Justice_Justice_Shalt_Thou_Pursue

“Justice, justice you shall pursue” is one of the Torah’s great exhortations. Recognizing that the Torah is always economic in its use of language, the double use of the term zedek certainly draws our attention to this somewhat abstract concept and forces us to question the Torah’s intention. Why, as Rabbi Peli asks directly, is the word repeated twice?

In some of his earlier comments, the Sefas Emes expresses the opinion that justice, “is the foundation of everything”. But, for him, justice is essentially synonymous with “truth”. “We need to keep pursuing justice,” he states, because “we can never really come to truth in the fullest sense within this lying world”. Therefore, in this world, the pursuit of justice is a never ending process, only to be attained in the world to come.

This is an interesting perspective, making the pursuit of justice less a matter of social and legal institutions and more a matter of the spirit. Our famous text becomes less a statement about justice itself, which becomes effectively an unobtainable end, and more an a directive about the importance of the pursuit itself. True justice may be impossible in this world, but its pursuit must define everything we do. As the Sefas Emes concludes, “When we pursue justice in this world, we attain it fully in the world to come. “

With no achievable outcome in this world, the pursuit itself become a process without end, and that is the Sefas Emes’ message in this week’s commentary. The pursuit of justice and truth is a never ending process, and their is always another layer to be sought. The Sefas Emes supports this idea with the popular explication of the word emet - “truth” - which is written in Hebrew with the letters aleph (the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet), mem (the middle letter of the Hebrew alphabet) and tav (the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet). The truth - the real truth - therefore, must contain the entire truth, beginning, middle and end. We must pursue the truth all the way, going deeper and deeper, ad infinitum. It is a never ending process, but it is only then that justice can be truly achieved.