This is good music. What is missing is only the words. There are to be sure plenty of words, but only inside the metaphor. Outside the metaphor, we are left with your feeling about what to do, but no actual example, illustration or even speculation about how to do it. The one route to significant improvement of this very accomplished draft is to cut somewhat the Plato and the middlebrow music (both of which no doubt have their place, albeit a smaller one) in order to reflect on what this might operationally mean for your lawyering.

Justice as Transfiguration of Trauma

-- By CharlesSucher - 10 Mar 2017

"And that human virtue is justice?

To be sure.

Then men who are injured are of necessity made unjust?

That is the result.

But can the musician by his art make men unmusical?

Certainly not.

Or the horseman by his art make them bad horsemen?

Impossible.

And can the just by justice make men unjust, or speaking in general can the good by virtue make them bad?"

The Republic, by Plato.

Historical Trauma

Jews are no stranger to trauma. It pervades our history. I am, myself, a product of this historical trauma. I exist because my grandfather's original family—his first wife and child—were chosen for the gas chamber at Auschwitz. My grandfather, and his later wife (my grandmother,) were spared, because they could work. Mercy was granted to them as tools in a grand machine of injustice. This legacy of trauma has left me and other descendants of the Holocaust with an intractable question: what justice can we cultivate as the product of pure, unbridled injustice?

My family, like so many others, struggles to answer this question. We have fought our battles with disassociation and righteous resentment—vindictiveness towards those who are perceived as doing us wrong in our own time. The Nazis embody our trauma, but they are a mere metonym for a long historical cycle of injustice. And in my place within this cycle, I am convinced that wounds do not heal through further pain, just as good cannot emerge from bad.

With the luxury of distance from this trauma, I have the privilege—bordering on comfortable vanity—of believing I can discover a just answer. I've studied history: remembering the names of each concentration camp, learning the death toll of the Holocaust, and reading about the conditions that allowed the Nazis to rise. And I've read philosophical treatises, where thinkers like Plato have struggled with the same question in their own time. These endeavors have surely helped. But they are not enough. They teach the ugliness of injustice—but I seek to make it beautiful.

Mellifluous Empathy

In addition to their trauma, I inherited my family's love of music. My grandfather reportedly saw Fiddler on the Roof over twenty-five times. It helped healed his wounds—and listening to music and attending musical theater has helped to heal mine. However, I prefer Cabaret, because it is a more universal tale of trauma. I'm drawn to one scene—and one song—in the show: Tomorrow Belongs to Me. It's jarring for the progeny of Holocaust survivors to experience a thrill from a triumphant Nazi anthem, sung by those who caused the slaughter of one's family. The song is an epiphany of the musical's dramatic tension, as it captures the conditions that gave rise to injustice in Germany and the state of mind of the people who allowed it to happen. The song illustrates the injustice of that time, but also the dissociation and resentment that gave birth to it. Tomorrow Belongs to Me presents a diverse set of ordinary Germans at a beer garden, weary of destitution and trauma in the Weimar Republic, rising triumphantly, singing a redolent tune of natural destiny: the justice the Nazis offered those traumatized souls.

It is no surprise that modern neo-Nazi rock bands appropriated Tomorrow Belongs to Me for their own use. The song transfigures an ugly history in a stirring melody, beautiful aesthetic, and a hopeful message. When I first saw Cabaret and heard this song, I understood what was most attractive Nazi ideology. I touched the passionate, emotional populist stirrings roused by this moving anthem.

This is ironic, because Tomorrow Belongs to Me was written by an American Jewish, gay songwriting team. Somehow, John Kander and Fred Ebb, managed to capture the phenomenology of being a Nazi as well as the Nazis themselves. There are some arts injustice cannot master: it can't tell an empathetic tale. I am still am in awe of their creative genius. They displayed an empathetic mercy never displayed by their subjects. This understanding allowed me to form my own theory of social action.

Transfiguring Trauma Through Justice

We only love justice when we hate the right kind of injustice. As Plato recognized, inflicting "justice" with injustice is no justice. It is only through knowing and experiencing other lives that we can muster the strength to show mercy—to allow the circle to be broken. Humans are at our best when making beautiful music out of trauma and injustice.

I can't sing and I can't write music, so I have chosen to compose through the law. My mother—a civil rights lawyer all too familiar with the injustices of our time—taught me that a legal document cannot serve justice by merely applying the law: it must tell a story. Just as music served as Kander and Ebb's instrument of historical empathy, the composition of story through language is the lawyer's palette for justice. Winning cases, defeating adversaries, and securing damages for clients are fleeting victories at best. I aspire to become a lawyer who can tell a story, and engender a sense of justice through empathy—an aspect of human nature as intrinsic to us as resentment.

My Hebrew name,"Paz"—meaning "Pure Gold"—honors my grandfather, Philip. He understood justice all too well as he traveled with his Soviet liberators, fresh from Auschwitz. The party discovered a young S.S. soldier in hiding. My grandfather was presented with a gun and an opportunity to do "justice." Carrying the fate of someone who inflicted unspeakable injustice on him, he transfigured injustice into a beautiful tale—and declined to do unto them as they did to him. Justice does not cure or prevent injustice; it can only transfigure it. And that is where the justice of Tikkun Olam (repair of the world) sanctifies Schiller's beautiful declaration that, "Alle Menschen Werden Brüder, Wo Dein Sanfter Flügel Weilt" (all men become brothers, where your gentle wing rests.)

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