Red diaper babies and strict justice

Tonight we had Shabbat dinner at my self-declared “red diaper baby” friend’s house. It was his father’s 80th birthday and the only other song we sang beside “Happy Birthday to you…” was The Internationale. Dinner was Indian food and no bracha (blessing) was said over candles or the abundance of wine that flowed.
The guests came from all over my favorite quadrant of the United States, north of Mason-Dixon and east of the Mississippi. There were a lot of teachers present. My friend is a school principle, as am I, and many of his friends and family were teachers or involved with universities. Discussions focused on disappointment with president-elect Obama’s cabinet choices to the need to lead from the center, from history of central and South America to the slave trade and the continuation of racism.
I was literally picked and dragged into the conversation about the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. Of course, this comes in the week that I was spoken about to my Israeli friend, a visiting professor of film from the Open University in Tel-Aviv, as a radical. Little did those who labeled me know that they were speaking with someone with a voting record more radical than me. I have voted for both the left wing Meretz party and the left of center Labor party. My friend, I am told, has voted for Meretz and Chadash, the Arab-Jewish communist party. Regardless, radical is a label I wear proudly, although it saddens me that my very grounded perspective is seen as radical.
In the conversation, my wife took a liberal Israeli position. An older Jewish man took a more tradition, American Jewish position, and another guest took a position that was not supportive of Israel. What bothered me most in the conversation was the centrality of a monolithic understanding of justice.
The person who had the biggest grip with Israel brought everything down to the issue of justice, as if justice were a uniform measuring stick by which we can gage the behaviors of individuals and countries. Justice is anything but monolithic. Very little can be measured against justice because it is not a reified thing which has an absolute value. Justice for Jews is different than justice for Palestinians, in general, and justice for me is different than justice for my wife, also a Jew and an Israeli. As long as we aspire for uniform justice, we will only see injustice in the inequalities left from the absence of strict justice. As it says in the Talmud, “If you seek to have a world, strict justice cannot be exercised; and if you seek strict justice, there will be no world…You can have only one of the two. If you do not relent a little, the world will not endure. (Genesis Rabbah 39:6)”