"I can remember one of my teachers, Abraham Joshua Heschel, telling us that Plato and Aristotle would have laughed at the prophet Isaiah. How petty to be concerned about one widow being cheated, one poor man starving. Worry instead about the idea of Justice, the definition of equality, they would have told him. But the reader of the Bible is told that the abstract concept of Justice is meaningless unless it is translated into the lives of every citizen." Harold Kushner, To Life
There seems to be many battle cries these days for justice, for equality. The phenomenon is to be applauded as it awakens us to the disparity, desperateness and brokenness of our world. It is easy to get caught up with the big ideas of justice and equality and their grand (and sometimes subversive) rhetoric. But such ideas are at best abstract and the rhetoric needlessly grandiose unless we draw from them the desire to affect indidual lives, to help in concrete ways. Otherwise, we are merely caught up with phenomena of the day, feeling self-righteous and becoming contemptuous of others who are not as caught up with the wave.
[The LORD your God] executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. - Deuteronomy 20:18
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause. - Isaiah 1:16-17
Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. - James1.27
