Tag: adrienne maree brown

The Predator’s Tools

Building communities based on truly transformative justice requires that we strive to “put down the predator’s tools,” according to adrienne maree brown. (We Will Not Cancel Us; more here“). Considering the predator’s tools raises serious misgivings about this week’s Torah portion and many Jewish teachings centering the injunction to pursue “tzedek, tzedek [“justice, justice” or “equity, equity”]. Reflecting on inherited ideas of justice is but one aspect of exploring collapse and the possibility of (re-)building.

This is part of a series on Summer of Collapse.

Updated for more clarity of expression in the “Justice, In/Out of Context” section and addition of “Some History” section below Friday afternoon (8/29/25, around 5 ET)

Justice, In/Out of Context

The Torah portion “Shoftim [Judges]” (Deut 16:18-21:9) is composed of rules about appointing judges and other legal matters. It contains one of the most quoted verses in the Torah, which begins:

tzedek tzedek tirdof…, …צֶדֶק צֶדֶק תִּרְדֹּף
Justice, justice shall you pursue… (JPS 2006)
Equity, equity you are to pursue… (Fox/Schocken 1996)
— Deuteronomy 16:20

Teaching and preaching on this phrase is frequently separated from the context, in both narrow and wider senses.

In one narrow sense, focusing on the phrase alone and not the surrounding verses allows for generalizing the instruction beyond its most likely connection to the previous verse about accepting bribes. On another verse-specific level, many citations of “justice, justice” leave off the second half of the verse, which reads:

וְיָרַשְׁתָּ אֶת־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר־” אֱלֹהֶיךָ נֹתֵן לָךְ׃
…in order that you may live
and possess the land that YHWH your God is giving you! (Fox)
…that you may thrive and occupy the land that your God [YHVH] is giving you. (JPS)

Ignoring the bulk of the verse’s language allows for generalizing the instruction in ways the full verse doesn’t support. These specifics need not invalidate teachings centering “justice, justice.” And it’s essential to note that Torah text never stands on its own in Jewish tradition; it is interpreted and, in many cases, ameliorated by centuries of post-biblical teaching and legal rulings. Still, Shoftim reminds us that our inherited ideas of justice — in- and outside of Judaism — include ideas such as judicial death penalty (Deut 17:2-7), blood-avenging (Deut 19:11-13), “an eye for an eye” (Deut 19:21), and expectations of warfare (Deut 20).

Abolitionist efforts of any kind require serious examination of these and other punitive ideas we’re inherited and a careful look at how they frame our understanding of justice. Alicia Suskin Ostriker offers powerful teachings on the concept of justice and how it relates to Jewish theology — and ideas about the topic, more broadly.

Strange Invention

Decades ago, Ostriker remarked on the “strange invention of the Jews, God’s ‘justice'”:

It is a strange invention of the Jews, God’s “justice.” That God should be “just,” obliged to reward good men who obeyed his laws, care for widows and the poor and so forth, and punish evil ones who didn’t, was not a notion that occurred to the Egyptians, the Canaanites, the Babylonians, the Greeks. We appreciate, if we step back a bit from our theological assumptions, what a peculiar expectation it is that human justice should be intrinsic to a God, and still more odd, that human beings need to remind god about it….

…[God] was waiting for her [Job’s wife, or each of us] to issue her challenge. That is what really happens. God does not know how to be just until the children demand it….

She wants the unjustly slain to be alive and for singing and dance to come to the victims.

We already know what she wants. She wants justice to rain down like waters. She wants adjustment, portion to portion, so that the machinery of the world will look seemly and move powerfully and not scrape and scream. The children of God do not really say that God is just. But they invent the idea. They chew it over and over, holding it up to the light this way and that. And though blood drips from the concept, staining their hands, they are persistent. It is their idea. They want justice to rain down like waters. Justice to rain like waters. Justice to rain. Justice to rain.
–Alicia Suskin Ostriker, The Nakedness of the Fathers, p.232, 239, 240. Full citation below**

Ostriker was not writing from an abolitionist perspective or directly addressing the portion Shoftim. But her words point to important work we need to undertake around some basic concepts.

As we move through this period of collapse and consider which tools can still serve, it’s crucial to “take a step back” from many assumptions, in theology and beyond. As we move through Elul toward the new year, we are called to reflect on how our assumptions, and the structures built on them, contribute to harm and what steps we can take to remedy that.

Some History

For either Ostriker’s 1986 “Imagining of Justice” or the 1994 “Meditation on Justice,” a quick history reminder might be in order:

In the 1980s, gender was generally treated as a binary in- and outside of Judaism. Women’s leadership — or even full personhood — was not yet accepted in many parts of the Jewish world, although women were ordained as rabbis in some US movements beginning in the 1970s.

Keshet (For LGBTQ+ equality in Jewish life) was not founded until 1996 and, as their story reports: “Not too long ago, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Jews were largely invisible in American Jewish life. Marriage equality wasn’t on anyone’s radar — certainly not on the radar of most synagogues and Jewish organizations — and there was not a single gay-straight alliance at a Jewish high school.”

Ostriker’s 1986 statement about being a Jewish woman — “I am and am not a Jew” — made sense across all Jewish movements, at that time, even in the equality-focused Havurah movement. By the time Nakedness of the Fathers was released in 1994, gender equity had advanced in some Jewish spaces; the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance was still years away, however, and issues of gender and sexuality in Judaism still had (have) a long road ahead throughout Judaism.

Keeping this history in mind adds layers to the call to “take a step back” from assumptions. And Ostriker’s reminder that we have to imagine justice — and how it might relate to the divine — couldn’t be more timely…. it was in 1986 and in 1994 and the countless moments I’ve found myself turning to her words over the decades.




** Full citation: “Job, or a Meditation on Justice,” from Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1994.

Here’s a PDF excerpt — “Job, or a Meditation on Justice”

An earlier version (1986), “Job, Or the Imagining of Justice” — originally in The Iowa Review — is available on Academia.edu.

Author bios at Jewish Women’s Archives and Poetry Foundation

Feature image is largely decorative: The words “Whose tools?” and a two-pan balance.

Repentance, Repair, and Cancellation

UPDATE 8/26/25: Congregation Membership and Removal resource page

UPDATE 8/29/25: Typos in copying from We Will Not Cancel Us corrected

Repentance and repair must be year-round efforts, but the Jewish calendar emphasizes these needs as a new year approaches. For help in this work, many Jews turn to a centuries-old, five-step process outlined by Maimonides, AKA “Rambam” (acronym for R‘ Moses ben Maimon):

  • Naming and Owning Harm
  • Starting to Change
  • Restitution and Accepting Consequences
  • Apology
  • Making Different Choices — as outlined by R’ Danya Ruttenberg

This is another in a series on Calendar Notes for a Summer of Collapse.

Beyond some quotations and a few questions, I haven’t got much to offer.

But the questions strike me as non-negotiable, given all we face in- and outside Jewish communities… living in DC and with many friends and family in Chicago, I am so conscious of the disasters coming our way if we cannot figure out how to resist in ways that don’t cause more damage….

Naming Harm and Starting to Change

This year, I am exploring these steps within the “unthinkable thoughts” of adrienne maree brown’s We Will Not Cancel Us:

I’ll start with the scariest unthinkable thought for me, which is that maybe we as a species are in a state of apocalyptic fatigue — exhausted in the face of all the changes and endings we are living through. Our current collective circumstances require us to think about death, to grieve, and to consider that everything we have known has to change or come to an end. [p.33]


I, we, have to be able to discern what is me/us and what is fear.

Which leads to my next unthinkable thought: do I really know the difference between my discernment and my fear? [p.37]


…We are full of justified rage. And we want to release that rage. And one really fast and easy way to do this is what I experience as knee jerk collective punishment in movements. [p.40]


We are afraid, and we think it will assuage our fears and make us safer if we can clarify an enemy, a someone outside of ourselves who is to blame, who is guilty, who is the origin of the harm. Can we acknowledge that trauma and conflict can distort our perspective of responsibility and blame in ways that make it difficult to see the roots of the harm? [p.42-43, emphasis added]


…
The tools of swift predatory justice feel good to use, familiar, groove in the hand easily from repeated use and training, briefly satisfying. But these tools are often blunt and senseless.

Unless we have an analysis of abolition and dismantling systems of oppression, we will not realize what’s in our hands, we will never put the predator’s tools down and figure out what our tools are and can be.

My third unthinkable thought — why does it feel like we are committed to punishment, and enjoying it? Why do our movements more and more often feel like we are moving with sharp teeth against ourselves? And what is at stake because of that pattern, that feeling? Why does it feel like someone pointing at someone else and saying: “that person is harmful!,” and with no questions or process or time or breath, we are collectively punishing them, tearing them, and anyone protecting them, to shreds?

Sometimes we even do it with the language of transformative justice: claiming that we are going to give them room to grow. They need to disappear completely to be accountable. We are publishing shaming them so that they will learn do do better.

Underneath this logic I hear: we are good and we are getting rid of the “bad” people in our community or movement. We are affirming our rightness and power. [p.44-45, emphasis added]


Knee-jerk call outs say: those who cause harm or mess up or disagree with us cannot change and cannot belong. They must be eradicated. The bad things in the world cannot change, we must disappear the bad until there is only good left.

But one layer under that, what I hear is:
We cannot change.
We do not believe we can create compelling pathways from being harm doers to being healed, to growing.
We do not believing we can hold the complexity of a gray situation.
We do not believe in our own complexity. [p.57-58]

— We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice by adrienne maree brown. AK Press, 2020.

Institutional and Movement Repair

The crucial perspectives of We Will Not Cancel Us return me to Rambam’s process, as R’ Ruttenberg describes it: Maimonides discussion of transformation “precedes his discussion of amends/reparations and apologies. He doesn’t spell out his thinking explicitly, but I think he was trying to tell us that apologies, and even amends and reparations, don’t truly have the needed effect if the work to become different isn’t already underway….The goal here isn’t amends. It’s transformation.” p.34, On Repentance and Repair.

One tricky aspect of work here involves our participation in a variety of institutions: “How can and should we think about the work of repentance when not a single person, but a rather a body, made of many actors with different roles is causing harm?…What are the obligations–and limits to the obligations–of the individuals in charge, and what does repentance look like when undertaken by an institution?” p. 101, On Repentance and Repair.

Again, beyond the questions, I haven’t got much to offer. But I believe we have to be asking them. And the questions lead me back to adrienne maree brown:

“I can’t help but wonder who benefits from movements that engage in public infighting, blame, shame, and knee-jerk call outs? I can’t help but see the state grinning, gathering all the data it needs, watching us weaken ourselves. Meanwhile, the conflicts are unresolved, and/or harm continues.” p. 54 We Will Not Cancel Us

congregation membership and removal resource page (added 8/26/25)

Rambam, Ruttenberg, Repentance

Laws of Repentance, a late 12th Century work, is part of the enormous Mishneh Torah and can be found in several translations at Sefaria. (Useful background on Mishneh Torah as a whole). R’ Danya Ruttenberg provides an overview of Rambam’s five steps and explores them in the context of personal, public, institutional, and national repair: On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in An Unapologetic World (Beacon Press, 2022).