By Marco Del Monte
“Judges and officers shall you appoint for yourself in all your gates”. It does not say “for you”, but “for yourself”. Because everyone carries an invisible court within themselves. The eyes, the ears, the mouth, the heart: each one is a gate that lets words, images and emotions in and out. The Torah asks us to appoint judges and policemen within ourselves who know how to guard these gates, and to decide honestly what to let pass and what to hold back.
The judges are our inner balancing scale for decision-making, the ability to distinguish good from evil with clarity; the police officers, on the other hand, are the willpower that allows us to maintain that decision and apply it in practice, without letting it fade away among intentions. Immediately afterwards we read: “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof – Justice, justice shall you pursue.” The double tzedek speaks to us of two levels: external justice and inner justice. It is not enough to demand rules from others; we must also be just within our hearts, not bartering truth for our own interests.
The Gemara teaches: “Kol haposel, bemumò posel – he who disparages/disqualifies his fellow does so with the blemish that belongs to him” (Kiddushin 70b). The inner judge who allows himself to be corrupted not only deceives himself, but projects his falsehood onto others. Instead of seeing his own limitations, he attributes them to others. And here is the warning: “Do not take shochad-bribery.” Shochad is not merely the envelope passed in courts. It is any advantage, even the slightest one, that clouds the clarity of judgment, as is evident in Ketubot 105b: indeed, any complete Tzaddik who were to accept Shochad will not leave this world without becoming a fool (the term Teruf Daat is used, literally tearing apart, shredding one's own knowledge). As another Talmudic passage explains: A man does not commit a transgression unless a spirit of stupidity enters into him (Sotah 3a). In our inner courts, shochad becomes the art of justifying ourselves: “It’s not that serious… I am doing it for a good cause.” This is the subtlest corruption: turning a mistake into a merit, a sin into a mitzvah. The Sages call it mitzvah haba’ah ba’averah – when a transgression masks itself as a holy act.
It is the greatest corruption: losing honesty before Hashem, performing a comedy of justifications to ourselves. The Sages in Bava Metzia teach that even a small favour, or a simple greeting received, can change our judgment of another person. If someone usually does not greet us, and suddenly gives us a smile, something immediately changes inside us: we begin to judge them more leniently. In the same way, a wrong received pushes us to see evil even where there is none, to obstruct, to create difficulties for that person. If this holds true between people, how much more so in our relationship with ourselves: when a pleasure attracts us, our judgment immediately becomes biased. And so it happens that we prefer to sleep a little longer, and our conscience is instantly corrupted: “That way I will have more kavanah in tefilah.” Or again: “If I don’t smoke on Shabbat, I get nervous, it’s better to smoke to be happy on Shabbat” and so many other examples. The example does not matter: the mechanism is always the same.
Our conscience allows itself to be corrupted by a little shochad, invents elegant narratives, and turns a comfortable compromise into a devout act. “A gift blinds even the eyes of the wise.” Even the greatest of judges risks losing clarity in the face of a minor advantage. And if this applies to the wise, how much more so to us, who every day are tempted to become defence attorneys for our own passions. But the Torah asks of us another path. Tzedek, tzedek tirdof. Justice repeated twice reminds us that we must be just not only in our actions, but also in our intentions. Justice on the outside and justice on the inside. Honesty with others and honesty with God. Shochad, the Sages explain, becomes achad, “one” with the one who receives it. The person who allows himself to be corrupted stops distinguishing himself from falsehood, becoming one with it. The task of our inner Beit Din is therefore to maintain a distance from falsehood, not to merge with it. The Sages teach us that true freedom is born from self-discipline. Not from doing whatever one wants, but from not selling oneself for a petty gain. Because he who lets himself be corrupted by his own justifications is no longer free. He is a slave to his own shochad. It is no coincidence that we read Shoftim always at the beginning of Elul, the month of awakening and teshuvah. Because Elul is precisely this: appointing judges and police officers within ourselves. Learning not to let ourselves be corrupted by excuses, stopping the transformation of error into merit, recognising our limitations without disguising them as virtues. The Yamim Noraim ask us for honesty. Not perfection, but truth. Hashem does not want actors reciting justifications, but children who present themselves with a sincere heart. And so Elul is the time to unmask our shochad, to strip away alibis and masks, to look into the mirror with clarity. If we do this, then tzedek, tzedek tirdof will not just be a verse, but a path. The path that leads to a free, transparent, true life. The path that leads to Rosh Hashanah with a ready heart, without corruption and without alibis, before the Judge of judges who sees everything and who, precisely for this reason, welcomes us with mercy.
Shabbat Shalom
Translated from the Italian with Google Gemini. The Italian text is the original.