The Predictable Corruption of Power
The Midrash Tanhuma, commenting on the opening of Parshat Mishpatim Exodus 21, names the corruption of power almost clinically, contrasting how power works among people with how it works for God.
All of the strength and praise and greatness and might of the King of Kings is that he loves justice.
It is the way of the world that whomever has a strong arm does not want to conduct his business with justice, rather he ignores justice, cheats and steals… and does what is not right with his enemies. But the Holy One Blessed Be, King of Kings, loves justice, and does His will only with justice. (Midrash Tanhuma, Mishpatim 21:1)
Notice what the midrash is actually claiming. God is the most powerful “king” of all — more powerful than any human strong arm could ever be — and yet God’s defining greatness is precisely that this power never corrupts God’s justice. Among people, a strong arm bending justice toward itself is simply “the way of the world” — a description of what power does, structurally, to a person’s sense of what is fair. Power doesn’t just tempt toward corruption; it reorganizes justice around itself until the bias no longer feels like bias. It sets up a question we will return to: If God’s power and God’s justice can coexist without corruption, why can’t ours?
Ramban locates the deeper logic in the laws protecting the stranger, widow, and orphan: “On the side of their oppressors there is power, and I deliver each one from him that is too strong for him.” (Ramban on Exodus 22:20–23)
The imbalance of power is what makes injustice possible in the first place, and God, according to Ramban, is always on the side of those who are weaker. When the Torah grudgingly permits a king, it surrounds the office with restraints aimed at the corrupting mechanics of power itself: “He shall not have many wives, lest his heart go astray; nor shall he amass silver and gold.” (Deuteronomy 17:17)
The danger named isn’t that the king will be a bad man — it’s that accumulation itself corrupts.
And when the people ask Samuel for a king “to be like all the other nations,” Samuel answers with a precise inventory of what concentrated power takes: “He will take your sons… He will take your daughters… He will seize your choice fields, vineyards, and olive groves… and you shall become his slaves.” (I Samuel 8:11–17)
They want the king anyway. The text treats this not as a failure of information but as the predictable pull of wanting to be normal — even when normal means submitting to the very dynamic just described.
The Rhetoric of Deuteronomy 8: Built to Keep Interrupting You
If corruption by power is predictable, the Torah’s answer is not a single warning but a structure of return to the proper path. Deuteronomy 8 is built as a chiasm that moves from exhortation to wandering, to richness to the central command not to forget, then back to richness again, wandering again, exhortation again. The form performs the argument: You cannot simply move from need into plenty and stay there. The text keeps folding you back.
Its diagnosis of what will go wrong once the need is gone is almost a script for the interior monologue of the well-fed:
You shall eat your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied… then your heart will grow proud, and you will forget the Lord your God… And you will say to yourself, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.” (Deuteronomy 8:12–14, 17)
Comfort manufactures a story of deserving — I earned this, this is mine by right — that erases the memory of having been given anything.
Against this, the Torah installs a ritual counter-mechanism: Deuteronomy 26‘s bikkurim — first-fruits declaration requires the farmer, basket of harvest in hand, to say these very words aloud: “My father was a wandering Aramean… The Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us; they imposed heavy labor upon us.” (Deuteronomy 26:5–6)
The moment of greatest agricultural triumph is turned into the moment for declaring dependency and history, rather than achievement.
This is a technology, not a one-time lecture — tied to the agricultural calendar, repeated every year regardless of how settled you’ve become, because the Torah assumes forgetting is the default setting of comfort. The corrective has to be default too.
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When Forgetting Becomes Something Else
Here I want to press further than the sources on their own terms. Deuteronomy 8 and its calendar are calibrated to a particular scale of danger: the quiet, structural forgetting of the settled and comfortable — people who once knew what it was to be strangers slowly ceasing to notice the stranger, forgetting the land was a gift rather than an achievement. That is a real sin, but a sin of omission and self-satisfaction.
What we are watching now goes beyond that. It is not comfortable people quietly resting on “my power and the might of my hand got me this,” but active, organized, state-backed dispossession and violence — carried out not by individuals losing perspective but by groups backed by systems whose purpose is seizure and displacement. This is the manifestation of I Samuel 8’s description of the king: the one who takes — fields, homes, life itself — as policy, not lapse.
If we faced only the drift Deuteronomy 8 anticipates, its remedy would be sufficient: keep shifting perspective, keep the calendar turning, and the erosion would be arrested before it hardened. But rituals of remembrance are built to interrupt complacency, not to stop a machine already in motion toward conquest. Answering organized violence with only “let us remember we were once strangers” risks becoming its own consoling story — a practice that soothes the conscience of the powerful while doing nothing to arrest the power.
The Torah’s rhetoric of return was designed to make a reckoning possible, not to be one. Reciting “my father was a fugitive Aramean” strips away the story that your power earned you everything — but that’s only the opening move. It doesn’t yet look at what has been done with the power, or to whom. Remembering you were once a stranger is necessary preparation for facing the harm; it is not itself the facing.
In the West Bank village of Tell last week, settlers backed by a Defense Ministry-funded “rapid response security team” entered a Palestinian village in an area formally administered by the Palestinian Authority. Four Palestinians and two Israelis were killed. Soldiers who were present appear not to have intervened against the armed settlers. In the days after, the Israeli prime minister ordered a Palestinian home demolished, promised a crackdown on Palestinian towns, and moved to recognize additional outposts as official settlements, rewarding with land the very actors whose incursion had triggered the violence.
Dahlia Scheindlin’s account of these events in Haaretz describes not only what happened, but how Israeli mainstream and social media processed it, and what that processing reveals about where things stand. She reports a running toll, prior to this incident, of sixty-eight Palestinian deaths for every Israeli death in the West Bank that year — a disparity that, she notes, goes largely unremarked in Israeli public life unless a Jew is among the dead. And she points to Elisha Yered, the oft-quoted leader of the so-called “hilltop youth,” who has boasted openly on a podcast about a deliberate strategy of pushing into Palestinian areas to force residents out — an aim, she reports, that government ministers have described as modeled explicitly on Gaza.
This situation that goes beyond corruption into full-scale violence, resists Deuteronomy 8‘s own diagnosis, which fears the heart that says “my power got me this” — self-deception born of comfort. What Scheindlin describes is not self-deception. It is a chain of actors — settler, army that declines to intervene, minister who rewards the incursion, government that states its aim aloud — most if not all fully aware of what they are doing. This is not the ordinary human failure to remember we were strangers. It is domination that has learned to call itself self-defense. The Torah’s practice of remembering — “we were strangers too” — was built to soften complacency, not to see through a story constructed specifically to make that memory feel beside the point — or worse, to be used cynically to justify terrible violence.
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The Choice, Faced without Flinching
And yet Deuteronomy itself insists a choice always remains: “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse… Choose life.” (Deuteronomy 30:19–20)
This is not offered as an easy consolation. It is offered as a demand that presupposes we can actually see what we’re choosing between.
Simone de Beauvoir, in her essay “The Ethics of Ambiguity,” sheds even more light on moral choice in the face of deep injustice:
Cowardice doesn’t pay… Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics… only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer… what distinguishes the tyrant from the man of good will is that the first rests in the certainty of his aims, whereas the second keeps asking himself, “Am I really working for the liberation of men? Isn’t this end contested by the sacrifices through which I aim at it?” (Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity)
De Beauvoir cuts against the temptation to resolve a genuinely ambiguous situation into an easy story, with one side wholly righteous. She insists on staying inside that discomfort instead — refusing the “consoling ethics” that pretend away the tension between means and ends, between the violence done and the good supposedly being pursued. Her sharpest distinction is between two kinds of people: the tyrant, who has settled into “the certainty of his aims” and so never has to ask whether the harm he causes undercuts the good he claims to serve, and the person of real moral seriousness, who keeps asking exactly that — “Am I really working for the liberation of men? Isn’t this end contested by the sacrifices through which I aim at it?” — precisely because she refuses the tyrant’s comfort.
That distinction maps directly onto Deuteronomy 30. Choosing life is not a decision you make once and then rest in, the way the tyrant rests in his certainty. It has to be renewed by continual self-questioning, or it curdles into just another consoling story — one more version of the certainty de Beauvoir is warning against. A people convinced of its own righteousness, no longer asking whether its own violence undercuts its own claimed values, has stopped choosing in any meaningful sense. It has settled into tyrannical complacency.
The Sifrei Devarim, commenting on the command in this week’s parshah to “walk in His ways,” asks what that could possibly mean — how can a person walk in the ways of God? Its answer is that we are to imitate God’s own attributes: “Just as the Holy One is called merciful and gracious, you too be merciful and gracious, and give gratuitously to all… Just as the Holy One is called righteous… you too be righteous.” (Sifrei Devarim, 49:1)
That is the positive side of the choice in Deuteronomy 30 — we can choose to imitate God in so many ways.
The Maharal answers the question the Tanhuma raised at the start: If God’s power and God’s justice coexist without corruption, why can’t ours? He explains why we’re only asked to imitate God’s chesed, kindness, and not God’s mishpat, justice: “There is no correlation at all between human justice and God’s justice… a person could make a mistake in enacting justice.” (Maharal, Hiddushei haAggadot, Sotah 14a)
Kindness is something anyone can do without making a mistake, but human justice is fallible. We are not God, and we cannot claim God’s exemption from the corrupting pull of a “strong arm.” That is exactly the gap the Tanhuma opened with: Only God enacts justice without wavering; a human strong arm cannot be trusted to. So our part is limited to chesed and to striving toward justice — never to declaring that our own justice is God’s justice. That humility is itself a check against anyone who dresses up violence as righteousness.
The Torah gave Israel a technology against the ordinary corrosion of comfort: a calendar and a rhetoric built to interrupt self-satisfaction with the memory of vulnerability. That technology remains necessary — but it was built for drift, not for conquest; for the sin of forgetting, not the sin of taking. When power’s predictable corruption hardens into organized, state-backed dispossession, remembering that we were once strangers is where the reckoning must begin, not where it ends. Only once we have looked — without the comforting story, without resting in the certainty of our own righteousness — at how far this has actually gone, does Deuteronomy 30‘s choice become a real choice again, rather than a verse recited over what we have already refused to see.
Rabbi Shoshana Cohen (she/her) leads T’ruah programming on the ground in Israel and Palestine, including seminars, clergy trips, and the year-long Rabbinical and Cantorial Fellowship.