A court, not a chorus

In the opening lines of this week’s Torah portion, Shoftim, Moses proclaims one of the Torah’s great moral mandates: “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof… Justice, justice shall you pursue!” (Deut. 16:20)

It is a powerful imperative. The immediate question is obvious: Why repeat the word tzedek? Thirteenth-century Spanish sage Rabbi Bachya ben Asher offers the classic and deeply insightful answer: justice must be pursued justly. That is, the pursuit of justice must itself employ just means.

This deceptively simple insight stands at the heart of Judaism’s understanding of justice. We are commanded to pursue justice by just means because one cannot build trust within a community if the very processes by which justice is sought are themselves corrupted.

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The pursuit of justice is not merely the concern of ancient courts. The Torah’s insistence on restrained judgment speaks directly to any moment in which hubris outruns humility. When judgment is rendered without dissent, a court — or even a congregational boardroom — loses its claim to righteousness once it becomes a chorus.

Contrast the Torah’s timeless vision with the experience of many in recent years who found themselves condemned in a chorus of public opinion. Too often, people were cruelly and publicly shamed or threatened with professional ruined for holding unpopular views. Those who rushed to judgment over them often regarded themselves as righteous. Yet measured against the standards of Shoftim, theirs was not a pursuit of justice but of retribution.

Consider any setting in which unanimity is prized over deliberation — a boardroom where dissent is unsafe, or a public hearing in which suspicion hardens into certainty before evidence is weighed. In such places, the rush to consensus actually masks the absence of conscience.

The Torah teaches the opposite premise: be humble in judgment.

So important is humility, the Torah deliberately builds safeguards into its judicial process to protect against false accusations, senseless slander and wrongful conviction. Justice, after all, should never be rushed nor easy.

The Talmud teaches that if a court unanimously convicts a defendant immediately — sans a single judge advancing even one argument in the accused’s favor — the defendant must be acquitted.

Such a ruling seems almost incomprehensible. Surely unanimous agreement demonstrates certainty. Our Rabbis taught otherwise.

If not a single voice questions a prevailing consensus, if not one member of a board or court searches for a mitigating argument, then something fundamental has broken down. Such a court has become a chorus.

What an astonishing idea. A chorus sings with a single voice; a court exists precisely because no one voice — not even that of the majority — has a lock on truth. Where a chorus’ strength lies in its univocality, a court’s strength lies in its willingness to question everything before accepting — or ruling on — anything.

True justice is defined not by consensus, but by the presence of dissent within the process of judgment.
A chorus may be beautiful. It may even be powerful. But its univocality does not permit the questions justice demands. Unanimity does not invite opposing ideas, nor does unanimity protect the minority opinion.

Only a court of justice does that.

And perhaps this is the deepest meaning of the Torah’s repeated command: “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof.”

A rush to summary judgment may satisfy the crowd. However, Parshat Shoftim asks more of us than the pursuit of self-righteous satisfaction. Judaism insists how we arrive at a ruling is no less important than the verdict itself.

Justice must be pursued justly, for in rendering judgment, we ourselves are judged. PJC

Rabbi Aaron Bisno is the senior rabbi at Temple Ohav Shalom in the North Hills. Additionally, he serves as the Frances F. & David R. Levin Rabbinic Scholar at Beit Kulanu. This column is a service of the Greater Pittsburgh Jewish Clergy Association.