The World Stands on Three Things
Law, Truth, and Peace
Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel said: Do not mock the law, for it is one of the three legs of the world. Why? For the sages taught, (Pirkei Avot 1:18) “On three things the world stands: On law, on truth, and on peace.” (Devarim Rabbah 5:1)
You shall appoint judges (shoftim) and officials (shotrim) for your tribes, in all the settlements that the LORD your God is giving you, and they shall govern the people with due justice. (Deuteronomy 18:1)
“Judges and officials”—shoftim are the judges who do the legal work, shotrim are the officials who see to it that the judgments handed down are executed. (Daat Z’kenim on Deut. 18:1)
In parashat Mishpatim (Exodus 21:1–24:18), the Torah describes the court system that Moses implements with the help of his father-in-law, Yitro. In this week’s parasasha—Shoftim (Deut. 16:18 - 21:9)—Moses instructs the people not just to have judges (shoftim), but executioners of justice (shotrim).
For the Daat Z’kenim those who decide the law and those who implement the law should not be the same people, much as in the U.S., the executive and the judicial branches are separated. Rashi describes shotrim as those who enact the law at the bidding of the judges, almost like their assistants, their “yes men.” Israel is to be a juristocracy. In modern parlance we might call shotrim bailiffs or police officers. But if the shotrim are simply there to carry out the will of the judges it seems strange to include them at all. Isn’t it obvious that someone will have to apply the judges’s judgment?
Rashi’s language suggests, however, that the shotrim are needed because the judges’ judgment is not going to be accepted otherwise. There are two reasons why societies fail to uphold the law—the first is that they lack understanding of what to do; the second is that they lack the will to do it. Shoftim can settle disputes, but they can’t guarantee that disputants will accept the verdict. The command to appoint shotrim is a realistic acknowledgment that law is only effective if it can be backed up by coercive use of force.
The Noam Elimelech reads the commandment to appoint shoftim and shotrim through the lens of moral psychology. Given our capacity for self-delusion, it’s not enough to “trust our judgment.” We need shotrim—we need self-rebuke and self-critique—to correct our default intuitions, shoftim. The gates of the city, he says, are none other than the gates of the self. Once you are psychologizing, you might say that shoftim and shotrim represent two different ways of trying to improve oneself. Shoftim help us identify a problem, but shotrim motivate us to do something. Freudian psychoanalysis offers insight, but Cognitive-Based Therapy addresses behavior. Obviously, insight alone isn’t good enough. But behavioral change alone may prove shallow and unsustainable if not accompanied by insight.
Another possibility is that the shotrim are more than just enforcers. Shoftim are responsible for transmitting ideals, but shotrim are responsible for realizing them. Shoftim decide “law on the books,” but shotrim decide “law on the streets.” To make this a bit more tangible, we might think of shoftim as scholars and shotrim as community leaders. Shoftim know what the tradition says; shotrim know what contemporary culture has to say in response. The command to have shoftim and shotrim thus becomes a cipher for saying “you must balance the will of God with the will of the people.”
“On three things does the world stand” is a common rabbinic formula. It imagines the world as a stool or chair, perhaps even one upon which God sits enthroned. It also implies that at a basic level, we face trade-offs between independent goods. Three independent variables, x,y,z ensure our world has depth. In Rabban Gamliel’s version of the three things—recall that he was the head of the Sanhedrin—the world stands on the pillars of law, truth, and peace. That truth and peace are opposed we know well. When people speak their truths they often conflict. Peace and compromise involve diplomacy rather than “disagreeableness,” the quality found in most breakthrough thinkers and innovators.
One way to think about the various debates between Hillel and Shammai is over the extent to which peace (civility, kindness) or truth should dominate. There is a through line that connects Hillel’s willingness to lie to a bride on her wedding night, to teach the Torah on one foot to a prospective convert, and his ethos of “steel-manning” his opponent’s words and placing them before his own. But the category of the law is different than both peace and truth. How so?
Law is different from truth in that it is practical. The commandment to keep Shabbat, for example, falls neither into the category of truth nor untruth. Rather, law replaces the true-false binary with the permitted-forbidden one. Law is also different from peace in that it is backed up by threat of punishment. Even law in the more general sense of “a law of nature” is far from peaceful. The law of gravity knows no compassion. Heavy objects fall at the same speed on the righteous and the wicked. The laws of the animal kingdom are far from peaceful.
Why would someone “mock the law,” Paul and antinomianism not withstanding? One possibility is that the truth-seekers, i.e., philosophers see law too basic, too focused on social cohesion and conformity. Another possibility is that peace-seekers see the law as incapable of touching people’s hearts and appealing to their internal motivation. Law is a mess, insufficiently pure. It makes theory the servant of casuistry, or else, it makes it the servant of pragmatism and group dynamics.
The temptation to scoff at the law is often felt most deeply by those who make the law. It’s easy for Shoftim to want nothing to do with shotrim; the law as applied on the ground is a distraction, they might say, from the law as properly presented in law review articles and Supreme Court opinions. But the call to appoint shoftim and shotrim together is a call to stand in the breech between the theoretical plane and the practical plane, the law as blueprint and the law as a living mess. In his farewell address, Moses gives us a clue that the law is as much a matter of situational discretion as it is a matter of rule and principle.
Rabbi Eliezer speaks to the fact that the project of justice is a messy one when he says, “In a place where there is justice, there is no judge; in a place where there is no justice, there is a judge” (Devarim Rabbah 5:5). The command to appoint judges, we should understand, is at the same time a recognition of our need for, and our lack of justice. A world of perfect justice would be one in which judges were redundant. But if justice is lacking in our world, then judgment, by definition, will be imperfect, as will be the judges and officials who carry it out. The Midrash interprets Rabbi Eliezer as saying that we must choose between human and divine justice, “justice below” and “justice above.” Read in this way, it’s a kind of koan, flickering in ambiguity. On one interpretation, he’s saying, “Don’t worry—if you can’t implement justice here on earth, at least God will see to it that there’s justice in heaven.” There’s a consolation in this. On the other hand, he’s warning us, “Don’t leave justice to God, for if you wait for that, you’ll end up with nothing here on earth.”
The paradox, then, is how we can speak about justice at all. To abandon the language of justice is to give up. But to insist that we know what justice is and how to implement it is to make ourselves into gods. The Talmud (Avoda Zara 52a) notes that the Torah juxtaposes the obligation to appoint judges with a proscription against planting asheirot, idolatrous shrubs, by the altar. What’s the connection? Reish Lakish says a judge unfit for judgment is a kind of asheira, a kind of idol. He is an illegitimate authority posing as a genuine one, much like an object that is falsely worshipped. The project of carrying out human justice in a messy world requires humility. When we lose that humility and think we know what justice is and that we have it, we harden ourselves. We become objects rather than subjects. Just as idolatry reduces God to one aspect of Godself, idolatry on the human level involves reducing ourselves to certain features. When our desire for justice leads us to oversimplify, we commit injustice, mistaking a look-alike for the thing itself. But if we throw up our hands, this, too, is an error. We need to balance our pursuit of ideal judgment (shoftim) with a realization that life calls for discretion (shotrim).
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh
P.S.—Here’s my latest mega thread on Friedrich Schlegel.
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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