The Genesis of Justice (31 page)

There is rarely perfect justice here on earth. There is no complete answer to the question of theodicy
in this world
, even if threats and promises are postponed for many generations.

Moreover, the concept of punishing and rewarding descendants raises troubling moral questions about individual versus familial
or group accountability. It simply isn’t fair to punish an innocent person for another’s sin. This issue first arose when
God punished Adam and Eve, not only by exiling
them
as individuals, but by inflicting painful sanctions on all working men and childbearing women. If the murder of Abel by Cain
is also seen as part of the punishment of their parents, then the life of the innocent Abel was forfeited to avenge a crime
he did not commit.

The flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the slaughter of the entire clan of Shechem are other examples of collective
or familial punishment. The subsequent law books articulate conflicting rules regarding this difficult issue. The Ten Commandments
threaten punishment “to the fourth generation,” while Deuteronomy, thought to be a later work, mandates that “fathers shall
not be put to death for children, neither children be put to death for fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own
sin.” The commentators struggle to reconcile these apparently conflicting texts.
¹⁵
In addition to contradictory rules, we see inconsistent practices throughout the Bible. God commands the destruction of Amalek
throughout the generations for the crimes of one generation. He threatens reprisals on the descendants of sinners and rewards
on the descendants of just people. Sometimes the collective punishment is vertical (down through the generations), other times
it is horizontal (within one generation, but extending to the entire family, clan, or city). Yet paradoxically, God appears
to agree with Abraham that the innocent should not be swept along with the guilty.

Even today we have conflicting attitudes toward parental responsibility for the acts of their children. In the wake of the
shootings at Columbine High School there were calls for expanding the civil and criminal liability of parents. Following the
defeat of Nazi Germany, there were calls for collective sanctions against the German people. But in the end, the decision
was made to punish only those individuals whose guilt could be proved.
¹⁶
The Allies refused to employ the concept of
Sippenhaft
—punishment of kin—which had been widely used by the Nazis.

Eventually Jewish law accepts the
principle
that it is wrong to punish (or reward) anyone for the sins (or good deeds) of another; punishment and reward, if they are
to be just, must be individualized.
¹⁷
This principle, which develops over time, is easier to articulate in theory than to apply in practice. Whenever we punish
an individual for his crimes—by execution, imprisonment, fine, or other sanction—we inflict harm on his innocent family, friends,
associates, employees, and others within his circle. The corollary to this reality is that when we reward an individual for
his good deeds, some of that reward may benefit those who did not themselves earn it. Some degree of collective punishment
and reward may be inevitable in any system of individualized justice, but there is an important difference between systems
in which collective sanctions are an explicit part of the process and those in which they are an inevitable by-product. The
movement from collective responsibility—of the family, the clan, the tribe, the city, the nation, the race, the religion,
and so on—toward individualized responsibility is reflected in the Book of Genesis. It has not been a linear movement in history,
because the emotional pull of collective accountability remains powerful.

Thus, God’s second attempt to assure His followers that there is ultimate justice in this world fails for two reasons, one
empirical, the other moral. Empirically it becomes clear, once recorded history is developed, that descendants do not necessarily
reap what their ancestors have sown. Morally we are troubled by a system of justice that relies on vicarious accountability.
So the theologians of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had to accept the solution offered by other religions—namely, a world
to come in which the righteous are rewarded and the unrighteous punished. Justice would indeed be served, but in a world no
human could see and from which no human could return or report. An elegant solution to an otherwise insoluble problem.

The sharp difference between the earthly promises and threats of the early books of the Bible and the otherworldly punishments
and threats of the talmudic commentators is beautifully illustrated by a chilling story about a second-century rabbinic sage
named Elisha, the son of Abuyah, who became a disbeliever after he saw, with his own eyes, that one of God’s most explicit
promises was not kept. Tradition has it that Elisha was studying on Sabbath in the valley of Gennesar when he saw an evil
man climb to the top of a palm tree and take a mother bird along with her young. He thus violated two commandments: to keep
the Sabbath and to send away the mother bird. Yet nothing happened to him. After the Sabbath, Elisha saw a young boy climbing
a tree to retrieve some bird eggs. His father instructed him to send away the mother, and the young boy did so, thus obeying
the two commandments, which explicitly promise long life. Yet as soon as he descended the tree, the good boy was bitten by
a snake and killed. Rabbi Elisha cried out against this betrayal: “There is no justice, and there is no judge.”
¹⁸

According to the tradition, Rabbi Akiva—the greatest sage of his time—responded to Rabbi Elisha’s apostasy by explaining that
despite the seeming explicitness of the text, the promise of a long and good life is not in this world, but rather “in the
world to come,” which is “wholly good” and “whose length is without end.”
¹⁹
It is also, of course, a world invisible to those on earth, and thus any promise or threat involving this world is not subject
to observation or verification.

The story of Rabbi Elisha is telling for a number of reasons. No rational person would believe a promise of reward and punishment
in this world, where the young die, the righteous are punished, and the unrighteous are rewarded—all in plain view of everyone.
Rabbi Elisha was the reasonable skeptic, believing his own eyes and concluding that the first mechanism of biblical sanction—immediate
consequences here on earth—was demonstrably false. Ecclesiastes recognized the injustice of life and the emptiness of death
yet accepted God. King David blinded himself to the injustice of life by declaring that he had never seen a “righteous person
abandoned or his children wanting for bread.”
²⁰
But those who did not live as privileged kings saw a real world full of iniquity. As a result, Judaism had to accept the
prevailing view of other—sometimes competing—religions of the day. The sages searched the sources, particularly the prophetic
writings, and declared that despite the pregnant silence of the Pentateuch, there
is
life after death, with reward and punishment. Rabbi Eleazor was certain that “wherever there is not judgment [below] there
is judgment [above].”
²¹
Maimonides elaborated on this theme and attempted to reconcile the world to come with the rather explicit language of the
Bible specifying earthly punishments and rewards:

Hence, all those benedictions and maledictions promised in the Torah are to be explained as follows: If you have served God
with joy and observed His way, He will bestow upon you those blessings and avert from you those curses, so that you will have
leisure to become wise in the Torah and occupy yourselves therewith, and thus attain life hereafter, and then it will be well
with you in the world which is entirely blissful and you will enjoy length of days in an existence which is everlasting. So
you will enjoy both worlds, a happy life on earth leading to the life in the world to come. For if wisdom is not acquired
and good deeds are not performed here, there will be nothing meriting a recompense hereafter, as it is said, “For there is
no work, no device, no knowledge, no wisdom in the grave” (Ecclesiastes 9:10). But if you have forsaken the Lord and have
erred in eating, drinking, fornication, and similar things, He will bring upon you all those curses and withhold from you
all those blessings till your days will end in confusion and terror, and you will have neither the free mind nor the healthy
body requisite for the fulfillment of the commandments so that you will suffer perdition in the life hereafter and will thus
have lost both worlds—for when one is troubled here on earth with diseases, war or famine, he does not occupy himself with
the acquisition of wisdom or the performance of religious precepts by which life hereafter is gained.
²²

Thus the narrative of justice, so demonstrably false here on earth, can be continued in a world whose existence no one can
disprove. Hence the leap of faith, without which traditional religion becomes impossible.

Judaism, which is based on a covenant between God and His people, could not easily endure without a world to come in which
God could keep His promises out of the view of humankind. In the mortal world, God’s promises—long life, defeat of enemies—are
repeatedly broken. As the tenth-century sage Saadia Gaon put it hopefully, if not somewhat desperately: “In this world we
see the godless prosper and the faithful suffer. There
must
, therefore, be another world in which all will be recompensed in justice and righteousness.” A contemporary evangelist made
the same point in a recent television appearance concerning the murder of innocent children. The Reverend Robert Schuller
insisted that there
has to be
an afterlife with eternal justice.
²³
This is a common religious reaction to inexplicable tragedy. A variation on this theme is presented by a prominent Conservative
rabbi, speaking in the political language of our times: “The world to come is a form of protest against a wretched status
quo in which poverty, illness, and wars crush the human body and soul.”
²⁴

A poignant Yiddish story by the nineteenth-century writer I. L. Peretz illuminates the need for an afterlife in a wretched
world of poverty and oppression. A man named Bontsha has lived the most horrible of lives—poverty, sickness, parental abuse—but
never complained, either to God or to his fellow man. His death goes unnoticed on earth. The board marking his grave is blown
away. In heaven, however, his arrival is greeted with great ceremony. Even the prosecuting angel can find nothing bad to say
about him. The divine Judge pronounces His decree for Bontsha:

There in that other world, no one understood you. … There in that other world, that world of lies, your silence was never
rewarded, but here in Paradise is the world of truth, here in Paradise you will be rewarded. … For you there is not only one
little portion of Paradise, one little share. No, for you there is everything! Whatever you want! Everything is yours!

Bontsha smiles for the first time and speaks: “Well then, what I would like, Your Excellency, is to have, every morning for
breakfast, a hot roll with fresh butter.”
²⁵

This Yiddish story is an elaboration of the New Testament’s promise “The meek shall inherit the earth” and the rich will have
difficulty making it into heaven. The scales will be balanced, the playing field leveled, and justice achieved. Those who
were despised on earth for their virtues shall flourish in the world to come. That is the leap of faith the Abrahamic religions
can offer to offset the obvious injustice of this cruel world.

But not all the sages have been prepared to make the leap of faith from the injustice of this world to the perfection of the
next. Rabbi Judah Low, the great scholar of Prague, took a more rationalist view in the sixteenth century: “A foundation of
religion cannot be something that is not discernible to experience.” That is why, he surmised, the Torah “avoided the hereafter.”
Other commentators have suggested that the generation of Jews who left Egypt were not ready to accept an afterlife, perhaps
because they had suffered so much from the Egyptian obsession with the world to come. So the oral tradition “discovered” it
when the Jews were ready for it.

A midrash, written after rabbinic Judaism accepted the afterlife, has Jacob and Esau debating this issue in the context of
Esau’s selling of his birthright:

Esau: “Is there a future world? Or will the dead be called back to life? If it were so, why hath not Adam returned? Hast thou
heard that Noah, through whom the world was raised anew, hath reappeared? Yea, Abraham, the friend of God, more beloved of
Him than any man, hath he come to life again?”

Jacob: “If thou art of opinion that there is no future world, and that the dead do not rise to new life, then why dost thou
want thy birthright? Sell it to me, now, while it is yet possible to do so. Once the Torah is revealed, it cannot be done.
Verily, there is a future world, in which the righteous receive their reward. I tell thee this, lest thou say later I deceived
thee.”
²⁶

The discovery of an afterlife, which neatly solves all the problems of theodicy, made it unnecessary for God to continue to
threaten or promise consequences in relation to future generations. Punishing and rewarding future generations may be necessary
in a world that includes no intimation of an afterlife, because sometimes it is simply not enough to threaten the life of
a sinner, especially when he is old and near death.
²⁷
More severe punishment may be needed. A God who can threaten eternal damnation and promise eternal salvation does not need
to threaten a sinner’s children or promise reward for the descendants of the righteous.

In one sense, threats and promises to be carried out against future generations are the
functional equivalent
of threats and promises to be carried out in the hereafter: Both are unseen by the sinner or saint; both provide answers
to those who see sinners rewarded and saints punished in their lifetimes. In a world in which punishment and reward are bestowed
on future generations, it is possible to believe in divine justice—at least for a while—despite the obvious empirical evidence
to the contrary. Maybe
this
sinner has not been punished, but his descendants will surely be punished for him—if not in the first or second generation,
then sometime in the future. Similarly, in a world in which punishment and reward are bestowed on the sinners themselves,
but in the invisible hereafter, it is possible to believe, despite evidence that in this world sinners are often rewarded
and saints punished. Maybe he has gotten away with it
here
, but just wait until he reaches the pearly gates. Both the indeterminate future rewards and punishments for descendants here
on earth and the promise of salvation and purgatory in the hereafter share an invisibility to the generation witnessing injustice,
and invisibility permits faith to overcome empirical doubt.