Second response: friendship over justice

Cross Currents, Spring, 2005 by Sam Fleischacker

I'd like to begin by echoing Eboo's remark that it's true and important that decent and sincere religious Christians, Muslims and Jews can wind up on different sides of such issues as the war in Iraq or the situation in Israel and Palestine. And I think it's true that an interfaith organization that takes a strong and clear stand on any issue as controversial as one of these is likely to be understood as an ally of a particular political party or view and therefore more likely to drive away some people that would otherwise be part of it. The question is: when faced with such tension, which way should one go?

One answer to that question is that the interfaith movement as a whole can afford to have groups that make different choices on this matter. And it is probably much the best that it does include exactly such a variety of groups. To quote a scripture other than my own, "there are many rooms in my father's house." (John 14:1)

But for any particular group, the question is, should it primarily pursue justice or should it primarily pursue inclusiveness? I'd like to say a few words on behalf of inclusiveness. I'd like indeed to suggest that, sometimes at least, pursuing inclusiveness can actually be a better strategy for achieving justice than directly pursuing justice.

Now in the Jewish tradition, we don't like to have any discussion without some texts, so I want to bring in some texts before going on. First, an intriguing if slightly obscure bit of the Talmud. It focuses on an attempt by the rabbis to explain why God allowed the Romans to destroy the temple in Jerusalem. After all, as religious believers, they had to attribute that act, ultimately, to God. For the rabbis, it's really God who destroyed the temple and Jerusalem, and that means we Jews must have done something bad enough to deserve such a terrible punishment.

There are various explanations of what grievous sin merited the destruction of the Jewish holy city. One such explanation goes like this: Rav Yohanan said "Jerusalem was destroyed because they gave judgments there in accordance with the law of the Torah." To this, another voice in the Talmud responds, "Should they have judged, instead, by arbitrary tribunals?" What law should we expect Jews to use other than the law of the Torah? But the voice explaining Rav Yohanan's position goes on to say that he was condemning judgments that relied on the strict law of the Torah rather than going beyond the letter of the law. (B.T. Baba Mezia 30b). It is a sin, a grave sin, to stand on the letter of the law alone, and never go beyond it, to insist always on strict justice rather than encouraging people to renounce their strict rights, on occasion.

The 18th century commentator known as the Maharal remarked that in a community that works only by the letter of the law, only by strict justice, we may say there is no community at all. It's a natural consequence of such a wholly legalistic community that it will destroy itself. "Supra-legal conduct is the cement of human society," as Rav Aharon Lichtenstein has said. If you have a community where people have their rights, but only their rights, and people are concerned about their rights, but only about their rights, you don't have a community at all. You have, in fact, a very individualistic group of people who are concerned only about what's mine, what I deserve, etc.

Now there's a tidbit in Aristotle, to take a very different text, that sums up this point beautifully. In the beginning of Book 8 of his Nichomachean Ethics, he says:

     Friendship seems to hold states together, and lawgivers to care
     more for it than for justice. [W]hen [people] are friends they
     have no need of justice, while when they are just they need
     friendship as well[, and the truest form of justice is thought to
     be a friendly quality.] (NE VIII.1, 1155a21-7):

We need friendship as much or more than justice, and where we have to choose between the two, we should choose friendship over justice.

Why? Well, first of all, for the reasons that Eboo brought up: that justice is controversial and that on many issues decent people can disagree very deeply about what is just. If they are ever to resolve these differences, they need to start by discussing them in a framework of friendship, of warmth and mutual respect. If one insists instead on settling what counts as justice first, the people who lose the argument over that will be angry and alienated, to the point where they are likely to refrain from joining the rest of the community in any enterprise, including that of enforcing justice. Without friendship, that is, the project of seeking justice itself will fail. Unless you can get people together talking in a friendly way, talking enough to get to know one another, to respect and understand each others' views, that they can get to issues of justice and try to persuade one another, you aren't going to bring about justice in any society.

Here I have to say that it's my own doubts about what's right on many political issues that makes me reluctant myself to be a part of an interfaith community that would be mostly devoted to a particular side on many of these issues. Unless religious Jews, Muslims and Christians can get together and talk and know each other on another basis on other issues, not political issues, they are unlikely to be able to form any solid political bond.