Thoughts on Justice

September 6, 2008

by Daniel E. Levenson

In Pirkei Avot there is a curious passage in which Hillel is walking along and sees a skull floating on the water. He addresses the skull in an even stranger manner, saying “Because you drowned others, they drowned you; and those who drowned you will be drowned eventually.” This comes between two sections in which Hillel is quoted on seemingly different matters, relating to leadership, education and the value of avoiding excess materialism. Leaving aside, for now, the location of this passage, which seems strange in and of itself given that the topics which surround it seem to have little to do directly with justice or death, I’d like to take a minute to look at what the editors of Pirkei Avot might be trying to tell us here.

Hillel’s first reaction at seeing the skull, which may be seen as evidence of a crime, is essentially to blame the victim. Without any other knowledge about the circumstances or who the person might have been or what has happened to them, his first instinct is to assume that they have deserved the violent fate that befell them. It is easy for us to criticize him for this, but at the same time how often do we hear about injustice and violence on the news and fail to respond to it? I think one of the reasons people connect with this passage is that the apparent hypocrisy of Hillel resonates within our own society.

I think that this passage does not only exist to remind us of the passivity that society can take in the face of obvious or perceived injustice. I would suggest that it is essentially working on two levels to teach two different lessons about justice in the world. In the first instance I think that it means to tell us, that those who do harm others will be harmed themselves, and from that we can draw a positive lesson that if we follow a path where we avoid hurting other people, we ourselves can avoid being harmed. This is one of the things that I really like about Pirkeit Avot, that it often posits situations or ideas that were  we  to implement them or internalize their lessons, the world could be a better place.

I think this passage is also meant, to provoke a strong reaction in terms of how the world actually is, and how we believe it should be. We know from our own experiences and from the media that this is clearly not the case: innocent people are killed all the time without having done anything to deserve their cruel fate. This is the genius of the Talmud, of course, that it is a text that wants to make us think – it does not exist solely to provide us with easy answers pertaining to Jewish life, law and tradition,rather it is a living tradition in and of itself that demands that we actively engage with it. And in each new generation, we must look for ways that it is relevant in our own lives. Now, in 2008, we find ourselves in a world where questions of justice are very relevant. America is at war in Afghanistan and Iraq, Israel faces very real threats from Hezbollah and Iran, and innocent people are still dying in Darfur.

The questions posed in and by the Talmud may be more than a thousand years old, but they still resonate with us today because we live in an imperfect world, one in which we sometimes perhaps need to be reminded that questions of justice are not merely the stuff of abstract philosophical exercises, but ones which we confront ourselves.