fellow officers stand by and watch? What would real justice look like, for George Floyd, and for the millions of his enslaved, tortured and murdered people. How can we begin again? Can we begin again?
Judaism declares “Yes we can, with justice.”
We understand that it will not be perfect, it will necessarily be human and therefore imperfect, but with a just verdict and a just sentence we can begin again.
Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel taught: Our world stands upon truth, upon justice, and upon peace. Having ventured to speak some truth, and to call for justice, we can finally come to shalom, to peace. We have to be so careful. What more can be said in this moment? What more than the words chanted all across the nation this week, “No justice, no peace”!
But Rabban Shimon taught, and our people has remembered, that our world stands upon three equal pillars: upon truth, upon justice and upon peace.
Our sages taught that “Shalom” is the name of God.
What do we even mean by “peace?” In our CBB staff meeting this past week, more than one member of the staff spoke up to say that they have been feeling overcome this week by emotion. “I’ve been crying more in the past week,” someone said “more than in my whole life!”
What feeling, thinking person has not been flooded by storms of emotion this week: anger, fear, grief, guilt, hatred. We are flooded with emotion.
Battered for months by the pandemic, and then the financial collapse, and now a police murder committed before our very eyes, and tens of thousands of protesters marching in cities across our country, met by lines of riot police and national guard, and the threatened involvement of the active military. If we are not flooded with emotion, we might ask: What would it take to make us feel?
This flood of emotions is normal, but the great danger of a flood of emotions is that it may lead us to shut down. To stop listening. In self-defense, we may go into a silence in which there is no speech, no listening, and no peace.
The original, deep meaning of the word Shalom is “wholeness.”
Shalom or “peace” means being able to feel all of our emotions, to hold them and not to shut down.
To hold all of our raging emotions, and to continue to listen.
To allow our heart to break, and to remain whole.
To feel afraid, but not be overcome by fear.
To feel rage, but not to lose our mind.
To feel grief, and also gratitude.
There is nothing more whole, taught the Rabbi of Kotzsk, than a broken heart.
It seems possible to hope in this moment, that we are entering a new time
of truth, of justice and of peace.
May this Shabbat offer us a glimpse of this new time:
A time of wholeness
A time of openness.
A time of humility.
A time of listening.
Shabbat Shalom