Parashat Shoftim | BJ Rabbinic Fellow Iliana Brodsky | August 15, 2026

Shabbat Shalom.

It's been a treat to, ease back into my time here at Joshua.

And I was away for the summer studying at Yeshiva Hadar,

a couple blocks away.

But it felt like a whole other world.

So thank you all for your warm welcome back.

And I'm excited to share a little bit of Torah this morning.

And part of Team Moshe instructs the people of Israel on the laws

and limitations of the justice systems they are to live under.

Upon entering the land.

It defines various positions of governmental leadership,

namely judges and law enforcers,

kings, priests and prophets.

It also gives some examples of necessary

policies to maintain a moral society.

In these instructions is where we are taught how to deal with vengeance.

Seekers say that three times fast.

Chapter 19 boasts

a stark ruling regarding the a zo mem.

The conspiring witness verses 16 through 19 of the chapter state

should a malicious witness rise up against a party and testify falsely.

The two parties who hold the dispute should stand before the Lord,

before the priests or the judges of their time to be investigated by them.

If the one who testified is found to be a false

witness, having perpetuated falsehood against his fellow, you shall do to him

as he plotted to do against his fellow, thereby

rooting out evil from your midst.

That is, if we went.

If a witness is found to have provided a false testimony before a court

with intent of harming the defendant, that witness is sentenced

as if they themselves had committed the accused crime.

Here,

the Torah teaches that the punishment of the malicious witness

must be commensurate with the harm they intended to do,

even if their scheme was discovered and the defendant was never actually indicted.

To drive the commandment home, the chapter ends with

the imperative law to say, do not look on with compassion.

Nefesh B'nefesh ion by ion Shamba

shain Yad beard rego borrego.

A life for life.

An eye for an eye A tooth for a tooth A hand for a hand A foot for a foot.

It's ruthless.

The Torah promotes this punishment of black

stallions or retributive justice only in two other places.

Exodus 21 and Leviticus 24.

Each of the other cases are complex in their own right,

and present a scenario in which someone permanently injures

another and is thereby charged to ensure endure commensurate damage.

In the case presented in our parsha, however,

the intended harm is never actually enacted.

The vengeance was conspired

but not carried out.

Should the punishment towards that person really be

as severe as when the damage is actually done?

The tradition deals with the starkness

of this ruling in a few different ways.

The Gomorrah and Baba karma softens the impact of these verses,

teaching that in this case of a conspiring witness,

we apply restitute of justice rather than retributive justice.

It says the School of Rabbi

Thea taught that the verse states, yard by yard, hand for a hand,

and what is given from one hand to another.

Payment.

I love rabbinic

elsewhere, voices like the Regio contend

that we are given this law about severe treatment of a conspiring witness

to show the power and the prowess of the courts of our nation,

as if to say, our judges are not to be messed with.

Don't even try it.

Rashi explains another widely held interpretation.

He comments that this law comes to teach us about the David case

or the after the fact case that the Torres specification of this punishment,

and a case where the schemes of the conspiring witness are discovered

before harm has been done to the defendant, actually teach us that

if we discover the schemes after the harm has been done to the defendant,

we are not to punish the witness at all.

God, the ultimate judge,

allowed for their testimony to be believed,

and one does not question the divine judgment.

It's a little complex, very interesting.

I think, however, there's a simpler explanation

for why the conspiring witness is treated as if they have caused actual harm.

I think it's because they have caused actual harm,

perhaps not to the

intended individual, but certainly to the community,

to the social fabric of the society.

The justice systems and policies passed down by Moshe Rubino and Portia

team are set to protect us, to keep us in good standing with one another

and to ensure our ability to thrive and progress in fairness and in faith.

Abuse of those systems through improper use jeopardizes

the whole project, destabilizes our capacity

for moral self-governance.

The sages of our Gomorrah also recognized

the conspiring witness as a threat to the larger community,

alongside the full retribution commanded by the Torah text.

They impose strict social consequences for the conspiring witness

and a disagreement between a buyer and robber.

A buyer states that one who is found to be a conspiring witness

should be stripped of all their legal

force, even retroactively.

His ruling implies that if the witness in question

had previously signed a Katoomba or confirmed a land purchase,

those transactions, be they completely unrelated

to the case in which the witness acted with mal intent, would no longer

be considered valid by the court system.

Rather, pushes back,

rather notes that it would be massively complicated

to undo other people's legal proceedings retroactively.

He's like it would be chaos.

It would be total chaos.

And he suggests, rather, that the witnesses be legitimized

from the point that the,

false testimony is discovered onward.

It's a very reasonable counter.

Yeah.

In the hundreds of disagreements between a buyer and robber

that we find in the Babylonian Talmud, this particular case

is one of six in which we follow the ruling of a bad guy.

The conspiring witness is too complete to be completely stripped

of their legal force, even retroactively, even though it's complicated,

the abuse of the legal

system to exact one's own personal revenge is a big deal, and warrants

the complete severing of this person from that system

and from their status as a legally forceful member of the community.

The conspiring witness causes social harm,

and so they bear a profound social consequence.

We may no longer have Jewish courts with Torah scholars

seated as judges or Davidic kings appointed by prophets of God.

Still, the transgression of abuse of our legal system

to exact personal revenge or personal gain is alive and well today,

carried out by leaders and lay citizens alike.

This is perhaps a debilitating symptom of American opportunism,

or representation of the desperation many feel

to stay afloat or ahead in our challenging world.

I'm not sure.

However, I do know that along with the consistent exploitation

of our legal system from all strata of our society,

we are seeing a historic level of distrust in our courts.

A survey conducted by Equal Justice Works earlier this year reported

that 79% of Americans perceive injustice in the current legal system,

61% of individuals report that they believe that

their income impacts their ability to receive a fair trial.

The impression many Americans have is that our courts are not functioning

as vehicles for fairness and peace between citizens,

but rather serve the individual interests of the privileged.

Few are those who know best how to exploit the system for personal gain.

Torah tells us this is inoperable.

The opening lines of this parsha proudly, profoundly call

Zedek tiered of justice.

Justice, you shall pursue.

The Midrash explains that the doubling of the word seek here

teaches that justice can only be pursued through just means

with trusted actors.

We cannot fulfill our aims of a just and a safe society.

When the legal systems themselves have been compromised by those

who use them with intent to harm others or mete out personal revenge.

Our sages teach that the imperative of this verse is to continue in pursuit,

that while we may grow weary of the flaws in ourselves

and in our systems of governing,

we have to continue to seek out the most rightly guided treatment

and to and to fight to ensure it's available to all.

The pursuit is the mitzvah,

the command, the antidote to the damage caused by malicious actors.

It is a way

to encourage us to continue to strive for what is right and what is fair,

even when it feels so out of reach.

Our tradition doesn't only offer wisdom for deterring

and overcoming bad actors within our legal systems.

It also gives us a tool for ensuring

that we do not become them ourselves,

and we do our best to repair the damage we have done

and to accept others in their attempts to do the same.

Spiritual accounting is itself

a form of resetting the scales of seeking interpersonal justice.

Yet it operates in a completely different mode, not through legal proceedings

between accusers and defendants, but in relationships

between friends, colleagues, siblings.

Year after year, in the same breath that we read this parsha about justice

and power, our tradition instructs us to turn towards one another

to make amends expansively and with intent.

We do this so that the hurt and the anger we carry for one year does not accumulate

and spill over into something vengeful and more widely destructive.

These two

modes of pursuing justice are inherently connected.

Mending the interpersonal through trouver through relationship

is a protective practice for our broader communal systems.

It frees us, little by little from the adversarial instinct,

from the notion that when we feel hurt or believe we are owed something,

we must put one another on trial.

I truly believe that if we exercise this muscle of forgiveness

and make the most of this season of reflection and repair,

we will be more committed to using our broader

social systems as they are intended to protect one another,

to advance our collective condition,

to pursue justice for its own sake, not for vengeance

or personal gain or self-satisfaction.

This law

may we engage in a true of us, so complete

and so compelling that it transforms not only who we are to one another,

but the systems we rely upon to treat one another fairly.

May it be just one tiny step

to move us and our world ever more towards justice.

Shabbat shalom.