Courtney Esteves ’19 is taking a new CBL class for second semester seniors entitled, “Seeking Justice.” The class recently read excerpts from Robert Lupton’s “Toxic Charity” as well as Rabbi Sacks’ “To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility.” In response to this week’s class readings, Courtney wrote the following reflection:
There are many different directions in which I could take this reflection, because I so appreciate much of what these readings had to offer! That said, one meaningful connection I drew between Sacks and Lupton is the critical importance of the “joining” or “marriage” of interrelated concepts. For example, Sacks writes that the untranslatable word “tzedakah” “joins together two concepts that in other languages are opposites, namely charity and justice” (32). Lupton offers a similar assessment, but in his case, about justice and mercy. More specifically, Lupton highlights the frequently quoted verse from Micah with his own spin on it — he writes that “Twinned together, these commands (act justly and love mercy) lead us to holistic involvement. Divorced, they become deformed” (41).
I believe both of these points to be at the core of the authors’ arguments. In my own experience, I have come to understand that charity/mercy and justice must be intertwined, reinforcing, and mutually informing for progress to happen. Furthermore, not only must they be intertwined, but their separation may very well cause more harm than good, as Lupton points out. Additionally, another connection I made was in the way Lupton describes mercy as “a door, an opening, an invitation to touch a life, to make a difference. But it is not a destination” (42). This immediately reminded me of Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ’s image of service as the “hallway to the ballroom” and “exquisite mutuality” as the ballroom itself. In justice-oriented efforts, I believe it is critically important to not throw out service or mercy altogether. Rather, it is important to continue service-oriented and mercy-driven initiatives with a critical awareness that these are merely steps along the way to a greater good (justice and exquisite mutuality, for example). And yet, to only vie for justice or exquisite mutuality without participating in the work of service/mercy can also lend itself to issues.
Quite literally, how can we reach the “destination” or the “ballroom” if we do not open the “door” and walk through the “hallway”?
