There are just over 1500 words, and 97 verses, in parashat Shofetim, the fifth portion in Devarim, the book of Deuteronomy.
Those 97 verses cover a lot of ground, almost overwhelming the reader with a plethora of detail on a range of subjects: the impartiality of the law; avoiding pagan cultic objects; not sacrificing animals with any serious defect; the stoning to death of idolaters and the requirement that two or more witness are needed for a capital conviction; how to proceed when legal cases are too perplexing; the dangers of king making; the duties and benefits of the Levites; strictures against fortune tellers, necromancers, magicians and others; dispossessing the nations whose people contain such individuals because God hates them; prophets, and how to tell the true from the false; establishing cities of refuge for those guilty of involuntary manslaughter; land rights; handling perjurers, the lex talionis; army morale and exemptions from military service; how to deal with a dead body whose identity is unknown and the avoiding of blood guilt.
The challenge in this situation is deciding which of the themes is best to interpret or utilise! In parashat Shofetim that is a real trial, because although the Levitical legalisms and the discovered dead body can be dismissed the rest not only jockey for attention, but arguably are highly relevant to the world, and the time, in which we find ourselves.
Unfortunately, there is a further complication imposed not by the text but by contemporary society. I cannot remember a time over the last nearly fifty years of working in and addressing congregations, where so many subjects were danger zones at best and off limits at worst. Nor can I remember a previous time where society in general and Jewish society in particular was so multi-polarised; of course there have always been single issues – foxhunting, for example – where the position of both pros and cons was so starkly different that not only could they not listen to each other they couldn’t talk to each other at all! Yet now there is an array of such issues, and the opposing sides are so arctically polarised that at best they can only hurl invective at each other and at worst they become violent.
The freedom of the pulpit, the right of the rabbi to address whatever subject they chose, in whatever way they chose to address it, is, I suspect becoming an historical relic of a time when we didn’t expect our thoughts to chime with everyone but we could have a civilised dialogue with those who disagreed, and part in a courteous manner.
I surmise that in fewer pulpits do rabbis have that kind of freedom, because they fear an over-reaction to something someone in the congregation believes them to have said; and it is possible that it could, at the very worst, fracture their relationship with their synagogue and even blight their future career. Yet, again arguably, rabbis’ opinions need to be heard, balanced and inspired by the rich panoply of Jewish tradition and informed by their own life experience; sometimes to encapsulate what the congregation is feeling and then to help with possible responses and a hefty injection of hope. Rabbis are the poorer for feeling concerned and constrained, and communities miss out too.
My beloved colleague Rabbi Bernard Hooker, z”l, used to say that if someone got up during your sermon and walked out of the sanctuary it wasn’t a problem, what was a problem was when they got up during your sermon and started walking towards you! Few rabbis would want to find themselves in either situation and so we self-censor, and run the risk of turning a precious opportunity into an anodyne, vanilla, waste of ten minutes.
So what on earth can I choose from within Shofetim? Is anything safe? Probably not, so I’ll throw caution to the wind and take the lex talionis, known to most of us as the law of ‘a eye for an eye’. It’s brutal, vengeful and horribly embarrassing, some might say, why would you choose that?!
We forget that the genius inherent in some Torah laws is that they were restrained in a way that pagan contemporary laws were not, and so it is with an eye for an eye, which is about commensurate, restorative justice and restraint. In other words, it is about maintaining a sense of proportion, not going over the top, restraining vengeful feelings and moving forward as constructively as possible.
You, dear reader, will decide on whether my ultimate choice works for you.
Rabbi Dr Charles Middleburgh, Dean and Director of Jewish Studies
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.