This week’s Torah commentary, written by Hebrew Seminary rabbinical student Dr. Cécile Bruriah Gonçalves, has been sponsored anonymously.
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צֶ֥דֶק צֶ֖דֶק תִּרְדֹּ֑ף לְמַ֤עַן תִּֽחְיֶה֙ וְיָרַשְׁתָּ֣ אֶת־הָאָ֔רֶץ
Justice, justice shall you pursue—so that you may live and inherit the land. (Deuteronomy 16:20.)
Pursuing justice is not a mere formality. Justice must be pursued against the inertia of the established order. The Israeli scholar Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz (1937–2020) formulates the demand in institutional terms: “אֵין דַּי בִּשְׁמִירַת הַחוֹק הַצּוֹדֵק” (“a just law is not enough”); rather, we are required to render justice effective within a medinah metukkenet (מדינה מתוקנת), a ‘politically ordered society.’ (See his Tanakh HaMvo’ar on Deuteronomy 16:20).
Our verse refutes messianic nationalism—the idea that the Messiah will lead us to a promised land. Justice governs. National life and possession of the land are conditional upon justice. Commenting on our verse, the German Orthodox thinker Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888) argued that concern for the public must be subordinated to the pursuit of justice, upon which Jewish political existence must depend. Any unjust actions that enable national survival would counteract the Torah’s condition for national survival.
The Iberian sage Nachmanides (c. 1194–1270), following the Spanish grammarian Ibn Ezra (c. 1089–1167), reads our verse’s repetition of the word “צֶדֶק” (tzedek, “justice”) as a corrosive force: one must pursue justice “שֶׁיַּרְוִיחַ בּוֹ אוֹ יַפְסִיד” (“whether one prospers or loses wealth because of it”). (See their commentaries on our verse.) This criterion disqualifies any justice indexed to group interest. Justice must serve more than the Jewish people alone.
The Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 32b, reads each use of the word Tzedek independently: “אֶחָד לְדִין וְאֶחָד לִפְשָׁרָה” (“one [to teach about justice in] adjudication; and one [to teach about justice in] settlement”). The Talmud then proposes we imagine two boats each seeking the right way in a narrow passage. An empty boat should yield to a boat still waiting to offload the goods it will sell. If both boats have business to conduct, the boat that passes first should transfer some money to the boat that waits, to compensate for lost time. A just settlement does not erase material asymmetry; it legally characterizes that asymmetry and distributes its cost.
Near the end of Parashat Shofetim, the Torah places a horrifying test before the judges: a dead body “לֹ֥א נוֹדַ֖ע מִ֥י הִכָּֽהוּ” (“the murderer of whom is not known”). (See Deuteronomy 21:1.) Measuring the distance to the surrounding towns does not solve the crime; it assigns responsibility to a jurisdiction. Deuteronomy 21:7 tells us that the elders should declare, “יָדֵ֗ינוּ לֹ֤א שָֽׁפְכוּ֙ אֶת־הַדָּ֣ם הַזֶּ֔ה וְעֵינֵ֖ינוּ לֹ֥א רָאֽוּ” (“Our hands did not spill this blood, and eyes have not seen!”). Compiled in the early 3rd century, the Mishnah, Sotah 9:6, requires the court to attest that they did not send away the victim-before-the-crime “בְּלֹא מָזוֹן… בְּלֹא לְוָיָה” (“without food or accompaniment”). The 13th century French sage Chizkiyyahu bar Mano’ach, in his Chizkuni commentary on Deuteronomy 21:7, understands that the Mishnah’s concern for “לְוָיָה” (“accompaniment”) creates an obligation for us not to abandon a traveler on the road, that we require “חבורה שילך עמו” (“a band with whom one can travel”). Tzedek becomes social justice when it compels power to answer for the material conditions that expose people to death or other grave risks.
Whether religious or national, political messianism—the belief that the Messiah will right our political shortcomings—allows far too many people to pursue the belief that their own wrong actions may be excusable—as if a promised end absolves the means employed in the present. The Iberian and North African philosopher Maimonides (c. 1135–1204) dismantles this claim and states that, even in the messianic era, “עוֹלָם כְּמִנְהָגוֹ נוֹהֵג” (“the world follows its ordinary course”). (See his Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Melakhim 12:1). He writes that we cannot calculate the arrival of the Messiah and that “אֵין סִדּוּר הֲוָיַת דְּבָרִים אֵלּוּ וְלֹא דִּקְדּוּקֵיהֶן עִקָּר בַּדָּת” (“the sequence of the transpiring of these matters or their details are not foundations of our religion”). (Hilkhot Melakhim 12:2.) The messianic militant turns into political certainty what law maintains in indeterminacy. To justify an unjustifiable war in the name of a redemption slated for some unknown time in the future is to suspend the Torah in favor of a flawed prophecy.
The Mishnah, Sotah 9:9 tells us (in shorthand): “מִשֶּׁרַבּוּ הָרַצְחָנִים, בָּטְלָה עֶגְלָה עֲרוּפָה” (“When murderers grew too numerous, there was an abolishment of the ritualistic breaking of the neck of a calf, whereby a court was symbolically absolved of any guilt associated with anybody whose murderer was unknown”). Dr. Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994) interpreted the overturning of this particular ritual as the exhaustion of ritual in the face of violence becoming the political order. In his words, such a state witnesses “כֹּחָם שֶׁל טְקָסִים מִתְפּוֹגֵג וּבָטֵל” (“the power of ceremonies dissipating and disappearing”). (See his Siḥot al Parashat ha-Shavu’a on Shofetim, section 14). A war does not grow sanctified merely by attaching a biblical verse to it—and an injustice does not become providential because it is committed in the name of the Jewish religion. In an age of messianisms, fidelity to the Torah begins with the refusal to surrender it to power.
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