Parshat Shoftim contains one of our most famous phrases — tzedek tzedek tirdof — justice, justice you will pursue. This phrase, read always during the month of Elul — a month of personal reflection and introspection — is often used as the proof text for the importance of living a life committed to pursuing justice. While I love this moral rallying cry, I wondered what happens when we read this phrase in its context. What does tzedek tzedek tirdof have to do with a parshah where Moses is laying out for the people how to build courts, appoint judges, constrain kings, evaluate prophets, conduct war, and adjudicate murder? And furthermore, what is the significance of the repetition of tzedek?
Many commentators follow Rashi’s opinion that the meaning behind the repetition of the word tzedek is about the qualifications of the judges. That in order to have a just system, the judges themselves must be the ultimate example of righteousness. This interpretation doesn’t sit right with me. Are not all people susceptible to bias, corruption, and abuses of power? Since God created humans to have moral agency, God must know that not only will we make unjust choices, but that with enough power, those choices may lead to systemic oppression, authoritarianism, and violent supremacy.
In Derashot El Ami, Rabbi Moshe AviGodor Amiel zooms out and looks at the system as a whole. He makes clear that each new regime has a different definition of justice. That what justice means and how it should be carried out will change with each new leader. Therefore, the repetition can’t simply be about justice on its own; rather, it is about the ethic of justice, where both the judicial process and the decision are just. This reading moves us away from justice as a personal commitment and instead suggests that justice must be embedded into the system itself so that it can be carried out. Power corrupts even exceptionally just people, especially those responsible for holding even more powerful people and systems accountable. God and Moses know this. They are not interested in building a society that is reliant on a select few righteous people; rather, they are concerned with creating an infrastructure immune to human fallibility.
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Today, it is nearly impossible to imagine justice interwoven into the fabric of our U.S. judicial system. During my first week of work at T’ruah, the Supreme Court made two horrifying decisions impacting migrants: one to overturn the ability of the lower courts to block the Trump Administration’s move to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians and Syrians, and the other to allow officials to turn asylum seekers away at the U.S.-Mexico border. Both of these decisions are catastrophically devastating, affecting 350,000 TPS holders and an uncountable number of asylum seekers.
With regard to TPS holders, plaintiffs’ cases were based on two points: that the Trump administration failed to abide by required legal procedures established by Congress and that racial animus played a key role in the decision to terminate TPS status. The Supreme Court did not rule on whether the Trump Administration followed legal procedures; rather, the Court declined to allow judicial review of whether DHS followed the law. This means that in the future even an openly unlawful decision to grant or terminate TPS could be entirely insulated from judicial review. In addition, the majority opinion declared that President Trump’s repeated public denigration of Haiti and Haitians did not rise to the level of unconstitutional racial animus that would permit a court to set aside the TPS decision. In short, the Supreme Court neither ensured that the government followed the law nor protected the people the law was meant to protect. And even worse, they made it so that no other court could hold the government accountable to following the law in any other TPS case.
In this case, both the means and the outcome were unjust. In fact, it is alarming how far this Supreme Court decision and the Trump Administration’s gross abuse of power deviate from a governmental system described in this parshah. When judges stop asking whether those in power have followed the law, justice is no longer embedded in the system. What guidance does Shoftim provide for us now?
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The verse that comes just after the repetition seemingly takes a hard left turn. We read, “You are not to plant yourself an asheirah [or] any kind of tree beside the altar of YHVH your God.” Looking up asheirah in Brown Driver Briggs, the lexicon for biblical Hebrew, we learn that it refers both to a Canaanite goddess of fortune and happiness and to a cultic symbol carved out of wood and placed near the entrance of a holy site. The rabbis of the Talmud take this a step further by saying that the asheirah was a symbol of idolatry and imagined it not as a wooden post, but rather a tree that is planted and grows roots. In Sanhedrin, Reish Lakish likens the appointment of unjust judges to planting a tree of idolatry. In keeping with Amiel’s thinking, Rabbi Thomas Alpert writes, “that is to say, a miscarriage of justice is like the planting of a tree that encourages evil and idolatrous practices.”
Now, I am not here to perpetuate the misogyny of equating the worship of a goddess to evil practices. Instead, I’ll offer a different interpretation. The move to monotheism, the worship of a single God was a move toward oneness, toward seeing everything and everyone as interconnected. Therefore, the worship of “other gods” — especially ones that we pray to to amass wealth — is a move that threatens that interconnectivity. According to the rabbis then, a miscarriage of justice threatens our ability to see ourselves as one being, as deeply reliant on each other for survival. Planting an asheirah is the biblical version of seeding wealth and greed so that its roots become so embedded into the earth that we cannot uproot them.
Parshat Shoftim is not a set of instructions for how to reform a broken system. It is a world-building exercise where, with God’s instructions, we create new systems with just processes and just outcomes. When our systems have been corrupted, perhaps our work is to build alternatives — to join together in our communities and create structures of accountability and care. If a miscarriage of justice is the same as planting an asheirah, then let us not stand by and watch the tree take root. We must uproot it and ensure that oneness and our deep interconnectedness are what we worship on our altars. And in doing so, we will build communities capable of tzedek tzedek tirdof.
Rabbi Mol Paul (she/they) is T’ruah’s national rabbinic organizer. Mol comes to T’ruah after a 10-year career building inclusive Jewish communities as a community organizer, youth and adult educator, street chaplain, and shaliach tzibur. She was ordained from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 2025. Mol loves singing wherever and whenever they can, tending to their garden, trying to perfect the chocolate chip cookie, and spending as much time as possible with their niblings.