Justice, justice shall you pursue

A guest blog post by Eliza Jane

Justice, Justice shall you pursue

A few moments stick in my memory from the process of learning about Judaism and deciding to convert. I remember reading, “It is not incumbent on you to complete the task but nor are you free to neglect your part”, and thinking those were some great words to live by. Or reading Koheleth, and wondering why I hadn’t read it earlier. I graduated with a philosophy degree and read Plato and Sartre. Had this seminal existentialist meditation on nihilism and the search for meaning slipped my reading list because it was put in the religious box, not the philosophy box? 

There were difficult conversations with my mother who felt that, if she’d known I was going to find religion she would have had me baptised. I explained that no, I wasn’t finding religion in general. I was finding this one in particular which felt right. But I’d also heard that studies of adopted identical twins show there’s a strong genetic component to religiousness, so I wondered about that.

I read and read and read. I pored over translations of The Guide to the Perplexed by Maimonides and I and Thou by Martin Buber, and everything else in between and beyond. 

I learnt how to make challah, how to say the Shabbat blessings, how to make charoset for Pesach, and which herbs could be used for the maror.

I remember the weekly pattern of walking from our small flat in Grey Lynn to the synagogue in Mount Eden every Saturday to go to Shabbat services, learning how to read Hebrew, how to sing the songs.

On my way to my Beit Din (the rabbinic committee which formalises conversion) straight after work one clear autumn evening, I saw a butterfly flitting between the browning leaves of a plane tree. Though I had no idea what the bracha (blessing) was for seeing a butterfly, I knew there would be one, and that was a beautiful thought. At my Beit Din, I was asked whether I was sure I wanted to join the Jewish people, given the long and entrenched history of Jewish oppression. It felt like that was one of the easier questions. I had come to consider this my community already. This was the history my children would be inheriting so, whether I converted or not, this was a people I was entwining myself with.

I have been proud to be able to draw on Jewish concepts when I’m teaching my kids – tikkun olam (healing the world), tzedakah (charity) – and proud to be able to celebrate holidays their ancestors have been celebrating for millenia.

Here’s the heart of it. Judaism is one of the ways I find grounding and hope for building a better world, and that has always been important to me, and that’s what made me feel like converting to Judaism was a beautiful gift. 

It seemed to me that Jewish thought, teaching, and religious practice was preoccupied with the same dilemma that kept pulling me in over and over when I was studying ethics. This is not the fairly simple question of why do the right thing. It’s the thornier question of how to hold onto hope when the world feels too hard to fix. Because while we can act even if we don’t have hope, our action will be twice as strong if hope is there to counter despair and exhaustion. Rage at injustice burns bright, but to sustain change it needs hope alongside. This can be a personal struggle for many – and it’s also a collective challenge. Judaism is not a proselytising religion; the Jewish writers I absorbed were not saying they’d found the one true answer, or that there could even be one true answer. But the question was central. And there were strands of answers woven through the rituals to sanctify time on Shabbat, to connect with others in our synagogues; in Jewish songs, festivals, and in acting on mitzvot. These are all ways to find beauty in the world, while being reminded that we cannot look away from injustice. 

My favourite passage in the Nevi’im (the second book of Tanakh, the Prophets) instructs us to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. Walk humbly. My next great love after reading is tramping, so I just adore that turn of phrase. Walking humbly, to me, is appreciating the world we live in as a wondrous creation far beyond our human selves, and recognising that the story of the world is multifaceted and we are only one part.

So that’s the perspective I’m coming from. Judaism is a beautiful, powerful religion that asks us to heal the world, and I feel blessed to have been able to join this community. 

Our teachings require us to be working for peace, and surely we know this in our hearts. Our teachings say that every single soul in this world is created pure, everyone is created in the image of God, b’tselem Elohim. Our teachings tell us “You shall not harm a stranger or oppress them, for you were strangers in Egypt.” 

The Shabbat morning service includes prayers for peace, and lists the ancient obligations without measure from the Talmud – to pray with sincerity, to build peace where there is strife. There is no room in those words for disingenuous, empty sentiments. The failure to build peace, the failure to speak out against war, is a denial of ourselves. It’s a failure to teach our children the values we want to teach them. How can they look up to their community leaders if those leaders are saying it’s naive and impossible to create a better world, that perpetual war and oppression of others is justified, that the most essential, enduring and true parts of Judaism are the ones we can set aside most easily? 

There are some who might say that as a convert, I don’t have the deep knowledge of Jewish trauma and oppression, that I’m still a visitor. I get that. But my children bear that history, and I bore those children. My husband was born in Israel. His grandmother survived a concentration camp. His grandfather fought in the 1948 war, and again in 1967, and we named our first son after that grandfather. 

Not long before we were engaged, I studied in Berlin for a few months. I was already interested in Judaism, and spent an immersive afternoon wandering around the Neue Synagogue. That synagogue was built to be able to fit 3000 people. It can be said to be the birthplace of Reform Judaism. Albert Einstein attended services there, and it’s the first recorded place that a woman spoke from the bema (pulpit). I also went to the oldest synagogue in Europe, in Prague. Reminders of the Jews who aren’t there anymore can be found in city after city after city throughout Europe. A street market I went to in Berlin sold battered, antique menorahs – I was taken aback, what were the stories they held? I shuddered to think of people buying them as bric a brac. They should have been heirlooms. Family lines, snuffed out like the candles that once would have burned in the window. The scale of loss of Jewish life from the Shoah (Holocaust) is so unimaginably huge; and with it the loss of Jewish scholarship, community, history, political debates. It is still very recent, the generations overlap through to today, the trauma is still being played out. And in Israel, it has compounded, and spiralled outward, and become normalised as a permanent, essentialist feature of existence. 

Solidarity with Jewish people, care for Israelis, hope for a safe future for all – these are all reasons to build peace. There are no reasons, none at all, to continue down the current path of pain and destruction, violence and trauma, of dehumanising Palestinians, of launching bombs that kill entire families – children, parents, grandparents. Everything in our texts and our history is crying out to us that this is not the way. This is not the way. Exhortations to peace are repeated over and over throughout Jewish writings. This isn’t cherry picking or subtext, it’s central: “That which is hateful unto you, do not do to your neighbour. This is the whole of the Torah; the rest is commentary.” How can anyone in the entire world look at the children of Gaza and not weep and rage and cry out for them to be allowed to live? How can we – Jews living in safe, peaceful countries, where our children don’t know what bombs sound like – stay silent? 

There is a map laid out for a different path from the disastrous one Netanyahu is leading Israel down. It has been written over thousands of years. It has been a trusty guide. Through millennia of Jewish experience, Jewish communities have cherished it, and held it sacred in the most impossible circumstances. Right now is a hard time in Jewish history, but it’s far from  the hardest time we’ve faced. It’s a time to turn towards the truest parts of our teachings, to hold onto them, to use them to spark hope and give us courage and strength. There is nothing, nothing, no shred of a possible defence for saying peace is too hard, for becoming apologists for endless war and denial of basic rights. It’s time for t’shuva (returning), for returning to our values, returning to a better path. How dare we do anything else.

Eliza Jane lives in Wellington with her husband and two sons. She converted to Judaism over a decade ago, and has a particular interest in Jewish philosophy and literature. She also makes legendary challah and babka.