September 6, 2019
What Contemporary Judges Can Learn from the Judges of Yore
By Atar HadariNo judge is so great as to be exempt from showing deference to the judicial hierarchy at large.
While some weekly Torah readings follow a clear narrative arc, or contain a unified body of teachings, others offer a smorgasbord of material that can leave commentators scrambling to figure out what links one segment to the next, let alone what brings the whole together. Among the latter category is this week’s reading of Shoftim, or “Judges” (Deuteronomy 16:18-21:9). It opens with a succession of social and legal principles that juxtapose law and idol worship, obedience and the consequences of disobedience, without any readily apparent connective logic.
Searching for answers to this conundrum, I was put in mind of one talmudic episode and one contemporary episode that together illustrate the value of what this chunk of Deuteronomy may be trying to teach us.
The “chunk” begins thus: