Deuteronomy 16

I've been called to jury duty three times in the brief time I've been eligible as a juror. Once, I was notified online that my juror group was not needed. Another time, we sat in the waiting room the whole business day before getting dismissed. Finally, I got to sit through two days of jury selection before once again being dismissed. As you can see, I haven't had a whole lot of exposure to the legal system (and I hope that jury duty is the only real exposure I'll ever get), but I do have an interest in seeing justice meted out properly.

It's all the more infuriating, then, when justice seems perverted or judges seem to show partiality--which verse 19 admonishes against. You'd think that judges in America wouldn't take bribes, but you don't have to look any further than the heinous "kids for cash" atrocity--in which now ex-judges Mark Ciaverella and Michael Conahan accepted kickbacks from juvenile detention centers in return for handing minors outrageously unconscionable sentences. The recent Stanford rape case doesn't involve corruption (at least as far as we know), but it's still ridiculous that the perpetrator (whose name shall not sully this post) only got six months. Little wonder, then, that Judge Aaron Persky, who presided over the case, recently got removed from another sexual assault case.

It's disheartening that, after thousands of years, unscrupulousness and venality still exist in a system that's supposed to be a bastion of morality, but we're all human. Doesn't excuse anything, I know, but it puts into relief how much we need God. I mean, I'm guessing that most people wouldn't disagree with God's tenets of justice in verses 18-20, but unfortunately, selfish desires sometimes get the better of us. I know I should treat everyone with impartial kindness, but sometimes my egocentric tendencies force my irritation to manifest itself.

The Moses nugget in chapter 16 is a little aside he makes in verse 3 when he refers to the unleavened bread as "the bread of affliction." (Technically, the grammatical term for this is an "appositive," a noun that immediately follows and renames/describes another noun.) On one hand, this descriptor is apt because the bread reminds the Israelites of their plight in Egypt and the haste in which they fled. On the other hand, could this be a subtle indication of what Moses thought about the unleavened bread itself? I have had matzah myself, and though I thought it was fine, I can see how one would find it dry and insipid. Better bland than gag-inducing, though.