City of Refuge: Balancing Justice and Compassion

At our August 3rd Saturday morning service, Rabbi Steven delivered a drash about the biblical concept of the city of refuge, places where those accused of manslaughter could seek asylum. In a modern context, how do we balance justice and compassion or employ both the righteous anger of protest and the need for strategic compromise?

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

In some ways, Numbers is the last book of the Torah. It ends with the Israelites standing at the Jordan River, about to enter the Promised Land. Moses recounts each of the places that they have passed through on their journey: from where they began, in Ramses, to where they are now, gathered in the steppes of Moab. His final instruction to the Israelites is the allotment of land to each tribe, with the notable exception of the Levites who are given forty eight cities within the holdings of their cousins (we’ll come back to these in a moment). The Book of Deuteronomy, which we begin reading next week, is mostly Moses’ retrospective of their journey – his swan song, before he passes the mantle of leadership to his successor, Joshua. It doesn’t introduce anything new. The Book of Numbers is the actual end of our foundational narrative: which tells us how the children of Abraham and Sarah became a great nation, with its own laws, land, language, and culture.

Among the cities assigned to the Levites are six arei miklat, or cities of refuge. These are places where someone who has committed involuntary manslaughter, rotzeah makeih nefesh bishgagah, can flee while awaiting adjudication. The reason this person can’t stay where they are is that the moment someone is killed (whether intentionally or unintentionally), the mechanisms of justice are put into motion. In Genesis we read that anyone who sheds the blood of another human, “by human hands shall their blood be shed.” And in Exodus: “One who fatally strikes another shall be put to death.” While killing makes one person a murderer, it makes another person – usually someone related to the deceased – a goel, or redeemer, who is responsible for exacting the penalty of this crime: a life for a life.

Our tradition places the sanctity of human life as the true north of our moral compass. The first thing the Torah teaches about humankind is that every person is a reflection of the divine image. As such the preservation of life, pikuah nefesh, supersedes almost every other commandment. This is why murder is responded to so quickly, so decisively. It is not only a break in the social structures that keep us safe. It is anathema to the ethical claims of our tradition. To this end, the rabbis debate whether we actually ever practiced capital punishment in the first place and lay the groundwork for interpreting the prescription of “a life for a life” as a question of how we might assess the value of life lost, rather than a literal demand for the death penalty. This only reinforces our tradition’s aversion to killing human beings and the necessity of a swift and resolute response to murder, whether premeditated or accidental.

But in creating the cities of refuge, our tradition also recognizes the need to balance justice with compassion: to see, in the murderer, a human being who might have unintentionally killed someone, who might have made an understandable (if deeply unfortunate) mistake – if only we understood the context in which the action took place. This does not mean that justice should not be pursued, but that restitution for the crime might look different.

I spent a summer at yeshiva studying the arei miklat. There is an entire section of the Talmud dedicated to them. The rabbis are fascinated by this case: Where do we draw the line between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter? How do we determine intent? What role does negligence play in assigning responsibility to the person who commits the crime? And when does their context take the blame, social systems that failed to protect both them and their victim? There are some great photos, buried on social media, of me pretending to chop wood – demonstrating the difference between hitting someone on the upswing versus hitting someone on the downswing. But the difference matters – as do a million other factors, when deciding whether the response to the taking of one life should be the taking of another.

Recognizing complexity is not a distraction from the pursuit of justice. It is a necessary part of it.

It is comforting to exist in a world of binaries: good and bad, right and wrong, action and consequence. This is the appeal of orthodoxies, religious or social, that give us strict rubrics to live by. The goel, the redeemer, operates within the legal orthodoxy of lex talionis, where punishment must mimic the offense in kind and degree. You killed someone, so you must be killed. But these orthodoxies can only be maintained in isolation; the introduction of outside elements (like the idea that someone might accidentally kill a person, and maybe shouldn’t be subjected to capital punishment) causes the system to break down, and so these variables must be removed or ignored. Put another way: if you believe the earth is flat, you either need to find an alternative explanation for how something can move beyond the horizon or look the other way. In this moment, it might be tempting to only think about other communities obsessed with defending their orthodoxies (and often ones we look down on, like flat earthers or TERFs or people who think the election was stolen), but it behooves us to see where we have also fallen into this trap: through the media we consume (and the media we avoid), the relationships we keep (and the people we don’t talk to anymore), who we think of as “us” (and who we think of as “them”). Even if it was never our intent, each of us lives in echo chambers of our own creation – ones that simplify an overwhelmingly complex and nuanced world.

The good thing is that if we are aware of this fact, we can start to peer over the edge of these echo chambers at that overwhelmingly complex and nuanced world.

Of course, holding complexity cannot be an end in and of itself. We must be cautious about when the call to recognize nuance is used as a cover for apathy or inaction, those moments (and we’ve all seen them, maybe even been guilty of them ourselves) when people throw their hands in the air and say something is too messy to make sense of so why even bother trying to fix it. 

But we must also be wary of when the pursuit for justice forgets to take into account this messiness. And what is messier than our own humanity?

It’s easy (and it’s not wrong) to follow the impulse of righteous indignation, to see a wrong and want to fix it. This is the role of the goel, the redeemer, who understands that an injustice has happened and restitution must be made. It is much harder to be the person who builds the city of refuge, who balances the pursuit of justice with the need for compassion. And by compassion, I mean the acknowledgement that human beings do things for a reason but sometimes make mistakes, that we makes choices of our own while also being acted on by forces much larger than us, that we affect those around us as much as we are the product of our environment, that we exist “in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

I think people have become very good at being a goel. This has been a summer of protest, of taking to the ballot boxes and to the streets. We have become adept at posting and reposting memes, writing hot takes on current issues, or sharing images that force us to bear witness to the brokenness of this world. Our critical voice has been honed and sharpened. Good. This is necessary for creating change. But it’s not enough. Because as we tear down the structures that no longer serve us, we must also be ready to build the world that we want to live in. And in our pursuit of what is right and what is good, we cannot risk tearing each other down as well. This is the lesson of the arei miklat, the recognition that pursuing justice must occur with the acute awareness of how messy and complicated human beings are, and even so, how precious, how deserving of dignity and care we are as well.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite midrashim, a story that the rabbis tell about the creation of the world. They say that God created the world three times. The first time God created the world around din, the pursuit of justice. This was a place of action and consequence: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But this world could not be sustained, because there was no room for error and no possibility for people to change. The second time God created the world around rachamim, holding compassion. This was a place of nuance and complexity, of understanding the context in which people operate and make decisions. But this world could not be sustained, because no one was held accountable for their actions. And so God creates the world a third time, balancing din and rachamim. This is the world we live in, in the dynamic tension between the pursuit of justice and holding compassion.

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to sit down with Toni Preckwinkle, who has served as the President of the Cook County Board of Commissioners since 2010. She offered that protest is part of changing the world, but it’s insufficient. The other is collaboration, which is less sexy and – in our current political environment – often reviled as traitorous, as we are submitted to orthodoxies of ethical purity where we must align on everything or risk being cancelled. She shared, “Compromise has been demonized and civility has been denigrated.” But that’s how things get done. And, she said, if you got something that is a bit more than what you had before – you got something. But to only live in the space of protest, to refuse to sit at the table with or march alongside people who do not entirely agree with you, to only see the “wrong” in people who make mistakes and not recognize their capacity for redemption: we all get nothing.

We have a lot at stake in the months ahead of us. And the call for justice is clear: there is a lot wrong with the world as it is. Yet we if become so fixated on what we need to tear down that we forget to look to each other to help us build what comes next, or even tear each other down in the process – we will lose.

I believe this is what we can do, right now: help build arei miklat, cities of refuge – places where people can make and learn from their mistakes; where people can come to be confused or unsure in a world that demands we stake our claim on every issue of importance and be met with compassion, rather than ridicule; where we can encounter people who may not think like us or post like us or vote like us with curiosity, to learn about the context that shaped them, and use our differences to help us better understand the complexity of this world. This is the sacred task of communities like this one. We’re doing it right now, but sitting in this space together. And it is a task so essential for the months ahead, as we head to the ballot box. And no matter what happens in November, we will need these places for years to come.

My blessing for each of us: that we answer our tradition’s call to live in the dynamic tension between din, the pursuit of justice, and rachamim, holding compassion. For this world. For each other. For ourselves as well.