Justice Belongs to the Courts
Words of Wisdom with Rabbi Efrat Zarren-Zohar
This Dvar Torah on Parshat Shoftim was edited from one written by Rabbi Steven Abraham of Temple Beth El, Omaha. You can follow him on Substack where he explores Torah, Jewish identity, Israel, and the moral and spiritual questions facing the Jewish people today.
Israeli West Bank barrier sign.jpg. (2026, February 25). Wikimedia Commons.
What Bret Stephens Got Right — and Why the Torah Got There First
Every rabbi eventually learns an uncomfortable truth: it is much easier to condemn the sins of others than the sins of our own.
The prophets of Israel understood this.
Nathan did not rebuke the Philistines; he rebuked King David.
Jeremiah did not devote his ministry to the moral failures of Babylon. He called his own people to account.
Covenant begins with self-examination.
That is why I found myself nodding in agreement as I read Bret Stephens’ recent column in The New York Times warning that Jewish terrorism in the West Bank poses “a direct threat to Israel’s security and statehood, and thus to Zionism itself.”
Stephens is one of Israel’s most steadfast defenders.
He has spent years exposing the double standards routinely applied to the Jewish state and resisting the reflexive moral equivalence that so often characterizes discussions of Israel.
Precisely because he has earned that credibility, his warning deserves to be heard.
He leaned on a public letter to the American president from Matan Vilnai and hundreds of retired senior Israeli commanders not a dovish constituency warning that escalating violence in the West Bank is poised to ignite the region.
He cited the IDF’s own accounting: 867 nationalistic and settler-related crimes in 2025, up from 682 the year before.
Bret Stephens writes as a Zionist. I write as a rabbi.
His concern is the future of the Jewish state.
Mine is the moral vision upon which that state rests.
When the Torah imagines Jewish sovereignty, it does not begin with armies, borders, or diplomacy.
It begins with courts.
“Judges and officers shall you appoint in all your gates… Justice, justice shall you pursue.” (Devarim/ Deuteronomy 16:18-20)
This is one of the Torah’s most revolutionary ideas: Justice is not entrusted to the individual. It belongs to institutions.
The Torah does not command every passionate believer to become an instrument of divine judgment.
It commands the creation of judges, officers, witnesses, and courts.
Justice must be disciplined by law, restrained by procedure, and accountable to something larger than the convictions of any one person.
The enduring genius of Judaism lies... in its profound suspicion of unchecked zeal.
The Mishnah teaches: “Pray for the welfare of the government, for were it not for fear of it, people would swallow one another alive.” (Pirkei Avot 3:2)
The Sages did not romanticize governments. They lived under Roman occupation and knew firsthand that rulers could be cruel and corrupt.
Yet they also understood something timeless: when every individual appoints himself judge and executioner, civilization itself begins to unravel.
The alternative to imperfect law is not perfect justice; it is chaos.
That insight explains why the rabbis treated the story of Pinchas (BaMidbar / Numbers 25: 6-13) with such caution.
Pinchas acted with extraordinary zeal. The Torah rewards him with a covenant of peace.
And the Talmud spends its energy building a wall around him.
Halakhah hi v’ein morin ken — this is the law, but we do not teach it (Sanhedrin 82a).
Had Pinchas approached the court beforehand to ask whether he was permitted to act, the court would not have allowed him.
Had Zimri turned and killed Pinchas first, Zimri would have been exempt from liability, because in that instant Pinchas was a pursuer.
The Jerusalem Talmud goes further still and reports that the Sages wished to excommunicate him (Yerushalmi Sanhedrin 9:7).
Consider what our rabbis did there.
They took the single case in all of Scripture where vigilante killing was divinely ratified, and they sealed it so thoroughly that no one could ever climb through the opening.
A law that may not be taught is a law no one may rely upon.
The extremists in the hills above Nablus have a theology of Pinchas.
We have a theology of containing Pinchas.
It is the harder of the two, and the more Jewish.
Which brings me to the part of Stephens’ column I cannot stop thinking about.
He reports that administrative detention imprisonment without formal charge is deployed as a matter of routine against suspected Palestinian terrorists and has been specifically withheld from suspected Jewish ones.
That is not mercy. It has a name in Torah.
“For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords… who shows no favor and takes no bribe.” (Deuteronomy 10:17)
Lo yisa panim— He shall not lift up a face.
It is the technical term for the judge who decides whom he is looking at before he decides what happened.
The failure in the West Bank is not a failure of legal authority. The authority exists.
It is a failure of will, which is to say a decision. Describing the perpetrators as roughly a hundred and fifty juvenile delinquents does not change the arithmetic.
It only tells us whose face is being lifted up.
There is an instinct, at this point, to reach for the ritual of the eglah arufah, the elders washing their hands over the broken-necked heifer and declaring that they did not shed this blood.
It is the wrong text. That rite exists for a murder whose perpetrator is unknown; ours post video of themselves.
And the Mishnah closes the door itself: when murderers became many, the eglah arufah was discontinued (Sotah 9:9). The rite presumes rarity. It cannot survive frequency.
867 incidents, up from 682.
Perhaps no rabbinic voice speaks more directly to our own moment than Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin, the Netziv of Volozhin.
In his introduction to Ha’amek Davar on Genesis, the Netziv argues that the generation of the Second Temple was filled with Torah scholars and outwardly righteous people.
Their tragedy was not a lack of piety but a corruption of it.
Convinced that they alone possessed the truth, they justified hatred and violence l’shem shamayim, for the sake of Heaven.
The Netziv’s warning is devastating precisely because he refuses the comforting illusion that religious devotion automatically produces moral clarity.
Sometimes it produces the opposite.
The danger is that they become so certain God agrees with them that they no longer believe they must answer to anyone else.
That temptation is as old as humanity itself.
Love of Israel has never required blindness to Israel’s failures. If anything, the covenant demands the opposite.
The closer the relationship, the greater the obligation to speak honestly.
The Talmud teaches: “Whoever is able to protest against the members of his household and does not protest is held accountable for his household; against the people of his city, he is held accountable for his city.” (Shabbat 54b)
That teaching is not an invitation to self-righteousness. It is a rejection of tribalism.
We do not excuse wrongdoing because those committing it happen to be our own.
None of this diminishes the reality that Israel continues to face enemies committed to its destruction. Nor does it erase the horrors of October 7 or the impossible burdens borne by Israeli soldiers and civilians.
Two Israelis were killed near the village of Tell in the same days these fires were set. A people under siege does not lose its right to defend itself.
But self-defense and vigilantism are not the same thing.
The first obligation is always to protect innocent life Jewish and Arab alike for every human being is created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.
Violence directed against innocents is a moral outrage before it is a political problem.
When such violence is committed by Jews while invoking Jewish claims or Jewish destiny, it commits a second offense as well: it desecrates the covenant in whose name it purports to act.
The Jewish state was never intended to demonstrate merely that Jews could wield power. History has shown that many nations can do that.
Israel was meant to demonstrate something rarer: that power itself can be governed by justice; that sovereignty need not become license; that even in our own land, under our own government, exercising power in our own defense, we remain bound by the same covenant that bound our ancestors in the wilderness.
That covenant has never entrusted justice to zeal. It entrusts justice to law.
And that is why, on this question, Bret Stephens is right.
Stephens is right because the Torah has insisted from the beginning that a Jewish society worthy of its name cannot permit anyone — not even those convinced they are acting in the name of Heaven — to place themselves above the law.
“Justice, justice shall you pursue.”
The command is not addressed to vigilantes.
It is addressed to a nation determined to build a society where even the most righteous submit themselves to justice before they presume to administer it.
