Divinity is in the detail
What's in this week's Parasha?
Sometimes I have only to look at the opening verses of our parasha for a Purim joke to pop unseasonably into my head without asking me permission, The quite awful joke (wait for it!) is: how do we know that Mordechai’s listeners were hard of hearing? Well just look at the opening verse of the Megillah: Vayehi b’ymei Achashverosh. Who? Achashverosh!
When Scripture repeats a word it isn’t really because we are deaf. The famous third verse of our parasha (the one that prompted the joke) is a case in point: Tzedek tzedek tirdof.
The ArtScroll Chumash translates the verse straight. “Righteousness, righteousness shall you pursue!”
The Chasidic master Rebbe Simcha Bunim of Przysucha (1765-1827) renders: “Pursue righteousness righteously!” In Jewish ethics and morality, the end does not justify the means. The Robin Hood syndrome of stealing from the rich in order to benefit the poor has no echo in the Torah way of life. A mitzvah that results through an averah (sin) is no mitzvah (Daf Yomi students will have just been reminded of this principle enunciated in tractate Succah 30a).
However “righteousness” is not the only meaning of “tzedek”. Every kosher-observant Jew has heard of “Badats”, a word used in the context of those providing the most reliable hechsherim (stamps of kosher approval). Badats is an acronym for three words: “beit din tzedek”. We would hardly seek to translate it “righteous Beit Din” – as opposed to an unrighteous bet din perhaps? We would hope there is no such thing! Rather “beit din tzedek” means “Torah court of justice”. “Tzedek” means “justice”.
I would wager no other language in the world allocates the same word to an ethical concept like righteousness and a legal imperative like justice. In Judaism you cannot have one without the other.
We can illustrate this by taking a mitzvah such as “lo tignov – do not steal”. On Mount Sinai the words “lo tignov” were proclaimed and thou shalt not steal has been accepted by every civilised society. It is a paradigm of righteous conduct. But it is open to 1001 variables of interpretation. What are its parameters?
For the Torah Jew in addition to its plain meaning it encompasses: don’t kidnap or aid and abet abduction or hijacking however noble the cause may or may not be. Don’t steal ideas = plagiarism. Don’t steal an individual’s right to express their reasonable views by suppressing free speech = totalitarianism. Don’t steal a person’s trust = fraud and deception. Don’t steal the right to objective thought = abusive propaganda and intrusive advertising. Don’t steal a person’s time, don’t be a timewaster or worse a peddler of gossip and slander. Don’t even steal an individual’s sleep by awakening them without permission.
For two millennia, yeshivah students have grappled over the length and breadth of three Talmudic tractates with the precise ramifications of such matters as cows grazing in others’ fields (substitute: parking over another’s driveway) and damage done to borrowed, hired and custodial objects.
And it is God, not the devil, in the detail in what is sometimes a hair-splitting argument but which may make a difference to my responsibilities. And all this has to be adjudicated by a beit din tzedek, a Torah court of justice, and all this stems from just two words in the Torah, “lo tignov – thou shalt not steal”! To be sure a righteous person will not steal, we’d say. But we need to be guided by principles of justice in order to know how we must not steal!
“Tzedek tzedek tirdof” means “pursue righteousness (ethical perfection) through justice (precise legal parameters). But equally the reverse is the case. Justice without righteousness cut short the period of the Second Temple which was destroyed “because legal decisions were rendered according to the letter of the law and not beyond” (Bava Metzia 30b). From the context it is evident that ethical rather than ritual matters are being spoken about.
Insistence in civil disputes by each litigant on his or her full unadulterated rights does not constitute righteousness even though minimally justice may be done.
Or as Dayan Yehezkel Abramsky of the London Beth Din (subsequently resident in Bayit Vagan, Yerushalayim) was reputed to have said: “In the first two sections of Shulchan Aruch (dealing with man–God mitzvot), ‘pshara, compromise’, is an ugly word. But in the latter two sections dealing with societal mitzvot, there is no concept more sublime than compromise!”
Rabbi Chaim Ingram is the author of a series of parashah books available by contacting judaim@bigpond.net.au
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