My father Leo - may his memory be for blessing - had some definite ideas about justice. A 22-year veteran of Manhattan South Homicide, a detective first grade, and later in his second career, a tireless VP of Protective Control for Bank of New York, he spent a lifetime bringing people to justice, righting wrongs where he could, never afraid to stand up for what was right and see that the appropriate penalty was handed down. And he managed to do it all with tremendous style. Above all things he found a way to connect with people whether they were do-gooders or perps, always with an irrepressible grin and a twinkle in his eye. His way with people was a weapon far more powerful than the .38 he carried or the Glock he kept in the kitchen cabinet.He cared about justice as much as he cared about his family, because he cared about families who had been touched by the damage that unchecked injustice can do. He never forgot a victim, never forgot a name, always made sure that he remembered that no matter what sort of evil or physical or emotional mutilation or destruction had occurred, that what he was bearing witness to was the human relationship of life-to-life in an ultimate transaction gone awry. He understood that all human beings contained the yetzer ha-tov and yetzer ha-ra - the good and evil impulse - in equal balance. But what he never let himself understand or accept was how people could justify their actions when they led to such a destructive end.
I saw him lose hours of sleep poring over the details of a case file, and come home in the early morning hours after a night spent in pursuit of a suspect. I remember the morning he came home after finally breaking the case of the murder at the Metropolitan Opera, when I was eleven years old. "We did it, Schnickelfritz," he whispered proudly as I padded down the stairs to greet him at our front door at five in the morning. And then, hurrying into the kitchen to grab a quick bagel with American cheese, he took the stairs two at a time to go up and change for the Commissioner's press conference. There was no mistaking it: justice realized energized him.
My dad understood that pursuing and obtaining justice was a team effort that required the cooperation of many discrete souls working towards one sacred goal. Fellow detectives. The officers who'd first responded, the coroner's office, the EMS teams, the crime scene technicians. The witnesses, the friends and family of the victim. And the random people you'd meet while following a lead, from the guy in the coffee shop or the mechanic or the bartender or the lady who lived next door to the crime scene. My dad could make a friend of all of them. You never knew who would give you what you needed to solve the case.
The toughest people he had to work with were the wrongdoers themselves. He hated the excuses, the lies, the rationalizations people gave him for doing the unspeakable - acting on their own selfish and destructive impulses, robbing people of their dignity, destroying the souls of the people left behind, turning a fellow human being into a victim, needlessly and recklessly abusing the ultimate power of G-d - ending a life -- and taking that power into their own hands. He could pretend a friendship with a criminal for the sake of getting what he wanted out of them - a confession of wrongdoing and if he was lucky, a willingness to accept responsibility for what they did. He was a big fan of the allocution process, when a person has to stand up in court and tell, for the record, what they did, in an unvarnished and factual statement. No justifications, no embellishments, no embroidering of the facts to manipulate the listener.
There were so many other people that my dad encountered during the course of an investigation - objective people, people with no investment in the outcome - who could tell the truth in a way that made it easy to see when someone else was lying. Not only did he work with the best in the business, but years of gathering honest testimony and witness statements made him absolutely pitch-perfect when it came to detecting the body language, tone of voice, and other characteristics of the liar. As a daughter, naturally, I got away with very little. To this day, I still believe that anyone who underestimates the ability of a New York City homicide detective to see through a lie is kidding themselves.
I've inherited some of his intolerance for injustice. Like my father, I do not suffer fools gladly. I do wish I had his way with people, but I am also too much my mother's stubborn and straightforward child to listen to lies and rationalizations with a smile, however insincere, on my face. I have very strong - perhaps too strong -- feelings about those whose deepest impulses drive them to hurt others, and then attempt to justify, rationalize and worst of all, cover up their actions.
To this end, the first Torah portion I ever learned how to chant, Shoftim, reflects this. Shoftim is the Hebrew word for judges, and the famous phrase above, Justice, justice you shall pursue, is at the heart of the parsha’s text.
The double justice we see in the text isn't there by accident. The way my dad, I think, would interpret it is that every crime has two stories: the truth of what really happened and then recognizing that vigilance is required to ensure that those facts are not in any way altered to gain sympathy or to rationalize the hurt that was caused to the victim. In my dad's view, the phrase, "I didn't mean for it to happen" was irrelevant. It happened, and nothing could undo those actions. The honorable thing to do is to accept responsibility, remember your actions and learn from them. Making an effort to change the story, or cover it up, or erase it was as much of an injustice as the crime in the first place.
For my dad, the pursuit of justice was as much about preserving the factual, ethical memory of wrongdoing as it was about making the bad guys accountable for their crimes. In Judaism, memory is the cornerstone of justice: remembering what was done to us to that we can learn from it and become better people. "May this memory be erased" is about the worst thing you can ever do or say - every person, every thing deserves to be remembered, both for good and for bad. We can't erase our actions, but we can take what we need to learn from them and move on. Without justification, without rationalization -- but with the hard-won wisdom we needed to gain from the experience.
Silence is not a Jewish value, nor should it be a human ethic. Because when the voice of the victim is silenced, and the injustice of that silence is followed by the memory of a crime being altered or erased, the opportunity to learn and grow vanishes with it.
When my father passed away three years ago, a friend suggested to me that as a way of finding comfort, I should choose a Torah portion or prayer moment to remember him by. While Shoftim was certainly the obvious choice, there is also a liturgical stronghold that has become a way for me to pay tribute to my father every Shabbat. During the second prayer of the Amidah, as we recognize the Holy One as one who “keeps faith with those who sleep in the dust,” I shift my prayer book in my arms so that I can touch my left hand – my dad was a lefty - to my heart.
My dad’s life was about keeping faith with those whose lives were shattered into dust, those who met with their final sleep too soon. He may not have been the most observant or exemplary Jew who ever lived. But his legacy is justice and remembrance, and the knowledge that lives in the world as a result of the ongoing struggle that we continue to face: ensuring that the truth of injustice is ever brought to light. As in the words of St. Thomas More: "In the things of the soul, remembrance without knowledge profits little."
Shabbat shalom.
Posts
