The Jewish elevation of social justice over property law

If that story was all the Hebrew Bible contains, the Bible would of course be of surpassing interest to Jews, because it would comprise our national epic. Furthermore, its monotheism would still make it a work of surpassing interest to non-Jews as well.

But the universal moral interest in the Hebrew Bible comes from its second great history: not the story of how the children of Israel took the Promised Land and made it an empire, but the interpretation of its eventual collapse - of the misfortunes and exiles of the Jews. That story, recounted again and again by the prophets, is simple and straightforward: the people became unjust and the wealthy oppressed the poor. Catastrophe overtook the community because God punishes injustice. If the first Biblical theme is the divinely sanctioned overthrow of law, the second is the divinely sanctioned demand that this people be just.

The core of Jewish ethics lies in the laws of holiness (kedushim) in Leviticus 19: to love the neighbor as yourself (Lev. 19:18), and to love the stranger as yourself (Lev.

Margalits book The Decent Society, which proposes that the hallmark of the decent society is that its institutions do not humiliate anyone, stands proudly as a contribution to the mainstream of Jewish ethics.⁴² From the prophets on, Jews have located injustice in oppression born of inequality.⁴³

Here is one way to understand how the two basic stories in the Hebrew Bible, the story of ascendancy and the story of catastrophe, interlock: com­munity originates in a mix of lawfulness and transgression, represented in the Hebrew Bible through the overthrow of primogeniture and the inscrutable notion of divine destiny, of chosenness. But community endures through justice. Or, as Jews have traditionally combined these two strands of the story, we were chosen by God, but what we were chosen for was not privilege but obligation - the commandments or mitzvot to do justice.⁴⁴ In the past, God worked His will through the transgression of the laws of property suc­cession; in the present, God punishes those who place property above justice.

I phrase it this way to highlight that these complementary strands of the Biblical narrative share one thread: an ambivalence, or even skepticism, toward the moral claims of property. And, as we have seen, alongside an exalted regard for the law, the Hebrew Bible expresses an ambivalence about legalism.

I suspect that these deeply ingrained attitudes account, in part, for the attraction so many Jews feel toward political radicalism and political mor- alism. It is no secret that a remarkably high proportion of Jews are attracted to progressive causes.

face, which has been discolored through hard work, the rich must cover the face of their dead as well; and the rich, like the poor, must be transported to their graves in plain coffins. Babylonian Talmud, Mo’Eh Katan *27a - *27b. Most striking, perhaps, is another Talmudic dictum: that it is better to throw yourself into a fiery furnace than to humiliate someone in public. Babylonian Talmud, Babba Metzia *59a. I discuss these topics further in a paper about this famous Talmudic passage, The Coiled Serpent of Argument: Reason, Authority, and Law in a Talmudic Tale, 19 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 1253 (2004).

⁴² Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society 1 (Naomi Goldblum trans., 1996).

⁴³ It is not inequality itself. In the Mishneh, Shemos Rabbah 31:5, David asks God why He does not create equality, and God replies that if He did, there would be no opportunity to practice kindness and truth.

⁴⁴ This idea that to receive commandments is the same as receiving favors - that obligations are blessings - is reflected in the otherwise curious Talmudic dictum that there is greater moral merit in doing an act out of obligation than in doing it voluntarily. Babylonian Talmud, Babba Kamma *87.

powerful strain of antilegalism, of the subversion of law in the name of justice, that is every Jew’s Biblical birthright.^[594]