The biblical prophets as lawyers for the poor.

• Author: Shaffer, Thomas L.
• Position: Religious Values and Poverty Law: Clients, Lawyers and Communities

"[T]his is the fast I desire: To unlock the fetters of wickedness, And untie the cords of the yoke To let the oppressed go free; To break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, And to take the wretched into your home; When you see the naked, to clothe him, And not to ignore your own kin."

Isaiah 58:6-7 ***

I have been pondering, for more than a year, a report in the New York Times of an interview with a well-dressed young man encountered on a sidewalk in New York. (1) He could have been one of my students, a year or two out, working for one of the big law firms, "[t]rudging on time to a tidy fortune." (2) I ponder him as if he were.

I ponder over the fact that this evidently prosperous, successful, young man said he was unhappy. He did not blame "the system" he serves for his unhappiness; he did not even blame his parents. (3) "There's no one to blame," he said. "There's no scapegoat." (4) What is missing from his life, he said, "is role models or mentors." (5) He said he wished he could be an apprentice to "some wise old man, and I would follow in his footsteps." (6) His comments made me remember the "role models" and mentors we were told about when I was a law student half a century ago, and those we might talk about now to our students and to our children.

In law school in the late 1950s, we were given as exemplars lawyers who were prepared to represent their enemies. They stood bravely for the adversary ethic: John Adams, who defended the British soldiers who shot down colonial Americans in Boston; the United States Army lawyers who defended General Yamashita after World War II; Thomas More, who said, in Robert Bolt's play, that he would give the Devil the benefit of the law. (7) White, male saints they were--all of them standing for the proposition that everybody is entitled to a lawyer. Our exemplars, as I went through law school, stood for that ideal. Consequently, my clients have included a Nazi, a child rapist, and General Motors.

I went to a Catholic law school, and thus I linger over St. Thomas More. In 1931, when More's statue was put above the door of the new law building at Notre Dame, he was the symbol of immigrant American defiance of the Protestants. It was not important then for law students to talk about More's personal qualities: He stood not as a "role model" but as a symbol of the Catholic alternative to American public education--where the Bible was always the King James Version and America's state religion was the Protestant, democratic order. (8)

By the time I was a law student in 1958, More had become a lawyer saint as well as a Catholic saint. But we did not learn any more about his personal qualities than our forebears had learned in the 1930s; we learned that the King had him beheaded and that More was brave in the face of death. Frank Sheed, a prominent lay Catholic writer of that era, surveyed all of the saints available for imitation by Catholic lawyers and decided More was not useful as a mentor, because, Sheed said, More was a saint only because he was a martyr; the British killed him.

Then I was hired to be the only Catholic in an Indianapolis law firm that was all male, all white, all Protestant: no Jews, no blacks, no women, and, until me, no Catholics. Robert Bolt's play "A Man for All Seasons" was popular, especially among lawyers who, thanks to Bolt, were finally paying attention to More's personal qualities. Bolt's play made More a quadruple-threat lawyer-saint. He was four-times over a saint for all lawyers, even Jews and Protestants: (i) "a hero of selfhood," as Bolt described him; (9) (ii) a hero of the American adversary ethic like John Adams and the Army lawyer--she would, for the right retainer, give the Devil the benefit of the law; (10) (iii) a saint for American civil religion, a saint whose religion was private--as religion in America is supposed to be--and eccentric; (iv) a saint who showed, with wit and with his life, how law is about power.

More is a religious figure--even in the play--and he is a saint. He might, on deeper and more thoughtful analysis, be a prophet, but by the time Bolt and lawyers and law teachers got through with him, he was not much of a prophet. He was a martyr who did his best to avoid martyrdom by keeping his mouth shut and his head down: "If [God] suffers us to fall to such a case that there is no escaping, then we may stand to our tackle as best we can ... [but our] natural business lies in escaping." (11) He was not angry; he was cool. With such baggage, I doubt that More was a prophet in the biblical sense, despite the prophetic tone of his private statements to his daughter, his son-in-law, and his friend Norfolk.

The possibility that Thomas More was a prophet is suggested, if you can manage to extract him from American civil religion and focus on the last scene in the play, when he finally goes public. (12) That suggestive possibility makes me wonder whether the biblical prophets might be "role models" in a way that goes beyond the adversary ethic, selfhood, civil religion, and the idolatrous temptation of legal power. Putting Thomas More aside, looking to the Bible, going with that word "prophet"--maybe the Hebrew prophets can teach us about law and about poverty in a way the adversary-ethic heroes cannot. Maybe then, also, along the way, on the sidewalks of New York, the prophets are examples and mentors for our young colleagues in ways Thomas More and John Adams are not.

Maybe so; but it is a perilous suggestion. It sounds "off the wall," for one thing, and beyond the bizarre--or maybe because of the bizarre--it is scary. It would be fearful to be a prophet--lawyer in modern America, "exposing to people the underlying causes of all the wounding in this world," as Sister Joan Chittister puts it.(13) Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, "Carved over the gates of the world in which we live is the escutcheon of the demons.... Our lot is that we must face that world." (14) Prophetic recruiting literature is not as appealing as recruiting literature for the Marine Corps.

Rabbi Heschel said: "The prophet faces a coalition of callousness and established authority," (15) as she faces those who oppress the poor. The prophet "undertakes to stop a mighty stream with mere words.... [T]he purpose of prophecy is to conquer callousness ... to revolutionize history." (16) Jawdat Said, Islamic scholar, said the prophets "changed a civilization not by destroying a tyrant, but by refusing to obey his evil demands and calling him to the good.... [T]hey did so through a persuasive transforming social movement without the use of violence...." (17) I wonder if that agenda--subversion with mere words and refusal to obey evil demands--would have appealed to the young man on the sidewalk in New York, the one I imagine to be a lawyer.

If so, and if he proposes to imitate the people Sister Joan, Rabbi Heschel, and Mr. Said were talking about, he should be warned further: The biblical prophets were scary because they were really angry. They talked "one octave too high." (18) They were noisy and troublesome, not only because they were angry about injustice but also because they aimed to alarm and change people. Still, they were more lawyers than intellectuals or theologians or scholars. (19) They were lawyers for the poor, most of them, and in peril, always in peril. They saw the peril from the beginning; few of them wanted to be prophets. Moses said he could not be a prophet because he had a speech defect. (20) Isaiah said he was a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips. (21) Jonah ran and hid. (22) And, as if the escutcheon of the demons were not enough, the prophets were followers of a strange, grumpy, even abusive, God. Moses was denied the Promised Land after a lifetime of painful leadership. (23) In Jewish tradition, his aged mother got to go there but all three of her children died on the way.

The stories of the Hebrew prophets are usually tragic--not in the Greek sense, but in the Jewish sense: suffering creates the meaning of the prophetic story, and, at the end, that meaning will triumph over power. The prophets believe and practice tragedy in that biblical sense. (24) The biblical images are not images of triumph. The images on the way to meaning are Israel in slavery, captivity, misery, and, for Christians, the Cross. The images are dark.

In the Bible, the Lord calls the prophet. God pushes and threatens and then achieves divine purpose through disgrace and death. The Lord said to Jeremiah, "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born ... I appointed you prophet.... They will fight against you; but they will not prevail against you for I am with you...." (25) We are perhaps allowed to ponder what "prevail" means, as we think of Jeremiah, first thrown into a well and, then when he did not die there, as he should have, carted off to Egypt to die there--as a martyr, tradition says. (26) The Lord would not let Moses, after all he had to endure, enter the Promised Land. (27) Elijah, who got beyond himself, had to be whisked away. (28) He was not even allowed to die. The prophet Jesus was tortured to death. (29) Dr. King went to Memphis in support of people who pick up garbage, and he died there. Violently and tragically, as did Gandhi and Robert Kennedy--who were both lawyers for poor people. These are all stories, we believers say, or should say, of the triumph of meaning over power. Triumph, certainly we believe that. But it is an odd kind of triumph. Scripture is grim recruiting literature.

There is a midrash in the Talmud, about Moses and the Talmudic sage Rabbi Akiba. (30) Moses listens to a lecture on Torah by Rabbi Akiba; the Rabbi tells his students that he is speaking of the Torah Moses received on Mount Sinai. Moses does not understand what the Rabbi is talking about--although he can tell that what the Rabbi is saying is very impressive. (31) Moses asks the...