Deuteronomy 16:18-21:9
A Distant Dream
I suspect many speakers of modern Hebrew are misled by the second word in this week’s Torah reading. In today’s Israel, shoterim are policemen—and this same root also underlies the collective mishtarah, “police.” But there were no policemen in ancient Israel—certainly not in the modern sense of policemen. The word shoterim might have been related to shetar, “writing” or “document,” and writing may at some point have been part of the shoter’s duties, but the biblical appearances of this root offer little support for understanding this root.
Whatever the shoterim did, the significant point of this first verse seems to be that judges and other officials are to be appointed in all your [city] gates, that is, in the physical place in cities and towns where judges traditionally held court. “But do we really need an established judiciary for our town?” an ancient Israelite might have asked. “After all, everybody here knows everybody else—let’s just settle things on our own.” Such sentiments might especially have been espoused by the haves in a traditional society, where the social order changed little from generation to generation and power remained in the hands of the privileged few.
Precisely for that reason, the Torah requires the appointment of these officials, whatever their precise duties. Their presence was certainly no guarantee that justice would prevail, but it at least ensured that this local judiciary would have to go through the motions. And here is an interesting feature of human nature: appoint someone to high office—a judge, for example—and he or she can sometimes surprise you, holding out for fairness even when the easiest thing in the world is “go along to get along.” A powerful judiciary at least preserves the chance that justice may prevail despite local pressures.
That is why the Torah next takes up the subject of judicial corruption. “You shall not pervert justice,” it says, and then more specifically, “You shall not show partiality.” This means that just because So-and-so has a lot of friends or has done such-and-such a good deed in the past, he cannot be allowed to take that bit of accumulated credit and use it to neutralize some later misdemeanor. (I remember not long ago a Pakistani official explained that all criminal charges should be dropped against A. Q. Khan, the founder of his country’s nuclear program, on what seemed to the official to be perfectly reasonable grounds: “He is our national hero.”)
Quite apart from showing partiality to the high and mighty, judges can be bribed, so the Bible, here and elsewhere, clearly forbids the taking of bribes. Even a basically decent judge can be corrupted, our passage says, or perhaps only swayed a little bit, since a bribe “can blind the eyes of sages and twist the words of the righteous”—nothing outlandish, but just enough to throw the case in the bribe-giver’s favor.
Finally, “justice, justice, you must pursue!” our passage says. The very repetition of the word “justice” seems to say that it has an overriding importance, the mega-theme of this whole group of mitzvot. In fact, the word “pursue” may be a bit too bland a translation of the Hebrew tirdof: “chase after” would be a bit more vivid (as some commentators have observed), suggesting that at least sometimes a sustained investigative probe is required for the judges to arrive at a fair verdict.
Even if the local judges lacked the knowledge (or, perhaps, the courage) to arrive at a fair decision on their own, a later verse (Deut 17:8) calls for them to appeal to a higher—or at least more distant—authority to render a verdict in their stead. Sometimes, presumably, the very fact of this further geographical separation may make it easier for justice to prevail.
Well, all this sounds fine in the abstract. But a certain irony must accompany the reading of these opening verses today. After all, our newspapers in recent weeks have been full of plans for considerably weakening Israel’s judiciary, quite the opposite of what this week’s Torah portion is calling for. Under these circumstances, “Justice, justice, you must pursue!” sounds like a distant dream.