‘Justice, justice’ … why all the repetition?

How many times were you told by your grandmother not to leave food on your plate? How often did you hear, “Do you know there are children starving in (fill in blank)?” And then, we’d feel guilty for the rest of the week.

Well, the Torah has the same policy about words—nothing gets left over, nothing gets wasted, not a single word. And if a word shows up twice, you can be sure that Moses didn’t just repeat it because he forgot he had already said it.

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So here’s our verse from this week’s Torah reading, Shoftim. Tzedek, tzedek tirdof—“Justice, justice, shall you pursue” (Deuteronomy 16:20). Two “justices” in one sentence.

Now, I don’t know about your Hebrew-school teacher, but mine would have circled that in red pen and written “redundant” in the margin. Except this is the Torah, not a bar mitzvah speech, and no red pens are allowed. So the commentators never let a good repetition go to waste, and we have different explanations.

Rashi says the double “justice” is about where you go looking for it. Don’t just wander into any old courtroom. Find yourself a reputable beit din, a court with judges who have a reputation for honesty.

Because, let’s be honest, you can have the most righteous cause in the world, but if the judge is on the take, or the court is a bit of a shemozzle, then justice is just a word painted on the wall. Rashi is basically telling us: The messenger matters as much as the message.

You may have heard of the term “BaDaTz.” It stands for Beit Din Tzedek, which means a “House of Righteous Justice.” An authentic beit din dispenses justice and righteousness with unquestionable integrity.

Then along comes Reb Simcha Bunim of Peshischa, a Chassidic master of the 18th-19th century and gives the verse a little twist. He reads it not as “pursue justice and also pursue justice”—as if God were simply nagging us twice for good measure—but as “pursue justice, justly.”

In other words: how you go about getting justice must be just as kosher as the justice you’re chasing.

The end does not justify the means. You don’t get to lie, cheat, bully or manipulate your way to a righteous outcome and then take a bow as if the finish line erased the whole ugly race. A tzaddik doesn’t win by playing dirty, even for a cause he’s certain that the Almighty Himself would applaud.

Now, I can already hear some of you—because I get this question every single time I give this class: “Rabbi, surely there are exceptions?” And you’re quite right, there are. Judaism is not a religion of rigid slogans; it is a religion of nuance, which is precisely why we need dozens of volumes of Talmud instead of one bumper sticker.

Take the terrible years of the Holocaust. A Nazi officer stops a Jew on the street and demands: “Are you a Jew?” And the Jew, to save his own life, says “No.”

That, my friends, is not a lie in the eyes of halachah, Jewish law—that is survival. It is pikuach nefesh, the preservation of life, which trumps almost everything else in the book. Nobody is writing that fellow up for a violation of the ninth commandment. Quite the opposite; we would say he did exactly the right thing.

And on a lighter note, there’s the classic from married life.

Your wife tries on a dress, twirls in front of the mirror and asks, “Does this make me look fat?” Gentlemen, let me save you years of therapy: There is only one halachically, diplomatically and matrimonially correct answer to that question. And it is not “well, funny you should ask.”

This, too, is a matter of life and death—and you’d better answer the question appropriately or you may be putting your very life in danger. Shalom bayit (“peace in the home”) is itself a Torah value, and sometimes a small, harmless fib in the service of somebody’s dignity and your own domestic tranquility is not a crime against truth. It’s allowable. It’s practically a mitzvah.

But remember that these are the exceptions, not the rule. They’re the fine print at the bottom of the contract, not the headline. The headline—those big bold letters at the top of the page—is still tzedek, tzedek tirdof: “Justice, justice, shall you pursue.”

Don’t build a good result on a foundation of rot. Don’t tell yourself that a little dishonesty here, a little corner-cutting there is a small price for a big win because it never stays small. It has a funny way of becoming the whole story.

So between Rashi and Reb Simcha Bunim, I think we get the complete picture, and it isn’t complicated, even if it took two rabbis and a few centuries to spell it out.

Rashi tells us where to look for justice—through people and institutions you can trust. The Chassidic master tells us how to walk there—with clean hands the entire way. Put them together, and you’ve got a life lesson of eternal worth.

It’s not enough to want the right outcome. You have to earn it in the right way. And that, my friends, is why the Torah says “justice” twice—because it takes two to get it right.

To end, I can’t help thinking about how this applies to the situation in the Mideast.

There are millions of advocates for Palestinian Arabs all over the globe, and they may well be correct to seek fairness for them. But are these proponents doing so with justice and truth, or with deception and defamation?

Blood libels against Israel are not justified by any measure of morality. If you seek equitability for the oppressed, the downtrodden and the suffering, then do it honestly … or don’t do it at all.

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