Justice, justice shall you pursue — preferably after coffee

Elul has arrived, which means the Jewish calendar has once again dispensed with gentle encouragement and moved directly to the annual performance review.

This Shabbat we read Parashat Shofetim, meaning “judges.” It begins with Moshe commanding the Israelites to appoint judges and law enforcement officers in every city. This is appropriate for Elul, the month in which we are supposed to examine our behavior, acknowledge our failings, and prepare ourselves for the Days of Awe.

Most of us are extremely enthusiastic about judgement, provided someone else is in the dock.

“Justice, justice shall you pursue,” Moshe declares. Not admire. Not discuss over coffee. Not place on a motivational poster beside a photograph of a sunrise. Pursue.

Shofetim is effectively the Torah’s constitutional blueprint for the Jewish nation. It deals with courts, witnesses, kings, prophets, warfare, accidental killing, and communal responsibility. It is less a soothing spiritual interlude than an instruction manual for preventing society from becoming one enormous WhatsApp group administered by somebody’s unstable cousin.

The first requirement is the appointment of honest judges. They may not favor anyone, distort the law, or accept bribes, because “bribery blinds the eyes of the wise and perverts the words of the righteous.”

Notice that the Torah does not say bribery blinds only the corrupt, dim-witted, or morally suspicious. It blinds the wise. Intelligent people are not immune to self-interest. We are able to produce more sophisticated explanations for why our self-interest is, in this particular case, an important matter of principle.

I am extremely capable of conducting such judicial proceedings in my own head. I can prosecute, defend, and acquit myself before breakfast. If I spend money I should have saved, the defense submits that the purchase was essential to my emotional wellbeing. If I avoid something difficult, the court accepts that I was protecting my boundaries. If someone else behaves in precisely the same way, however, I am prepared to deliver a detailed judgement, sentence, and psychiatric assessment before they have finished explaining.

I live with three cats, so I am also familiar with legal systems in which the accused is presumed guilty, the evidence is irrelevant, and the judiciary wakes you at four in the morning because it can see the bottom of the food bowl.

Shofetim requires not only judges but also officers to enforce their decisions. The Torah apparently understood something we continue to resist: magnificent laws are useless when nobody applies them. A society cannot measure its morality by the nobility of its declarations. It must look at what actually happens in its courts, markets, streets, and institutions.

We are very good at announcing values. Every organization has integrity, transparency, and respect somewhere on its website, usually just above the button that makes it impossible to speak to a human being.

The parasha then turns to political leadership. Israel may appoint a king, but he may not accumulate an excess of horses, wives, or wealth. He must write Torah scrolls, keep one with him, and read from it throughout his life so that he does not become arrogant. (Once again for the people at the back…)

This is a remarkable idea: the more powerful the leader, the more urgently he requires a daily reminder that he is not G‑D.

It is also an idea that has not enjoyed universal political adoption.

The Torah assumes that power is dangerous even when the person exercising it began with good intentions. Leaders do not become immune to temptation because they have impressive titles, devoted supporters, or photographs of themselves looking thoughtful beside flags. Power requires limits precisely because human beings are so gifted at confusing personal ambition with national necessity.

Shofetim also prohibits sorcery, divination, consulting the dead, and other attempts to manipulate the future. Moshe tells us, “You shall be wholehearted with the L‑RD your G‑D.”

This is difficult advice for anyone who has ever googled a mild symptom and emerged 20 minutes later having diagnosed herself with three terminal illnesses and a rare tropical parasite.

We dislike uncertainty. We want advance notice of what is coming, preferably with the option to cancel. We consult experts, algorithms, horoscopes, and that one friend who once accurately predicted rain. Some people read tea leaves. Others analyze the punctuation in a two-word WhatsApp reply. The methods differ, but the desperation is much the same: tell me what will happen so that I do not have to live with not knowing.

The Torah does not ask us to abandon reason or ignore danger. It asks us to recognize the limits of control. Faith is not certainty about what will happen. It is the ability to continue behaving with integrity when we do not know.

The laws of war in Shofetim are equally striking. Peace must first be offered before attacking a distant city. Certain people are exempted from battle, including a newly married man and someone who has recently built a house or planted a vineyard. Fruit trees may not be destroyed during a siege.

Even in war, destruction has boundaries.

The prohibition against destroying fruit trees forms the basis of bal tashchit, the broader prohibition against needless destruction. War does not suspend every moral restraint. Rage does not automatically become strategy, and obliterating something because one has the power to do so is not the same as achieving victory.

For Israelis, this is not an abstract discussion conducted safely across several thousand years. We read laws about fear, enemies, peace, and military responsibility while living in a country where war enters our homes through sirens, reserve duty, funerals, and names we know. Shofetim does not offer us the luxury of pretending that war is simple. It insists that even when survival is at stake, we remain responsible for the kind of people we become in the pursuit of it.

The parasha ends with one of the Torah’s strangest and most unsettling rituals. A murdered person is found outside a city, and nobody knows who killed him. The elders of the nearest city must come forward and declare: “Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see.”

Nobody seriously suspects the city elders of sneaking into the countryside at night to murder travelers. The Sages explain that they are declaring they did not knowingly allow the victim to leave without food, assistance, or protection.

The question is therefore not merely: Did you kill him?

It is: Did you notice him? Did you help him? Did you create a society in which a vulnerable person could disappear without anyone considering him their responsibility?

This is where Shofetim becomes deeply uncomfortable. It expands responsibility beyond what we personally did to include some things we might have prevented. “It wasn’t my department” may be administratively convenient, but it is not always morally convincing.

The command to place judges and officers “at all your gates” has also been understood as a personal instruction. Human beings have gates: our eyes, ears, and mouths. We decide what we allow into our minds and what we release into the world.

In the age of “forwarded many times,” this may be among the parasha’s most urgently neglected commandments.

Before forwarding the outrage, did we verify it? Before repeating the story, did we ask whether it was true? Before publicly convicting someone, did we examine the evidence, or did the accusation simply confirm something we already wanted to believe?

Elul asks us to place judges at those gates. Unfortunately, the judge cannot be the same easily bribed creature who has been approving all our excuses throughout the year.

The Haftarah offers consolation. G‑D tells Jerusalem: “I, indeed I, am He Who comforts you.” Jerusalem is called to awaken, shake off the dust, and rise.

But even the consolation demands movement. Jerusalem is not told to remain comfortably in the dust while waiting for redemption to arrive with a municipal cleaning crew. She must get up.

That is the challenge of Shofetim. We cannot demand honest leaders while refusing to examine our own dishonesty. We cannot condemn corruption while accepting the tiny private bribes of convenience, ego, and belonging. We cannot insist that other people take responsibility while maintaining an extensive list of reasons why nothing is ever ours.

“Justice, justice shall you pursue” is easy to applaud when justice supports our preferred verdict. The real test comes when justice restrains our anger, exposes our bias, or rules against us.

Elul has opened the court.

Regrettably, we are not the judges.

We are the case.