Tzedek, tzedek tirdof

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.

Farewell to the Runway

Well, Leanne won with her petal architecture in spite of Korto's beautiful use of color and beading. A lame end to a lame season, but I'm sad that it has come to an end nonetheless. I never expected to be a fan of Project Runway, but it has ended up influencing me in ways I am realizing now that it's all over (on Bravo at least. Results of the lawsuit against Lifetime are still, I believe, pending.)

I ended up a fan by accident. When I came home from that first stay in the hospital in September of 2006, I was in so much pain that I couldn't stay in my own apartment. At my mom's, I could barely make it from the downstairs bedroom into the living room. A raging bacterial infection had destroyed my left leg and settled into the bone marrow of my foot and ankle. Six days of intravenous antibiotics only succeeded in pissing the infection off even more. Just sitting in the car, coming back to my mom's house, was agony.

So when I arrived there with a purse full of the stuff they give you for anthrax (six weeks' worth!) there wasn't a lot I could do. Mom was working during the day; before she'd leave she'd set out sandwich and a glass of cranberry juice diluted with water, ice and a pitcher. I was barely managing on the crutches. She knew that I couldn't make it to the kitchen.

When she came back from work in the afternoon, she'd immediately turn the channel to Bravo. "You've got to watch this, Ann," she'd say. "I think you'll like it."

And like it I did. The insane personalities. The creative quirks. All the kooky ideas and fabrics and the trips to mood that felt like getting out early from school. Kayne and Jeffrey and Laura and Alison. The design process and Tim's comments. It reminded me of writing, my best writing and my best days of writing, amazing teachers and mentors who had guided me to be even better than I thought I could be, who didn't mind my occasional indulgences into self-reflection. It was wonderful.

But I wasn't. All that fall I just kept getting sicker and sicker. My walk and energy improved, but my bloodwork didn't. I went back to work, barely able to handle the piles that had accumulated on my desk during the three weeks that I'd been home sick. But no matter how tired I was, I always stayed awake for Runway. My mom and I watched the Couture challenge in Paris with eyes that never got tired of gazing upon the City of Light. "Just get better, Ann," she'd say, over and over. "Just get better, and we'll go."

I didn't get better. Not until that December, when I'd been let go from the job I wasn't dealing with, got an IV port installed in my arm and a dead, infected bone surgically removed from my foot. Then I started ten weeks of IV treatments, two a day, still at my mom's. It was gross. My hair fell out, my body ached, and my stomach hurt, not to mention the chronic cough thanks to an allergy to the heparin I had to use to flush the IV lines.

Together, my mom and I watched Jeffrey win, marveled at the appalling mediocrity of Top Design season one, and rooted for Betty to lose and Sam or Marcel to win on Top Chef. Bravo's reality gave us something to focus us away from the reality of sickness that had come to shape that fall and winter.

Now, two years later, still struggling to find wellness and move forward, I'm sad to see Runway roll up the white carpet and become part of the past. I think I'll miss it in the way I miss the old episodes of Law & Order. The same way that I feel when I see Lennie Briscoe and think of my dad, I think every time I see Tim Gunn I'll think of what it was like to be cared for again, and safe, even while doing battle with the most serious illness I've ever faced. As each designer fought to make each creation they were challenged with something that would ultimately adorn and beautify the bodies they were dressing, so it was with me, with pills and potions, medicines and Mom, trying to redesign reality, and make it work.

Bullies

When I was in third grade, the kid who sat next to me didn't like something I said to him. As I recall, what I objected to was the fact that he had taken something out of my pencil case and failed to return it. So when we were filing back into our classroom, and while our teacher wasn't looking, he twisted my arm behind my back, wrenching my hand and breaking two fingers. I remember going to the hospital, laying my swollen hand flat on the x-ray table, the silver splints with their soft blue foam lining, and the sling I had to wear on my arm for two weeks. Kids being kids, sure. It happens all the time when you're eight.

But not when you're thirty-eight. Or at least, you'd hope. But over the course of the past two days, that very same kid who twisted my arm behind my back is trying to do the same thing, all because again, he doesn't like something I said. Only this time, it's online.

Last night I was subjected to four hours of barely literate, intimidating emails and wall posts on my Facebook page. All because a group of friends dared to call out a bully in their midst. And in the process, raise questions about the nature of the reunion that clearly were not welcome.

It got so bad that I had to cut off the conversation, as it had turned disrepectful, abusive, and more than a little threatening.

Clearly it doesn't matter what kind of education you get: a bully makes their intentions known with threats and demands, failing to engage in civil discourse and failing to recognize the fact that people have a right to their opinions and questions.

This all started because of the reunion controversy, which sadly has turned into a replay of high school. Instead of one united class, it's been cut in two. Us versus them. People are being forced to pick sides. Fights are breaking out, hearts once healed are broken, friendships once renewed are now splintered again. And blame is getting misplaced, everywhere you look.

While I am so proud of so many of my classmates for taking a stand, for calling out the bullies who have brought so much destruction and pain to this process, what I can't get over is that even twenty years later, how limited and immature these bullies have turned out to be. How angry they are that the people they once abused are now standing up for themselves. How they don't realize that no one really cares who has succeeded and who has failed, who is poor and who is rich, who realized their original dreams and who found other paths. The only real things anyone should care about are life and health and blessing. Nothing else matters.

But for some people, that same old role - that of the bully - is prevailing. For them, this reunion was a chance to show that even though their teachers had no faith in them, even though they shat on the assignments and never did the homework, that their greatest fulfillment was found in pushing people around, humiliating them and subjecting them to ridiculous cruelty, that they themselves are now successful. That they've outmaneuvered the kids who made them feel stupid.

However: they are stupid.

What they're seeing now is that the people they pushed around aren't willing to take it. That they are now able to stand up for themselves, usurping the bullies' power and status.

Nowadays, that sort of behavior isn't tolerated in schools. I don't care that we weren't safe then, from having fingers, hearts, spirits broken. It isn't going to happen now. Just like the fact that there are codes of law that protect adults, there are codes of conduct that protect children, higher standards, and above all a zero-tolerance policy for cruelty and abuse. Which is a good thing. The sooner kids can be broken of those tendencies, the better.

Because clearly, they don't go away.