by Susan Lubeck, PJA Interim Bay Area Regional Director
J Weekly
July 15, 2010

Read the article at JWeekly.com


It has long been custom that, on Tisha B’Av (the ninth day of the month of Av), the Jewish community mourns. Reading from the Book of Lamentations, we remember the destruction of the First Temple, the Second Temple and the devastation caused by our repeated exile — whether from Jerusalem, Spain, Russia or Iran.

Traditionally on Tisha B’Av, which falls on Tuesday, July 20 this year, we turn inward to mourn. This year, however, we have an opportunity to look outward and mourn the tragic inequities of our criminal justice and law enforcement systems that are symbolized by the death of Oscar Grant.

Last week, a Los Angeles jury delivered its verdict in the case of former BART police officer Johannes Mehserle, a 28-year-old white man, who was accused of killing Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old African American man, on Jan. 1 2009. The defense argued that Mehserle meant to pull and use his Taser, and that he realized he had pulled his gun only after firing a single shot into the back of Grant — unarmed, a father, a son.

Some believe the criminal justice system functioned: The officer was accused and brought to trial, questions of his innocence were weighed, and he was judged guilty of an appropriate crime, involuntary manslaughter. Many see yet another miscarriage of justice, another instance in a series of seemingly endless examples of punishment distributed unequally depending on the skin color of the accused and the victim.

Still others may say, “How can we consider this a tragedy? Why should we privilege the death of one human being with our communal mourning?”

The answer is multi-layered. We call attention to this killing for the same reason the deaths of Emmet Till and Matthew Shepard called our attention to evils of Jim Crow laws and anti-gay hate crimes. Till was a black 14-year-old from Chicago who was murdered in a small Mississippi town after reportedly whistling at a white woman in 1955, and Shepard was a 21-year-old gay college student tortured and murdered in 1998 in Wyoming.

In 2010, we call attention to the Grant death and the Mehserle verdict because the impacts of an unequal criminal justice system are extreme.

If current trends continue unchecked, one of every three black men will go to prison in their lifetime, according to a 2009 document about racial injustices in the criminal justice system prepared for the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.

Mass incarceration that disproportionately impacts people of color is expensive, both financially and morally. John Thomasian, director of the National Governors Association’s Center for Best Practices, says that the rising cost of incarceration is “sucking the wind out of any discretionary funding” states had. According to “Classrooms or Prison Cells?” — an article in Newsweek last month, “the cost of keeping an inmate behind bars for a year [in California] is about $52,000, similar to the cost of tuition, room, and board at Stanford.”

Another answer is that, as Jews, we are called specifically to concern ourselves with justice for all. The prophet Jeremiah, calling on Jews to find peace in the diaspora by caring for the larger society in which they then lived, exhorted Jews to “work for the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you — for in its well-being you will find your well-being.”

Leviticus 19 commands us to “love thy neighbor as thyself” a Biblical articulation that Hillel found to be the central truth of Torah. Repeatedly, the text calls “justice, justice, shall ye pursue” (tzedek, tzedek, tirdof) and reminds us that we once were strangers, slaves and outcasts in the land of Egypt.

In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. expanded on this notion: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

In other words, we are our brother’s keeper.

Tisha B’Av calls on us to understand ourselves as part of this fabric of society, to understand our well-being is linked to the well-being of all.

Through Tisha B’Av, we can open ourselves to what may seem overwhelming, mourn it, and move forward — by informing ourselves about what we do not understand, engaging in service, and getting involved in advocacy or organizing.

Whatever your Tisha B’Av practice, we invite you to reflect upon the acts of kindness and consciousness, big and small, that can move our cities toward justice and healing — tikkun ha’ir, tikkun olam — and to take those steps, because the Oscar Grants of the world deserve nothing less.


Susan Lubeck is the Berkeley-based interim Bay Area regional director for the Progressive Jewish Alliance.