EXOD827 As indicated in chapter one, a majority of contemporary Jews responding to polls assert that in their view social justice is the core commitment of the Jewish tradition. Such responses were not, as noted there, far off the mark. The demand for justice is indeed a persistent part of Jewish sources from the Bible to our own day, and it is a significant element in Jewish visions for the future. This includes both procedural justice and substantive justice. Procedural justice demands that people be treated fairly in court and in society generally, with distinctions drawn among persons only for reasons having to do with their own actions or skills. So for example, a just society is one in which people are not judged guilty or innocent, or fit for a job, according to the color of their skin or how much money they currently have. … [Exodus 23:6-8; see also Deuteronomy 16:18-20, Leviticus 19:15-16; see also Deuteronomy 1:16-17; Deuteronomy 24:16]. Maimonides makes some of the Torah’s procedural concerns more specific: 1. It is a positive commandment for the judge to judge fairly, as Scripture says, “Judge your neighbor fairly” (Leviticus 19:15). What is fair judgment? It is equalizing the two litigants in every respect. One should not let one litigant speak as long as he wants and tell the other to be brief; and one should not be friendly to one litigant, speaking to him softly, while frowning upon the other and speaking to him harshly. 2. If one of the litigants is richly dressed and the other poorly dressed, the judge must say to the former, “Either dress him like yourself before you come to trial against him, or dress like him such that you are equal; then the two of you may stand in judgment.” 3. One litigant should not sit and the other stand, but rather both should stand. If the court wanted to permit both to be seated, it may do so. However, one must not sit on a seat higher than the other; they must be seated side-by-side. ... Although some of this may seem obvious to us now, note that much of it took quite a long time to become adopted in Anglo-American law. The guarantee that parents and children not be held liable for each other's offenses, although articulated in Deuteronomy 24:16, which scholars date to the end of the seventh century B. C. E., was not part of British law until about 1830; until then, descendants would suffer for their ancestors’ treason, a process known as “attaint.” The Founding Fathers of the United States therefore had to ban that explicitly in Article 3, Section 3 of the United States Constitution in 1789. More pervasively, the kind of fairness envisioned in the Torah and by Maimonides was not common practice in the United States until very recently, for poor people and blacks were commonly treated unfairly just because they were poor or black. It is still the case in the United states, in fact, that blacks are much more likely to be executed for killing whites than whites are for killing blacks. Furthermore, American law does not insist on the formal requirements that Maimonides articulates to make both litigants look alike in social status. Thus, the Jewish vision of an ideal world should prompt us to work toward refining the American sense of procedural justice. If that is true for the United States, which in our day has a relatively refined sense of procedural justice in comparison to its own past and to so many other nations of the past and present, the Jewish vision of procedural justice in the ideal society is even farther from reality in most other countries in the world--in Asia, Africa, South America, and Arab lands. Thus biblical and rabbinic standards of procedural justice still have a lot to teach contemporary humanity. Substantive, in contrast to procedural, justice demands that society be structured so that people have basic food, clothing, and shelter--and, in our own day, health care and access to transportation. Western concepts of substantive justice are rooted in the Torah. Contrary to Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Roman, and most other cultures of the ancient world, the Torah demands that such basic care be supplied not only for citizens but also for strangers.... (Exodus 22:20-26; Deuteronomy 24:17-18). The biblical prophets are perhaps best known for their scathing criticism of people--Jews as well as other nations--who fail to care for the downtrodden and destitute.
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