By
Donald H. Harrison
Today I took a stroll in downtown San Diego past the Edward J. Schwartz Federal
Building and Courthouse, and the nearby Jacob Weinberger U.S. Bankruptcy
Court. Having two federal court houses named after members of our local
Jewish community prompted me to ponder what are the factors leading to our
Jewish love for the law?
And love it we surely must when you consider that of the eight
current U.S. Supreme Court Justices, two of them are Jewish: Ruth Bader Ginsburg
and Steven Breyer. That's 25 percent of the current membership of the Highest
Court, when we are but 2 percent of the overall population! Even if the
U.S. Senate confirms Samuel Alito as the ninth justice, we still will comprise
22 percent of the court's makeup.
We are filled with pride when we recite the names of some of the other Jews who
had served as justices on the court: Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, Felix
Frankfurter, and Arthur Goldberg! Okay, so Abe Fortas we'd like to forget
because of the ethical controversy that surrounded him—but, still, overall,
Jewish justices have set an enviable record.
Although I never heard that Weinberger or Schwartz were religiously
observant—in fact, I somehow doubt that either of them spent long hours on
Saturday afternoons reading pondering the minutiae of the Torah or Talmud—my
guess is that our tradition of studying these books ever so minutely may have
contributed to our people's aptitude for the law.
You read a section of Torah and then you see what various
commentators have to say about this or that sentence. Sometimes the
commentators disagree, and you can almost imagine them, arguing their cases,
thought they may have lived centuries apart. On the one hand, this commentator
said this, but on the other hand, this other commentator said that.
However, argues a third commentator, the arguments of the first two commentators
can be reconciled, if you incorporate into the discussion a notion raised by a
fourth commentator.
How different is this from appearing before the U.S. Supreme Court and arguing
the validity or non-validity of a law based upon precedents and the
Constitution? To the extent that other peoples have not imbued their cultures
with such love of reasoning and philosophical argument, Jews may have a head
start in the study of the law. Where does that head start begin? For
most of us, it begins while studying for a bar/ bat mitzvah—spending month
after month learning not only to read a portion in Hebrew and to sing it with
the proper trop, but also thinking about the portion's meaning both in
its biblical context and in the lesson it provides for our conduct today.
This, I suppose, is the "good news" about why we Jews, as a people,
seem to have such an affinity for the law. The "bad news" is
that we may have become good at the law simply as a matter of self
defense. As a Diaspora people who always were in the minority, always
dependent to some extent on the good will of the majority, it behooved us to
excel at the law. To the extent that the majority had adopted a set of
rules, or laws, for how people and the government must conduct itself, we could
protect ourselves, as a minority, by learning those rules well—if
possible, learning them in all their subtlety and nuances even better than
members of the majority. By such means, we could attempt to persuade
juries, or judges, or magistrates, or administrators that cases should be
decided in our favor not because that would help us, but
rather for the beneficial effect it would have on their system.
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