Justice, Justice, You Shall Pursue

This week’s Torah portion begins, “Justice, justice you shall pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land.” And this week John Roberts was nominated to succeed Justice Rehnquist as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. And this week the people of New Orleans find themselves in exile, in a diasporic state that Jews understand all too well. Jewish textual exegesis relies on metonomy—meaning derives from the contiguity of elements, from the proximities of physical placement in the text. Elements have meaning not in themselves but in relationship with what comes immediately before and after.

And so it seems to me that this particular confluence of events at this particular historical moment resonates with meaning. “Justice, justice, you shall pursue” the Torah reads, and here we are pursuing justices who are charged with upholding the law. But the reality of racial, ethic and class injustice in these United States is so blatantly obvious in the wake of the devastation wrought by the failure of the levees in New Orleans and the absolute destruction of the city by flood, that the pursuit of the Supreme Court Justice is irrevocably tainted by the failure of social justice so evident in American Society. I have little hope and even less faith.

Our feared leader took no steps to alleviate the suffering; made no effort to offer to the suffering any relief until he had no choice but to act: the world expressed its own sense of outrage and demanded action. It provided help not forthcoming from the Republican elite. Even the United Nations offered relief to New Orleans before the government aid began arriving. I’ve been wondering whether Bush did not go immediately to New Orleans because he is afraid of the water or contemptuous of the people? Probably both, I suspect. This president will move back to his farm in Crawford, Texas, wealthy from the spike in gasoline prices, and live his life in ease. And what justice is there?

This blog is a screed. I don’t care. I’m just too angry at the complete lack of justice. “Justice, Justice, you shall pursue.” My daughter is at a school meeting called “Peace and Justice.” I suspect these are two words outside the understanding of the George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the rest of the hooligans. They wouldn’t be caught dead at such a gathering. They leave the death to others.