Justice and the Justice of Justice
A traditional assumption of Torah study is that the scripture contains no superfluous material. There are no “extra” words in the Torah; if the Torah repeats itself, there must be a reason.
Shof’tim contains one of the more oft-quoted examples of this:
“Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” (Etz Hayim Humash, Deut. 16:20)
I think the first explanation I ever heard for this repetition pertained to emphasis. The Israelites pursuit of justice is so critical to God’s plan — or maybe to the proper fulfillment of the covenant — that Moses repeated it in his exhortation. In other words, justice is so nice he said it twice.
I think I found an explanation I like better. Last night I attended a class at my shul for adults who want to improve their prayerbook Hebrew. Our first lesson was on noun pairs. Hebrew uses a lot of compound nouns or noun pairs; in English we have campground and backpack, but in Hebrew they might be written as “camp ground” and “back pack”. I learned that Psalm 23, often considered one of the most vividly descriptive of the Psalms, contains no adjectives per se, only lots of noun pairs. “Green pastures” is more directly translated as “pastures of greenness” and “still waters” as “waters of restfulness” but actually written as “pastures greenness” and “waters restfulness”. Or something like that.
The orgininal text has no comma or other markings to guide us in the relationship between the two instances of the word for justice. It just says “tzedek tzedek”. It would be as easy to understand this as “justice of justice” as “justice, justice”.
In fact most of Shof’tim describes not what is just, but how we are to conduct ourselves in investigations, trials, and sentencing. It’s clearly not enough that we pursue justice. In order to properly fulfill the covenant and prosper and possess the land, we must even pursue justice in how we go about pursuing justice.
So much for 24. So much for Guantanamo and rendition of terror suspects. We are better than the doctine of “any means necessary”, and more is expected of us.