Justice For All by Daniel Needlestone
This week’s parsha, Shoftim, looks amongst other things at laws, leaders and justice. The Israelites are waiting by the banks of the River Jordan, ready to enter the Promised Land and they receive guidance on how to create law and order once they are in the Land.
Then and now we live in a hierarchical world. Finding your place in the hierarchy and your niche in life is a struggle for many. Wherever you are in the hierarchy there is always someone above you, someone more important, someone else wiser, someone else richer. It’s very easy for us mortals to undervalue our place in the world and our place in society. Who are we to question the rules, the system, our leaders or our bosses? This parsha puts in place many parts of the hierarchy for the Israelites: prophets, kings, judges and priests. This is a people who a generation ago were brought out from Egypt, who are being led by Moses himself, and who have lived through miracles. Yet even under close supervision through the desert they go astray time and again. Now they are about to enter their own land without Moses. It’s a challenge to say the least and that’s why laws and leaders are so important. But the laws and systems are not there to disempower and separate people from leaders; rather they are there to create a just society.
Today as then we have the choice and power to obey the rules or not. We may not be the top of a hierarchy but we make life-or-death decisions every day. We make choices and are responsible for our conduct. The parsha also explains some of the laws around manslaughter - that when someone kills unintentionally they are to flee to live in one of the cities of refuge where they will be sheltered. This seems a distant rule to us who live every day with no intention of committing manslaughter but again wherever we are in the hierarchy of society we have power not just over our own lives but over other people’s. A few years ago on a fourth floor balcony I accidentally kicked a stone over the edge. It could have killed someone on the street but luckily landed harmlessly on the balcony below. We forget how much power we have in our hands and how our actions can influence those elsewhere.
So if we have power as individuals, how about the king? In this parsha the Israelites are also allowed to appoint a king. This is done with many preconditions. First, the king has to be one of them. That might seem obvious but we have many royal families today where the king was brought over from another land, so that they had royal blood. The king may not have too many wives, too many horses, or too much gold or silver. He must write out, not one, but two Torah scrolls and read and study them all the days of his life. In other words not only should a king be learned, grounded and humble but they should know the law and perform it. The king not only has the same laws as the rest of the people, he has an extra obligation to follow them.
We all have different jobs, roles and life situations but whoever we are, whether rich, poor, learned or learning our actions make a difference to others whether for the better or worse.
This D'var Torah was originally published in 2016/5776 on the Limmud on One Leg website.