On Shoftim

There are some parshat people dread discussing, but Tzedek, Tzedek, tirdof is not usually one of those. The term “Justice, justice you shall pursue” has become one of the most referenced Jewish phrases, particularly on the Jewish left, partially because it feels so easily malleable. Organizations like New Jewish Agenda made it the center of their rhetorical claim to Jewishness, and it is often the passage pointed to when making the argument that our tradition has an inherent sense of justice at its core. Why else would Moses say Justice twice?

But as with any word, the term “justice” has been used so flippantly that I doubt many people are particularly moved when they hear demands for justice. I've sat in many courtrooms when Judges (sometimes actually called Justices) hand out prison time to activists putting themselves on the line to achieve what they also called justice. If both oppressor and oppressed indicate their legitimacy by calling to justice, what does the term even mean?

Digging into the term justice is part of excavating what was revolutionary about Torah, but also what has never been fully realized, even in the text itself. Justice, the phenomenon that is supposed to manifest when judgment is applied, implies a set of boundaries that gives a social arrangement its shape. This is a structure necessary as a counter-balance to other factors that can make society go off the rails: social stratification, biases, class, colonialism can all create a situation when some people see benefits while others are unfairly maligned. Justice is when those inequalities are neutralized, when the universe has been returned to a sense of order. 

The sefirot of Gevurah, called the “left hand of hashem,” may be another way of considering Justice, the creation of boundaries through which Chesed, loving kindness, can be channeled. We often shy away from the idea that love and compassion needs limits, but it is in these limits and borders that we can shape a world that can balance the needs of lived human frailty. When Moses says that “you shall not judge unfairly” and that “you shall show no partiality,” he is pointing intimately to the fallibility that people have when determining who deserves compassion and who does not, the bias and even societal inequity that underlies that. Gevurah implies consequences, which is another way of saying who bears the weight of the decisions our society has made. So, instead, we look to Gevurah, to boundaries, to create justice, a world where our success depends on whether or not we build in equal access to freedom and flourishing, to undoing the stratifications that leave some free from accountability while others struggle to ever recover from the slightest indiscretion. 

In Me’or Enyanim, homilies on the Torah by the Rebbe Menahim Nahum of Chernobyl (of exalted memory), the rabbi suggests that this sense of justice was a part of the primal order brought forward since Earth’s creation.

“It was God’s desire to reveal His great love that aroused Him to create the worlds. But when God saw that the world could not be sustained [by love alone], the thought entered His mind to create it with the attribute of justice instead, join in  [justice and love] together into the quality of mercy.”

If mercy is how we judge whether or not we have captured the justice we pursue, then how do we feel about what Moses commands next? While the phrase “Tzedek, Tzedek tirdof” is one that we love to repeat, what of the stonings, annihilations, and penalties he suggests throughout the rest of the parshat? Does his judgment command mercy? Does the judgment of our leaders?

Harold Kushner says in his classic work on Job that suffering and trauma are less a part of Hashem's plan than the “rough edges” of a world in process: moving from chaos into order. Or, in another phrasing, to justice. This chaos is how the world began, a cataclysm that split G-d and all their creation into microscopic shards echoing across the universe. It’s always fitting that this parshat comes at the beginning of Elul, when we are taking stock of how to make teshuva since that word literally means “return.” Our acts of repentance are meant to rectify the harms of the world, those harms we participate in and those the society is built upon, create an injustice that topples the supposed unity our world was meant to be founded on. If we make teshuva, perhaps we can piece the world back together.

But, if the arc of the universe bends towards justice, then it is us that piece it back together, to heal the world. These individual acts of Chesed, or mitzvot, become strung together over time, repairing our existence until it has just the semblance of justice. But what would it look like for the world to be run by justice? And would it even be familiar to us today?

Everytime I am flippant about discussing Moshiach in political terms my chevrutah reminds me that the messianic age is not just a world of radical transformation, but where the “lamb lies down with the lion.” To achieve something we have to move past what we believe is possible and into the realm of the prophetic, to commit to what Marxists often call “a revolution like none other.” Changing the world is not enough. Because to enact justice would unmake the entire complex of human society, to shatter the institutions that hold together this petty arrangement. 

But this is why it a messianic dream, and not just one of reform and improvement. We come from a tradition that waits not to simply do our best, but for the “world to come.” And while this coming age requires what Gershom Scholem considered a cataclysm, we also have centuries of rabbinic debates as to the role we, ourselves, will play in the coming uprising. If we consider this revolution as one built by us, living humans engaging in tikkun olam, then we have to think about what we are doing right now in pursuit of justice. Building this temple of justice on the ashes of the old society is monumental, but made up of tiny stones, placed on top of each other by many hands. Isaac Luria understood this as the work of mitzvah, to replace the shards and move towards a cosmic harmony of order and, well, justice. 

These acts of love are, as Melanie Kaye/Kantronovitz identified, solidarity, a Chesed of knowing we cannot become free until all of us are: a perfectly realized justice. And that revolution has already begun, it started centuries back and we have simply inherited its active warfare in the fight for a better future. Each day is a question of whether or not we will perform the necessary mitzvah, driven by a libertory kavanah, to bring this sense of justice into our lives. “There is no act of love toward one’s neighbor that falls into the void. Just because the act was realized blindly, it must appear somewhere as effect. Somewhere,” wrote Franz Rosenweig in the Star of Redemption. 

This is, suffice it to say, a tall order, but what we were called to at Sinai. The mission of Torah, as I see it, is to call us to embody this drive towards justice, though that doesn’t mean our texts always get the pathway right. Instead, as we have always done, we have to interpret that mission, and to even bring a “new Torah” into existence, one that Rabbi Levi Yitshak of Berdichev explained could happen with each new generation as we ponder what it means to take on this mission. “Our ancestors understood the unbreakable link between justice, governance, and collective living and thriving,” wrote Rabbis Jessica Rosenberg and Ariana Katz on this parshat, “We can reject many of their conclusions while still embracing the same questions of Shoftim.” This is the work commanded, to seek out justice, to build it collectively, to redefine it so it remains the prophetic project it was intended to be. And it is also not one that we can let consume every part of ourselves, we are taking this on collectively. “Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, But neither are you free to abandon it.” Each act, however small, that moves us towards justice, is the necessary teshuva to return us to wholeness. To paraphrase Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, if breaking is possible then fixing is, by definition, possible as well. 

We cannot know, with any certainty, when a just world will exist, only that it won’t be done without human hands building it. Some suggest that it is a reinterpretation to see, as Judith Pasklow described, the shift in understanding kabbalistic concepts in uniquely materialist terms: “action means social action; evil is injustice; revolution repairs the material world,” but it seems that it requires a rather radical reinterpretation of the text to see anything else emerging from our prophetic tradition. The opportunity we are given, when following the Torah cycle, in living out our history of tradition, is to bring unity between the sacred and the profane: to live out moments of joy, community and wholeness, even just for one holiday, one shabbat, one Torah study. They are a roadmap for what is possible.

And that entire tradition, its arcane rituals and antiquated discourses rests on one key assumption: another world is possible. Because the time we have ahead of us will never be empty, but, as Walter Benjamin said, a "straight gate through which the Messiah might enter." This measure of perpetual hope, of faith, is what steals ourselves to do the daily work, whether laying tefillin or blocking roads and disrupting congress. Because we have faith that our actions will create justice, somewhere. Somewhere.

If we believe that a just world is to come, let’s live in that world now.