Seek Justice
By
Leonard Zwelling
Micah 6:8 — “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
Isaiah 1:17 — “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed”
I’ve been thinking a lot about justice lately. Sometimes it helps to go back to the Bible. In this case, I am going back to the only Bible I knew until I read the New Testament as a freshman at Duke, the Old Testament.
The first verse from Micah is so important that a portion of it adorns the bimah (platform) at the front of my synagogue. The second clearly says that those less fortunate are those having the greatest need for justice.
As is my habit lately, I asked my AI buddy Claude to define justice. He gave me a long answer. It included:
Corrective justice-wrongdoers should be held accountable
Distributive justice-“benefits and burdens…should be allocated fairly.” Of course, who decides what is fair?
Procedural justice-processes to get to justice must be impartial
Restorative justice-victims deserve compensation when wronged
Claude ended his definition of justice that it is when, “people get what they are due and that power is not exercised arbitrarily.”
That all sounded reasonable to me.
This story appeared in The New York Times on May 9.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/us/politics/midterm-redistricting-house-map-republicans.html
The piece is all about the gerrymandering of congressional voting districts to give an advantage to one party or the other.
Claude said gerrymandering is “the manipulation (emphasis, mine) of electoral district boundaries to give one political party an unfair advantage over opponents.”
In other words, gerrymandering is innately unjust and that injustice is being actively sought by one party or the other to gain an elective advantage. Gerrymandering is named after Elbridge Gerry who signed a bill to create unfair districts in Massachusetts in 1812, one of which looked like a salamander. Gerrymandering is a direct affront to the principles found in the Hebrew Bible and the definition of justice in Claude. Just because state legislative bodies can pass laws that favor one party by redrawing election districts does not make it right, or consistent with the spirit of the Constitution.
It is shameful that the politicians of both parties indulge in this political mischief and equally shameful that the courts, including the Supreme Court, go along. The obvious solution is to fairly and proportionately allocate voters in approximately equal numbers to relatively square-shaped districts once every ten years after the census and leave these district boundaries alone until the next census. That would be a huge step toward electoral justice and the true representative government that the Founders intended. By the way, I suggest that these districts be drawn by a bipartisan committee of Americans from all walks of life who in turn report to Congress, not the Supreme Court or to the Justice Department, both of which have been severely compromised. Congress is corrupt, too, but at least there are 535 of them and there’s a chance they can be induced to seek justice. I am also okay with having the bipartisan commission report to a group of religious leaders if Congress is not up to the task. Yes, I trust the Pope more than the President of the United States.
Mr. Trump is trampling on justice, too. He seems to have put his faith in a limited number of tech bro billionaires even having one of them, Elon Musk, overhaul the executive branch of the government to the point where it barely functions. Oh really, you say? The federal government needed a haircut, you say? Try calling the IRS, I dare you. And, while you are at it, try getting a federal grant to do your research. What did you think would be cut, the missiles?
Trump’s friends have doubled his wealth using crypto and, undoubtedly, inside information. The entire Trump family has gained tremendously since The Donald’s inauguration including his “impartial” diplomatic negotiators Kushner and Witkoff who have accomplished nothing to date. As I have said before, Middle East peace negotiations with Muslim states is not the job for two Jews.
What the Trump Administration has done with its immigration policies is a horror show of injustice. Yes, it has successfully deported some bad actors, but his foot soldiers, ICE, have killed two Americans and terrorized millions of tax paying people who contribute to the betterment of the country by picking your fruits and vegetables, building your houses, and driving for Uber. How is intimidating them, rather than developing a path toward citizenship for those making meaningful contributions, justice?
It all reminds me of the Joni Mitchell song “Sex Kills” from her 1994 album Turbulent Indigo where she sings, “I look at his license plate, it said ‘Just Ice.’ Is justice just ice?” Or to update that, is justice “just ICE?”
Now the real reason I have been meditating on justice is that I see so little of it at my prior place of employment MD Anderson. I have previously related my experiences with the faculty who I have tried to help who have been treated so badly by powerful vice presidents and department chairs. No justice there.
I believe President Pisters is of the Bill Cosby school of parenting and leading. When we saw Bill Cosby live in Las Vegas in 1982 when he was still respected in America, I believe he told us:
“Parents don’t care about justice. They care about quiet.”
That’s the Pisters formula for dealing with conflict. It is not a formula for success in developing biomedical research talent.
Justice is always in the eye of the beholder. There are always two sides to any dispute. That is why justice is best meted out by wise third parties. Unfortunately, there are few of those in the federal government or at MD Anderson.
Martin Luther King Jr. is often credited with saying, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Claude revealed that it was really borrowed from the abolitionist Theodore Parker circa 1853. President Obama used it in his 2013 inaugural address.
What I question is whether we are living in a moral universe—in our troubled world, in our great but misled country, or at MD Anderson where the moral leadership is virtually absent.
