There is a delightful tale from Afghanistan of a Jew who went out into the world in order to fulfill the commandment, “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” The man was certain that somewhere justice must exist, so he spent his life searching for it. He visited faraway villages, great cities, fields and farms, but still justice eluded him. In a forest he came upon the hovels of poor peasants, hideaways of thieves, and the huts of witches. Yet despite the danger lurking in these dark places, the man went on searching, certain of one day finding justice.
One day the man came upon a small clay hut that looked as if it were about to collapse. Inside it was filled with flickering flames. The man pushed the door open and came upon many shelves of many candles. The candles occupied the shelves from floor to ceiling and together they were like a constellation of stars. Stepping closer, the man noticed that some of the flames with thick wicks burned very slowly while others were sputtering and burning quickly.
In time a man in a white robe came out and greeted the Jewish traveler.
“What are you looking for?” he asked.
“I have traveled everywhere searching for justice, but never have I seen anything like this. Why are they burning?”
The old man spoke softly: “Know that these are soul-candles, as it is written, ‘The soul of man is the candle of God’ (Prov. 20:27). Each candle is the soul of a living person. As long as it burns the person remains alive. But when it burns out, the person departs from this life.”
The man asked if he could see his own candle and when he saw it, he started to shiver. His candle burned in a small, rusty tin which had only a small quantity of oil left. Its wick listed to one side and was already starting to smoke.
The old man left the room and an evil thought entered the traveler’s mind: he would take the oil from another candle and pour it into his tin. But just then, he felt a strong grip on his arm. “Is this the kind of justice you are seeking?” the old man asked him. And then the man found himself alone in the forest again, aimless, forced to contemplate his fate.
I am always struck by the searing irony of this story from the oral tradition of Afghan Jewry. On the one hand, there is a man who appears so pious that he sets out, quite literally, to pursue justice. On the other hand, after a life of searching for it far and wide, it turns out that the only time he encounters it is in the powerful tokhekah [rebuke] that is directed at himself.
The traveler for justice needn’t have traveled anywhere. He needed only to have gone inside his own soul where he would have found a yetzer, an impulse, of selfishness that pushed him to place himself before others. There also he would have discovered an impulse that moved him to search for justice as an observer rather than to create it as an activist. Surrendering to those impulses, he forfeited the claim of truly pursuing justice.
Or did he? For with his few drops of oil remaining, maybe the man finally did some great act of justice rather than just looking for it. Maybe, as the Israelites learned only after forty years in the wilderness, he too had finally attained a “heart to know, eyes to see, and ears to hear” (Deut. 29:3). Maybe, finally, he attained the wisdom, knowledge, and understanding to appreciate the essence of being a rodef tzedek, a pursuer of justice.
Even so, it is hard to escape feeling sad at the outcome all the same. All his life the man appreciated the ideal of justice. But only at the end of his life did his heart come to know it. What a waste. How much more he could have done if his heart had known what his mind had been chasing after. How much good he could have done had he acted rather than pondered, created rather than uncovered. Justice is a thing to be actively willed, not to be impassively discovered.
A few weeks ago, I toured a Landmine Museum near Siem Reap, Cambodia. It was there I heard the remarkable story of Aki Ra, the museum’s founder. From the age of seven or eight, Aki Ra was conscripted as a child soldier by the Khmer Rouge. A skilled marksmen, Aki Ra killed many people in battle and became an expert at laying mines. The many mines he laid were responsible for an untold number of casualties. Encountering someone who lost an arm, a leg, their hearing, or their eyesight to a landmine is an everyday sight in Cambodia today.
Yet somewhere along the way, after defecting from the Khmer Rouge, Aki Ra realized the incredible carnage that his mine-laying had caused. He started to seek out mines and disarm them, doing so with no helmet, no flak jacket, no body armor–just his hands and a stick. Soon it became his life’s work to the point that he has singlehandedly disarmed some 50,000 landmines and established a museum and boarding school for needy (sometimes injured and orphaned) children and teenagers. Having acquired eyes that see, ears that hear, and a heart that knows, this is how Aki Ra pursues justice today.
We know today that neither miracles (for the Israelites) nor justice (for the man seeking it, or for Aki Ra) are natural, inevitable phenomena. Each one requires not seeking, but doing; not just reading, but writing and speaking and making and engaging. And so, with seeing eyes, hearing ears, and knowing hearts, let us act.
(My telling of the story is adapted from Howard Schwartz, “The Cottage of Candles” in The Tree of Souls.)
John Franken is the Rabbi at Bolton Street Synagogue in Baltimore, where he has been active on issues of food insecurity, gun violence, and marriage equality. He is an alumnus of HUC-JIR is a T’ruah #TomatoRabbi.
