Another example would be to form an organization that both prosecutes and seeks justice against loan companies that prey on the poor and the elderly with dishonest and exploitive practices. It could also mean respectfully putting pressure on a local police department until they respond to calls and crimes as quickly in the poor part of town as in the prosperous part. Rectifying justice, or mishpat, in our world could mean prosecuting the men who batter, exploit and rob poor women. Therefore, though tzadeqah is primarily about being in a right relationship with God, the righteous life that results is profoundly social. Primary justice, or tzadeqah, is behavior that, if it was prevalent in the world, would render rectifying justice unnecessary, because everyone would be living in right relationship to everyone else. It means punishing wrongdoers and caring for the victims of unjust treatment. These two words roughly correspond to what some have called “primary” and “rectifying justice.” Rectifying justice is mishpat. It is not surprising, then, to discover that tzadeqah and mishpat are brought together scores of times in the Bible. But in the Bible, tzadeqah refers to day-to-day living in which a person conducts all relationships in family and society with fairness, generosity and equity. When most modern people see the word “righteousness” in the Bible, they tend to think of it in terms of private morality, such as sexual chastity or diligence in prayer and Bible study. We get more insight when we consider a second Hebrew word that can be translated as “being just,” though it usually translated as “being righteous.” The word is tzadeqah, and it refers to a life of right relationships. We must have a strong concern for the poor, but there is more to the biblical idea of justice than that. God loves and defends those with the least economic and social power, and so should we. Any neglect shown to the needs of the members of this quartet is not called merely a lack of mercy or charity but a violation of justice, of mishpat. The mishpat, or justness, of a society, according to the Bible, is evaluated by how it treats these groups. Today, this quartet would be expanded to include the refugee, the migrant worker, the homeless and many single parents and elderly people. They lived at subsistence level and were only days from starvation if there was any famine, invasion or even minor social unrest. In premodern, agrarian societies, these four groups had no social power. Over and over again, mishpat describes taking up the care and cause of widows, orphans, immigrants and the poor-those who have been called “the quartet of the vulnerable.” This is why, if you look at every place the word is used in the Old Testament, several classes of persons continually come up. So, for a while there, I didn’t know who was going to shoot me first.” Yet over the years Mark, along with leaders in the community, established a church and a comprehensive set of ministries that have slowly transformed the neighborhood.Īlthough Mark was living a comfortable, safe lives, he became concerned about the most vulnerable, poor and marginalized members of our society, and made long-term personal sacrifices in order to serve their interests, needs and cause. Mark told a reporter, “The police thought I was a drug dealer, and the drug dealers thought I was a police officer. For the first couple of years there, it was touch and go. It had been decades since any white people had moved into Sandtown. When I asked him why, he said simply, “To do justice.” One day we were standing at the copier and he told me that he was about to move into Sandtown, one of the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods in Baltimore. When I was professor at a theological seminary in the mid-eighties, one of my students was a young man named Mark Gornik.
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