“Tzedek Tzedek tirdof.” Justice, justice shall you pursue.”
Justice free of favoritism, bribery, influence. Not justice alone, but fairness. Today I guess a prime example of unfairness can be found in our own judiciary. In what world does asking a ten-year-old girl to carry a baby resulting from a rape to term justice?
In our parsha we learn to not to make a memorial stone for HaShem or offer a blemished animal. When someone is accused of a transgression, conviction requires two witnesses. If one can’t decide then, take it to the priests.
We find rules regarding choosing a king. He shouldn’t be allowed to be too wealthy, have too many wives or horses, nor should he be a foreigner. He should have a written duplicate, probably of all D’varim (or maybe all Torah) to study and remember. The priests should have no portion or inheritance of the land, depending on the other tribes for their sustenance. They should avoid soothsayers, interpreters of omens, sorcerers. Prophets will be named by HaShem, but if their proclamations are not true, they are to be ignored. Note: Think of how the prophets like Isaiah always couch their remarks upon the condition “if the people do this” etc, rather than proscribing exactly what will happen. Might this be a safeguard to avoid being ignored otherwise?
There will be three refuge cities for those who kill unintentionally to avoid revenge killing by the family of the person who died. The courts will determine liability. Don’t move your neighbor’s boundary marker. When going into battle, those sent home not to fight are those with a new home, a new wife or new vineyard, or those afraid or fainthearted.
When you approach a city to fight, first offer peace and surrender. If not, battle with them and Israel will prevail. Then kill all males, but the women, children, animals, and booty will be the spoils. However, if it’s part of the land promised, no one will be spared. With the cities you attack, don’t destroy the food trees so the people can eat after battle is done.
Finally, if a person has been slain, the city closest to the body must send out elders to sacrifice a calf, blessings by the priests are made, then prayers for atonement. Why ask for forgiveness? Underlying is the notion that in those days, a traveler was shown hospitality including provisions for the journey and perhaps someone to travel with them to ensure safety to the limits of their community. It infers a certain communal responsibility and in the case of the murdered victim, a failure of that responsibility.
Within this parsha I wanted to focus on two themes. First is the beginning. Justice, justice shall you pursue. Justice, Tzedek shares the Hebrew root with Tzedakah, charity and compassion. In the work we do, we carry acts of loving kindness to help heal the world, each in our own way, to bring justice and equity in this world. Caring and compassion are an integral part of true justice. I found an interesting commentary by Rabbi Chaim Singer-Frankes. He mentions the sixties activist Abbie Hoffman who was asked if he believed in the Beatles lyric, “Love is all you need.” Hoffman replied, “It’s nice but what you really need is justice.” Another contemporary of Hoffman sang, “He who made kittens put snakes in the grass.” In other words, the world can be a cruel place.
Perhaps this is why the Torah doubles down repeating the word Tzedek, Tzedek. Together, justice and compassion, we can go about the business of creating that better world for us all. Justice and compassion both as an individual and collectively. I’m reminded of the dream to which our own caring committee aspires, a day where our entire congregation is actively part of our caring community.
There was something else I wanted to talk about. What seems to us a contradiction, Parsha Shoftim goes on to command the Israelites to offer peace, the people are to be enslaved, and if not accepted, they are to kill all the males. Furthermore, if it is in the land promised to them, they must kill all men, women, and children, a retrospective command already offered in D’varim 7:2. What sort of justice is that? As horrible as this is, we err if we do not confront these passages head on. The Robert Alter translation and commentary on Shoftim says indeed the Rabbis did confront and reinterpreted this passage, seeking to show it was never really carried out and the archaeological record seems to confirm this. He suggests that the writers of D’varim, more concerned with the contribution of the role of the priesthood in this new land, offered a militant fantasy, albeit a dangerous one. Furthermore, in the world at this time, such wholesale slaughter of those defeated was the norm. We Jews have been wrestling with HaShem over the centuries to reinterpret and if I might be so bold, to nullify these sorts of passages by looking to other passages, both in written and oral Torah. We are not a people who rely on one isolated verse, but rather look to the entirety of the written Torah as well as the subsequent oral Torah which continues to be a work in process up to our own time. Indeed Judges 3:1 seems to abrogate this earlier commandment, leaving existing groups to test future generations of the people Israel in their faithfulness.
Shoftim has such contradictory messaging, messaging we must continue to revisit and interpret, year after year. What I take from this parsha is our collective responsibility to choose good leaders, grounded in the ideals of justice and compassion, and our individual and collective responsibility for each other. I also see a communal responsibility to wrestle with injustice, whether from those who would do wrong, or from the words of HaShem, spoken from the lips of Moshe.
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