Tzedek tzedek tirdof, says Moses in this week’s Parshah, Shoftim. Justice, justice shall you pursue. Not achieve. Not establish. Pursue, tirdof, the same root you’d use for chasing something running from you.
I keep circling the doubling. Rashi reads it as ends and means: one can’t justify the other. True, but not enough. Justice never holds still long enough to be caught in one hand: the justice of the letter and the justice of the spirit, what the law permits and what it should permit. Say it once, and you’ve named half of it. Say it twice, and you’ve admitted the whole thing is bigger than any single verdict.
Moses gets specific: appoint judges and officers, gather two witnesses, investigate meticulously, take no bribe, “for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and perverts the words of the righteous.” Then, almost without transition, a line that should unsettle us: in every generation someone will interpret this law for you, and you are not to deviate, right or left.
Read plainly, that’s a demand for total deference. The Talmud makes it stranger, not simpler. Rosh Hashanah 25b insists this applies “even if the judge before you is Yiftach,” a flawed, minor judge from the book of Judges, “in his generation as though he were Samuel in his generation,” the greatest judge Israel ever had. The law itself hasn’t changed. But the period and society in which it is interpreted have.
That should unsettle us more than it comforts us. A judge can be wrong, or bought, or certain he holds all of justice in his hand when he’s holding half of it. But a judge can also be persuaded, and this is less a flaw than the whole point.
We call ourselves a nation of laws, one that holds together only if it applies to everyone alike. We build precedent so no single ruling carries that weight alone. But precedent moves too: we watched the Supreme Court overturn nearly fifty years of it, reversing Roe v. Wade. Whatever you believe about the merits, Shoftim already taught the deeper lesson: no court of last resort is anything but some version of Yiftach. We can appeal upward, term after term, but the appeal ends somewhere, and we are bound to comply, whether we agree or not. A shared law is only shared if it binds the people who lose the argument too.
I remember waiting for test results, my wife beside me, the room dark and lonely, my imagination filling in what the doctor hadn’t said yet. The doctor could have been wrong about the diagnosis, about the treatment. What I noticed was how little the verdict had to do with the anguish. It was the not-knowing whether whoever held my chart was seeing me or processing me. Lo takir panim, the Torah tells judges: do not recognize faces. It’s a warning against favoritism, and equally a demand to see the face in front of you clearly enough to recognize the humanity looking back. You cannot do that with a law no one is left to interpret in the present moment.
We are handing more of our judgment to systems that can never be Yiftach in any generation: built once, unable to say, “the letter of the rule does not serve the person in front of me.” Risk-assessment algorithms in sentencing. Automated denials in insurance and benefits. A frozen rule can’t be bribed, nor does it tire at the end of a long docket. But Torah already knew that a system incapable of being persuaded isn’t the same thing as a just one. Tzedek tzedek tirdof describes a pursuit, and a pursuit requires someone alive enough to be moved.
When was the last time I let a rule be argued with? When was the last time I trusted a person in front of me more than the process built to replace them? Tirdof doesn’t promise you’ll catch it. It only takes stopping off the table.
Shabbat Shalom.