God as Our Judge -  Rosh Hashanah Essay

by David Shasha

Where hast thou been O soul?

What evils hast thou chosen instead of what good things?

When God invited you to a participation in virtue, have you pursued vice?

And when He offered to you for your enjoyment the tree of life, that is to say the tree of wisdom by which you might live, have you hastened into ignorance and to destruction, preferring misery, the death of the soul to the happiness of eternal life?

Philo of Alexandria, Legum Allegorae III, Paragraph 52

The brilliant Hollywood screenwriter Lamar Trotti is best known for two films that starred the angelic Henry Fonda.  There was John Ford’s 1939 film “Young Mr. Lincoln,” a portrait of the storied president as a young country lawyer full of ideals and dreams of a better world, and what is perhaps the greatest American artistic statement on justice and injustice in this world, William Wellman’s “The Ox-Bow Incident” which followed in 1943.  The two films were grounded in an American Christian Humanism that was deeply infused with the idea that man was created in the image of his Maker and that our Father in Heaven is, as the Jewish tradition teaches us, our Judge and Executioner.

While “Young Mr. Lincoln” recounts a story that is familiar to us from the time we are young grade school students, “The Ox-Bow Incident” is less well-known today.  The story of the film is, as always with the Hollywood classics, a simple one: A couple of men enter a town where a discussion is going on regarding the purported murder of a beloved rancher.  The two men see a bloodlust develop among the townspeople to get the murderer and execute him.

“The Ox-Bow Incident” is a film about what happens when men arrogate for themselves the role of executioner in a world where there are no rules, only assertions of guilt.  The foundational principle of American jurisprudence, the right to an evidentiary trial is here waived in favor of what was once called “Frontier Justice.”  A posse of men - and one woman - sets out and condemns the first group of people they see - three men who had just purchased some cattle from the purported victim.  Without a bill of sale from the rancher it seems that there is a question of guilt.  But the presumption of innocence, another key facet of American law, is again waived.

This lynching of the innocent marks a moment of the imputation of sin, a concept borrowed from Pauline Christianity.  According to Paul, all men are viewed as guilty and the Law itself is discarded in favor of the concept of Grace.  God is conceived as not being a Judge but as a Redeemer of men whose performance of Good Works is useless for their salvation.  Grace rather than justice is what defines this ethics.

“The Ox-Bow Incident” remains a haunting piece of Americana that echoes the Hebrew Bible and its concern with justice and equity.  By showing us the archly corrupted nature of a people that would prefer to lynch a man for what they think he did rather than what they can prove he did, the film provides one of the most salient portrayals of injustice that Hollywood ever produced.  The haunting images and sounds of the movie remain with the audience long after the movie has ended.  We are left to wonder why it is that man would so abuse his fellow man for the sake of an impulse rather than provide his neighbor with the fairness that we all desire.

The Jewish High Holy Days establish for us the primary image of God seated on the Judicial Bench.  This image of God as Jurist is one that precludes the corrupt nature of mankind, or at least should for all practical purposes preclude it.

But as we see in our day, this model of jurisprudence and social fairness has been corrupted by those who use the judicial system to procure only their own benefit.  Day after day we see TV commercials for programs like “Judge Judy” and “The People’s Court” and shows like Nancy Grace’s on CNN and even an entire network, Court TV, that promote a brutally ignorant and debased form of “justice” - a transformation of Justice into a form of Entertainment and Spectacle.

Within the Sephardic community that I live in, a tradition of the Jewish Court, Bet Din, was once functional.  This court was responsible to adjudicate civil cases in the Arab Jewish world and maintain the high standards of justice that were expected within the lines of the Talmudic tradition.

That Talmudic tradition was a legal literature that preserved the teachings and rulings of the Jewish courts in Palestine and Babylonia.  The two Talmuds are in effect, as Jose Faur has taught us, an ancient equivalent of U.S. Supreme Court proceedings; a precious record of the deliberations and discussions of the greatest Jewish minds of that era.

As the great Talmudic scholars well-understood, this literature must be parsed very carefully to glean a sense of its historical and socio-cultural context.  So much has happened since the close of this era that we are basically reading a completely foreign document that must be decoded carefully to allow the texts to be properly understood and interpreted.

And yet the current crop of Orthodox Jewish “rabbis” has rejected the very historical orientation of understanding the Talmud.  The current system of Jewish jurisprudence and legal rulings, based on Ashkenazi institutional power and the evisceration of the Sephardic tradition, is now trapped within a hierarchy that rejects modernity as it rejects a critical approach to tradition.  With its primordial rejection of the methods of the school of Maimonides, the Ashkenazi rabbinate has lived in a world of Jewish law that is more akin to myth than it is to the actual epistemic and cognitive realities of the Jewish legal tradition as it has been expounded by the Arab Jewish clergy.

One by one, the Sephardic communities have caved into the new system of Jewish institutional life and the members of our communities who once provided a robust and enthusiastic partnership with the rabbis and their courts, asking all sorts of legal questions and establishing the physical context for the well-being of our communities, are now but a shadow of their former selves.  Sephardic rabbis have abrogated their role as community leaders and relinquished their responsibilities to a group of lay leaders whose sole qualification is not their intelligence or piety, but the amount of money in their bank accounts and stock portfolios.

In the Brooklyn Syrian community this state of affairs has led to a situation where there is not a single functioning Jewish court that can adjudicate cases for the members of the community.  This means that when actions of legal import take place in the community that cases are either brought to Gentile court or not brought at all.  This state of affairs has been compounded by the emergence of a huge cadre - at least here in New York - of Ashkenazi Jews who are part of the Gentile legal system as lawyers and judges.  Rejecting the traditional model of Jewish courts, these Jewish lawyers and judges have become part of a system that is far more corrupt in its disregard for the niceties of judicial principles and civilized behavior.

We can point to the lunatic jurisprudence of Alan Dershowitz, one of the foremost lawyers in this country, whose two most famous cases were defending Klaus Von Bulow and O.J. Simpson; two murderers who were acquitted using the principles of law that Mr. Dershowitz espouses and that has sadly run amuck in the American system: The guilty are innocent and the innocent are guilty.  We are back to a time when the imputation of sin has re-emerged as a force in the legal culture of our country and where the imbalance of justice is now something that all those who have been exploited by rich lawyers and cynical judges can well understand.

In the Sephardic community, as I have said, there was never any recourse to the Gentile courts.  In the Arab world, under the beneficent influence of Islamic jurisprudence which emerged in the Middle Ages as a system of great worth, there were special courts for each of the acknowledged religions.  Rarely would a Jewish case be heard by a Muslim judge.  This allowed the Jewish communities of the East to develop a keen sense of moral values that was reinforced by the rabbinical class.

Today, with the absence of a Jewish court system in the Sephardic world, the practice of justice is a free-for-all.  The anarchy that currently prevails has been set in place by the emergence of a wealthy class that seeks to protect its own interests and force others less well off to act in accordance with its wishes.  Along with this anarchy a climate of extreme and malignant cruelty has emerged to dominate the social ethos of the community.

Paradoxically, the elevation of fundamentalist Orthodoxy in the Sephardic community has emerged as a critical factor as well.  Little wonder that this development has taken place because fundamentalism is a way for the hypocrite to hide a multitude of evils and maintain a veneer of religiosity that covers a debased moral sense that brings to mind the famous scene of Cameron Diaz in the comedy “There’s Something About Mary” where she unknowingly uses Ben Stiller’s sexual secretions as hair-gel.  In spite of the external surface realities that mark the appearance of a person’s moral character, there are always tell-tale signs of the immorality that is buried in the souls of men.

So it is quite plain that we face the perennial problem of respectability masking corruption. 

And here the image of God on His Judicial Bench once again comes into play.

On Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, God is imagined as sitting on his Court Bench adjudicating the case of each person that has come to Synagogue to repent before His mighty power.  We pray words that beseech God not to judge us as we are, but as we ought to be.  We admit our sins and beg the court for mercy - that is all we can hope for. 

But according to the rabbinic tradition God only judges us for ritual sins; the laws known in Talmudic tradition as Ben Adam la-Maqom, the laws between Man and God.  Violations of civil and criminal acts can never be adjudicated according to the rabbis by God himself, they can only be dealt with in a court of law.  God, after providing us with the Law, has left the matters of mankind to be settled in the human domain.

So how is it that for generations Jews have preserved the sanctity of their courts and their laws, and that now we have a situation where the system is larded with corruption and ignorance - all for the purposes of protecting the privileges of the wealthy and the powerful?

In this world there are a precious few souls who have had the courage to fight the corrupt forces of the powerful.  Those souls have frequently been brutalized and harmed for their activism in ways that most people could never even imagine. 

For the sake of justice we must raise our voices and articulate a vision that calls out the venal and the corrupted and accuse them of the crimes that they have done. 

And this confrontational engagement is something that one simply does not do in the contemporary Jewish world.  Those who look to follow in the footsteps of the Biblical prophets, whose cause of Social Justice and Righteousness was one that brooked absolutely NO COMPROMISE, are today treated like pariahs and even criminals. 

Such is a Jewish world where the good, the meek and the humble are prey for the wicked, the arrogant and the lunatic who see the world according to their own skewed value system and will do anything - ANYTHING - to protect what they think belongs to them; that includes coveting and manipulating people as well as things.  It is all part of a larger process of objectification and dehumanization.

Without a God sitting as Judge in Heaven that we can cry to in our anguish and our pain, those who have perverted justice to achieve their own nefarious aims can sit confident in their own black web of evil. 

Without a God sitting as Judge in Heaven those who suffer from the wicked have no recourse to seek their own justice and well-being.

Without a God sitting as Judge in Heaven there is no hope for the improvement of the moral state of humanity.

Like the poor innocent victims of the lynch mob in “The Ox-Bow Incident,” those who sit and wait for the judgment of God are left to the tender mercies of those whose jowls drip with the blood that they seek.  And we can see in our lives each and every day those who continue to cry out for the justice that is so deservedly theirs as dignified human beings. 

Justice so that people do not go hungry;

Justice so that people can live without fear;

Justice so that people can live with dignity and not have to kneel at the feet of the corrupt and the deceitful.

This image of God sitting on the His Throne of Justice is one that is so elementary a part of the Biblical and rabbinical traditions that it is a wonder that I would even have to write about it or explain its significance.  But after many words of advice from people who talk to me about the misguided nature of what I do as a social activist, I have come to hear an endless refrain of platitudes that demand that I compromise on moral principle and that I simply figure out the lay of the land and make the proper adjustments. 

After all, I am a relatively intelligent person - so why is it that I cannot read the signs and just figure it out! 

EXPEDIENCY TRUMPS GOODNESS!!!

The wisdom that is dispensed by our current crop of community elders is the opposite of what my grandfather Saul Mishaan and his friend and mentor Hakham Matloub Abadi taught to their students and protégés: Today we live lives of expedient comfort and relinquish any need for such a moral sense.  Morality in my community has been redefined to better describe the values of the debased and corrupted; those who lay waste our courts and our rabbis.

In the place of the old morality, they have erected new idols in their hubristic Temples of material gain.  They have a religion of wealth that has discarded the need for study and piety.  It is incumbent upon us to remember that this new religion continues to use the sacred and holy texts of the tradition - a tradition that they have so cruelly discarded! - as a false cover for their nefarious ideology.

Indeed, the ongoing charade of Talmud study in the Jewish world, study that is based on hypocritical dissimulation, continues to bolster the illusions upon which the community has erected its Pagan Temple devoted to self-advancement rather than to the needs of the poor, the weak and the disenfranchised.

Sadly, these evil people act in a way that believes that God will not come after them.  The God that they believe in is one that acts in overt ways; so if a person is poor and weak that means God does not care about him.  But if a person has money and property, this means that God has approved of their works.  A person testing out this neo-Pagan way of seeing things - it is certainly not a Jewish way of seeing things - will continue to play the odds and continue to damage the fabric of the community and by extension of the world that we live in.

Such people think that God is a complete sap and that their swindle will grant them eternal life.  But for those of us who continue to imbibe the sacred values of our Jewish past, from the Bible, the Talmud and from our noble Sephardic Sages, we know that there is a God who sits at his Judicial Bench on High and that He is watching all of us and measuring us according to the justice of our works.  He is not asleep nor is He playing a joke on us all.  He too is frustrated with the actions of evil men; it remains in the hands of those who have faith in Him to act as his messengers.

God in Heaven is thus our only sanctuary and our only truth. 

As the Psalmist states (81:12-16):

But My People would not listen to Me,

Israel would not obey me.

So I let them go after their willful heart

that they might follow their own sinful devices.

If only My people would listen to Me,

if Israel would follow My paths,

then I would subdue their enemies at once,

strike their foes again and again.

Those who hate the Lord shall cower before Him;

their doom shall be eternal.

For those Jews who are convinced that they know more than God knows, those Jews whose perpetuation of cruelty and injustice and immorality has now - at least in their own minds - been written into the actual Jewish Law, we need look no further than the resplendent words of God Himself through the agency of His holy and noble Prophets.  God is always quite clear about His demand for Justice and His role as our Judge.

Repentance is not possible, as Maimonides teaches, without three elements: Acknowledgment of the sin, repenting of the sin and the promise that the sinning will take place no more.  These are the integral elements of the Jewish morality.  In this there is no expediency and there is no casuistry.  One either does the Good or one does not.

For those who continue to suffer the depredations of the wicked, there is the perennial hope that God sits on high and doles out justice.  The injustice that we human beings suffer has been effectuated by the usurpation of human beings of the role of God; a matter that can only be redressed in the fullness of Time and not in the purview of our tiny part of the universal history.  We cannot always comprehend the actions of God; we can only choose to follow His vision and sadly watch those who violate His moral commands pretending that they are following out his Will when they are in actuality perverting His Will.

It is never easy to serve God, but it is all that the meek of the earth have.  We continue to fight wickedness and evil in the name of a Justice that we cannot always see.

And this is the secret of Faith: To do what is right, just and noble knowing that there is no quid pro quo with the Eternal.  All that we have is the justness and sacredness of the cause we serve for our Father in Heaven, the Judge of Judges.