Quaker Conference on Torture:

Using the Weapons of the Weak

A Message by Chuck Fager, at the Quaker Conference on Torture, Guilford College, Greensboro NC June 3, 2006

Friends, time is short, and torture is long, so I’m going to talk fast . . . .

I want to start with the Bible, specifically a parable – a parable of Quakerism. It’s from the beginning of Chapter 18 of the Gospel of Luke. I’m sure you’re all familiar with it – this is a religious crowd, right? Piece of cake.

Well, to refresh our recollection, the parable tells of an unjust judge, who neither feared God nor had any regard for people, and a widow, who had nothing but her voice, and came into his courtroom. The widow came and she cried out to the judge, "Give me justice! Give me justice!" But the unjust judge ignored her.

Now the text is very terse here, but the social context is not hard to fill in: Chances are the widow’s back was against the wall. Chances are she was in court because some greedy relative or landlord was trying to steal the inheritance from her dead husband, which was probably all she had to live on. Yet her case at first seems hopeless, because we’re told straight up that the deck is stacked, the fix is in, and the judge is crooked. How is he crooked? He’s likely on the take, selling his rulings to the highest bidder.

But this widow doesn’t give up. She keeps coming back, again and again, and cries out to the judge, and to anyone else who will listen, "Give me justice! Give me justice!"

What was she doing? Consider: she was a woman alone, in a society where such women were the very archetype of powerlessness and weakness. If she loses her case, she’ll probably starve to death – and starvation was common in those days. So this was a life and death struggle, and in it she made use of all she had, that is, the weapons of the weak, and the powers of the powerless.

What are these weapons of the weak? What are these powers? I group them under the initials TVA, for Tenacity, Veracity, and Audacity.

The widow is tenacious – she keeps coming back, she won’t give up. And when she cries out, she’s speaking not only of her own case, but also reminding the judge – and the watching and listening public – of his sacred duty: he’s supposed to be upholding the Law of Moses, the law of God. For centuries, this Torah had echoed for faithful Jews with Deuteronomy’s stern command to Israel’s judges, 16:19 – "Do not pervert justice or show partiality. Do not accept a bribe . . .justice, and only justice shall you pursue."

So with her cries the widow is not just making a private complaint – she’s also speaking ancient truth, reminding the Israelite public, as well as the judge, that there is an authentic, a holy tradition of justice in her society, and that it’s being blatantly and shamelessly perverted here. So her cries are also an exposé, a kind of committed feminist journalism. They shine a spotlight, or at least a penlight, of veracity into the fog the judge uses to conceal his dirty deeds.

And she is audacious – in her patriarchal world women were expected to keep quiet, especially in the public sphere. The courts were men’s turf, and litigation was men’s business. But she refuses to go along with this custom. She breaks the mold; she thinks, and acts, outside the box.

And eventually she wins, she gets a chance at survival. This is a limited victory– she doesn’t convert the judge – he’s still crooked; and she doesn’t overturn the corrupt system of which he’s a part. But she wears him out, harasses and embarrasses him, until he decides he’ll have to give her what she’s due, if only to get her off his back.

For a text that’s only five verses long, there’s a lot of meaning packed into this parable. In fact, as I said, I find in it a model for Quaker social witness, and particularly for the work we are now beginning on torture. Why is it a model? I think there are two reasons.

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