The Genesis of a Famed Attorney’s Passion for Justice

“Would you give a young person a book whose heroes cheat, lie, steal, murder--and get away with it?” asks Alan M. Dershowitz in his provocative book of modern biblical exegesis, “The Genesis of Justice.” “Chances are you have. The book, of course, is Genesis.”

Ever the controversialist, Dershowitz dares to speak out loud about one of the uncomfortable truths of the Judeo-Christian tradition--unlike the New Testament or the Koran, where God is always great and his prophets are always perfect, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible are crowded with men and women whose behavior is shocking and scandalous.

“The characters in the Jewish Bible--even its heroes--are all flawed humans,” Dershowitz points out. “The tradition of human imperfection begins at the beginning, in Genesis. Even the God of Genesis can be seen as an imperfect God, neither omniscient, omnipotent, nor even always good.”

To make sense of the moral ambiguities that he finds, Dershowitz rereads 10 of the most troubling tales in Genesis, ranging from the world’s first recorded murder mystery--the story of Cain and Abel--to the act of revenge that Joseph exacted upon the brothers who sold him into slavery in Egypt. And he reasons out the sometimes obscure moral instruction that can be glimpsed in stories of trickery, betrayal, rape, murder and mayhem that fill the pages of Genesis.

What makes “The Genesis of Justice” so refreshing is Dershowitz’s insistence on looking beneath and beyond the passages of Holy Writ where biblical law is presented in all of its abundance, complexity and density. All of Leviticus, for example, and much of Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy are law codes. Genesis, by contrast, is a storybook. And yet it is in the most compelling tales of the Bible that Dershowitz looks for and finds not only the roots of Western jurisprudence but the very spark that ignites the passion for justice that is the burning heart of the Bible.

Thus, for example, Dershowitz recalls how, as a student in an Orthodox day school in the ‘40s and ‘50s, he puzzled over God’s harsh punishment of Adam and Eve for eating the forbidden fruit at a moment when they still lacked knowledge of good and evil, God’s willingness to kill the innocent along with the guilty in the Flood as well as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and God’s demand that Abraham sacrifice his son. “These and other stories of justice and injustice had a powerful effect on my young mind,” writes Dershowitz. “They encouraged me to view the world in a skeptical and questioning manner. If Abraham could challenge God, surely I could challenge my teachers.”

Indeed, Dershowitz’s account of how Abraham argued with God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah shows how deeply he identifies with the role of the defense attorney: “Abraham Defends the Guilty--and Loses” is the piquant title he has given to the chapter. He points out that God and Abraham entered into a covenant--a contract--and “a contract bestows rights on both parties.” Just as Abraham was willing to confront God, Dershowitz argues, Jews “have been demanding an answer from their contracting partner” throughout their long history, “from the destruction of the Temples to the pogroms . . . and especially the Holocaust.”

Dershowitz treats the biblical texts and Rabbinic commentaries with care and respect, but he does not hesitate to point out that the biblical promise of “ultimate justice” is strictly “a matter of faith, not of proof.” He confesses to his own rage at the fact that Nazi war criminals go unpunished even as their victims cry out for retribution. “The Book of Proverbs categorically assures its believers to ‘be sure of this: the wicked will not go unpunished, but those who are righteous will go free,’ ” he writes, “but no one with eyes, ears and mind can be sure of that, since they experience its opposite every day.”

Nowadays, Dershowitz can hardly be avoided on the television screens and op-ed pages of America, and we can count on seeing his amiable grin on CNBC almost any night of the week, chatting with Geraldo Rivera about O.J. Simpson, JonBenet Ramsey or Monica Lewinsky. Now, thanks to “The Genesis of Justice,” we are given an insight into the inner workings of his conscience and the home truths that prompt him to speak out so freely and so boldly. Like an Old Testament prophet, Dershowitz is afire with a passion for what he calls “perfect justice,” even as he concedes that it is rarely found here on Earth.

“The wonderful stories of Genesis,” affirms Dershowitz, “leap into my mind whenever I think about contemporary issues of justice and injustice, as if they are hard-wired into my consciousness.”

Jonathan Kirsch is the author of “Moses: A Life” and “King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel,” forthcoming this fall.