From the Encyclopedia Judaica
JUSTICE has widely been said to be the moral value which singularly characterizes Judaism both conceptually and historically. Historically, the Jewish search for justice begins with biblical statements like “Justice (Heb. zedek); justice shall y’all pursue” (Deut. 16:20). On the conceptual side, justice holds a central place in the Jewish world view, and many other basic Jewish concepts revolve around the notion of justice.
God’s primary attribute of action (see Attributes of *God) is justice (Heb. mishpat; Gen. 18:25; Ps. 9:5), His commandments to men, and especially to Israelיִשְׂרָאֵל
Transliteration: yiśrā’ēl The name Israel (Septuagint Ancient Greek: Ἰσραήλ, Israēl, “El (God) persists/rules” or “God prevails”) refers to the patriarch Jacob who, according to the Hebrew Bible, was given the name after he successfully wrestled with the Angel of the Lord. The earliest known archaeological artifact to mention the word Israel as a collective is the Merneptah Stele of ancient Egypt (dated to the late-13th century BCE) for more info click here, are essentially for the purpose of the establishment of justice in the world (see Ps. 119: 137-44). Men fulfill this purpose by acting in accordance with God’s laws and in other ways imitating the divine quality of justice (Deut. 13:5; Sot. 14a; Maimonides, Guide, 1:54, 3:54). This process of establishing justice in the world is to be completed in the messianic reign of universal justice (see Isa. 11:5ff.; Deut. R. 5 7), All history, So, like the Torahתּוֹרָה
Tōrā,/ˈtɔːrə, ˈtoʊrə/; law, teaching, direction, instruction – The first five books of the Bible or also called “the books of Moses” comes from an archery term meaning to shoot. itself, which is its paradigm, begins and ends with justice (Ex. R. 30: 19).
The two main biblical terms for justice are Zedek and Zedakah. They refer to both divine and human justice, as well as to “the works of justice” ( Ex. 9:27; Prov. 10:25; Ps. 18:21-25). This justice is essentially synonymous with holinessקָדְשׁ
Transliteration qōḏeš Pronunciation ko’-desh a sacred place or thing; rarely abstract, sanctity:—consecrated (thing), dedicated (thing), hallowed (thing), holiness, (× most) holy (× day, portion, thing), saint, sanctuary. For more info click here (Isa. 5:16). In the Bible, furthermore, “justice” is so consistently paired with “mercy” or “grace” (hesed; Isa 45:19; Ps. 103:17ff.), that by talmudic and later times the term zedakah has come to mean almost exclusively “charity” or “works of love” (BB 1Ob), and the notion of “justice” is rendered by the terms “truth” (emet), “trust” (emunah), and “integrity” (vosher). Throughout the literature, finally, other values, particularly peace and redemption, are consistently associated with justice, as its components or products (Hos. 12:7; Ps. 15:1; Ta’an. 6:2). Ultimately, therefore, virtually the entire spectrum of ethical values is comprised in the notion of justice.
Jewish justice is different from the classic philosophic (Greek-Western) view of this concept. In the latter, justice is generally considered under the headings of “distributive” and “retributive.” These are, of course, also comprised in zedakah, but while “distributive” and “retributive” justice are essentially procedural principles (i.e., how to do things), Jewish justice is essentially substantive (i.e., what human life should be like). Substantive justice depends on an ultimate (i.e., messianic) value commitment. This is also made clear by modern thinkers, such as Hermann Cohen, who regards the just society as the ideal society of universal human dignity and freedom (Ethik des reinen Willens (1904), ch. 15; Religion der Vernunft aus des Quelten des Judentums (1929), ch. 19), and Ch. Perelman, who in his analysis of justice writes: ” … in the end one will always come up against a certain irreducible vision of the world expressing non-rational [though justifiable] values and aspirations” (Perelman, Justice (1967), 54). Although Perelman does not claim to be discussing a particularly Jewish concept of justice, he is aware of the Jewishness of this ethos (cf. W. Kaufmann, in: Review of Metaphysics, 23 (1969), 2I I, 224ff., 236). Justice, in its most profound sense, aims to fully enhance human and, above all, social life. So it suffuses all human relations and social institutions-the state (the commonplace dichotomy between individual and collective responsibility, often illustrated by the contrast between Ex. 20:5 and Ezek. 18, is transcended in the recognition of the dialectical interrelationship between the two, illustrated in Deut. 24:16 alongside Lev. 19:16 (see also Sanh. 73a), and in the contemporary involvement of the individual citizen in the collective actions of his nation). lawcourts (e.g.. 2nd Chron 19:6; Maim. Yad, Sanhedrin, 23:8-10), economics (Lev. 19:36), and private affairs-and, indeed, the single positive ordinance incumbent also on all non-Jews is the establishment of judiciaries (Sanh. 56a).
Justice is not contrasted with love, but rather correlated with it. In rabbinic literature, Jewish philosophy, and Kabbalah, God is described as acting out of the two “attributes of lawfulness and compassion” (PR 5:11. 40:2:
Maimonides, Guide 3: 53).
The critical problem pertaining to justice is that of theodicy: if God is just and rules the world, how can the successes of evil be explained? The problem of theodicy, a recurrent theme in literature, is raised by the Psalmist and is the theme of Job. It is the subject of E. *Wiesel’s story, written in the wake of the Holocaust, in which three rabbis subpoena God to a trial and find Him guilty. In the history of Jewish thought many solutions to the problem have been suggested, among them the essentially neoplatonic notion that evil is privation, i.e., that it is not something positive in itself but merely the absence of good (Guide 3:18-25); the view that evil and suffering constitute trials of the just, or, in rabbinic literature, “afflictions of love,” i.e., that God tests the righteous by causing them to suffer in this world; and the doctrine of reward and punishment in *Olam ha-Ba (Sanh. 90b-92a; Albo, Sefer ha-lkkarim, 1:15).
The rabbis regard Mosesמֹשֶׁה
Meaning of the name: Linguist Abraham Yahuda, based on the spelling given in the Tanakh, argues that it combines “water” or “seed” and “pond, expanse of water,” thus yielding the sense of “child of the Nile” For more info click here as the ideal of strict unbending justice, in contrast to Aaronאַהֲרוֹן
Aaron is an English masculine given name. The ‘h’ phoneme in the original Hebrew pronunciation “Aharon” (אהרן) is dropped in the Greek, Ἀαρών, from which the English form, Aaron, is derived. The brother of Moses, is described in the Torah, the Quran and the Baha’i Iqan. The origin of the biblical name is uncertain; however, an Ancient Egyptian origin may indicate “aha rw” meaning “warrior lion”, For more info click here, who is the prototype of the ideal of peaceשָׁלוֹם
Transliteration šālôm Pronunciation shaw-lome’ shalom – completeness, soundness, welfare, peace, well being, wholeness, prosperity For more info click here, and they interpret the incident of the Golden Calf as exemplifying the problem arising from the clash of these two ideals (cf. Sanh. 6a-7b and parallels). In the same context they suggest that compromise in legal cases may constitute a denial of justice (ibid./.
A reply to, though not a resolution of, the problem of theodicy in our time may be attempted in two directions:
(a) to protest against injustice in the tradition of Jobאִיּוֹב
Transliteration ‘îyôḇ Pronunciation ee-yobe’ Greek: Ἰώβ – Iṓb “hated” . For more info click here, *Honi ha-Me’aggel, and the hasidic leader Levi Isaac of Berdi-chev, which is possible only before a responsible authority, i.e., a just God; (b) to regard justice as a normative, rather than a descriptive, concept, as does Cohen, who writes that “justice maintains the tension between reality and the eternal ideal” (Religion der Vernunji, p. 569). According to this view, justice can be striven for and looked for only in the future-whether the future of mankind as a whole (the days of the Messiah) or of the individual -i.e., in God, whose justice in judgment is affirmed in the blessing recited in the hour of death, “blessed be the just judge.”
Man is obliged to imitate God by acting on the principle of compassionate equity (Micah 6:8; Mak. 24b; BM 30b, 83a), and-at the final consummation of history-justice and mercy become identical
