Trial by Jury

This week, I was called upon to do my duty as a New York State juror. I had to take off work and waste spend hours over the course of the past few days cooling my heels, waiting to be dismissed. Sitting there as I did, I had a lot of time to think, and one of the thoughts that kept popping into my head was how apropos it was for me to sit on a jury (not that I did – I was just on a panel) right before I myself came on trial.

Every judge will tell you (as the one in charge of my case did … numerous times) that one of the hardest parts of making a trial is finding a "fair and impartial jury." Everybody has some sort of bias, and it's very hard to set them aside and listen to the testimony with an open mind. The judge wasted the time of more than seventy people – over a three day period – trying to find such people.

With all this, the defendant on trial for attempted murder comes into court not knowing what the jurors think of him and his case. They don't particularly care for him, but neither do they know anything about the prosecutors. There is no connection between any of the jurors to anyone on the case, nothing that would cause the juror to lean toward any particular verdict.

We, on the other hand, come into our trial knowing that the jury is partial – to us. Our Father is the one judging our case. Instead of finding the people who will be able to see the matter clearly and make a just judgment, Hashem tries to find loopholes and somehow find us innocent of our "alleged" crimes. We go into that courtroom on Rosh Hashana knowing that the case is slanted to our benefit.

And yet …

There are so many sins that we are unable to atone for. So many sins that we can't do teshuva (repentance) for because we don't even know that we did them. I would like to take this time to publicly ask mechila (forgiveness) from all of my readers. If my words insulted you or hurt you in any way, please know that it was unintentional. I hope you'll forgive me.

Have a Ksiva V'Chasima Tova and a gut g'bentched yur.