Parshah Commentary

One of the Torah’s most famous adages is a commandment found at the beginning of our parshah: “Justice, justice you shall pursue.” The maxim is especially familiar to anyone who has ever been connected to a progressive Jewish organizations; you name the justice issue, someone has invoked this phrase to call attention to that cause. In the Torah, however, there is a very specific context for this unusually emphatic verse: “Judges and officers you shall appoint for your tribes, in all your gates which YHWH your God gives you, and they shall judge the people with a just law. Do not pervert the law; do not show partiality, and do not take a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise, and twists the words of the just.” And then, immediately after: “Justice, justice you shall pursue in order that you may live and inherit the land which YHWH your God is giving you.” In these verses, the Torah prescribes systemic checks against judicial misconduct, aware that even upstanding agents will be twisted by structural perversions. Moreover, by describing particular judicial regulations, the Torah makes clear that the stakes couldn’t be higher: Society depends on the maintenance of a responsible criminal justice system, and misconduct within it is an existential crisis to a body politic.

The mention of “officers” is striking, because the passage otherwise reads as if the topic is only judicial conduct. Indeed, the verses would read more smoothly if they simply said, “Judges you shall appoint for your tribes . . . and they shall judge the people with a just law.” The inclusion of law enforcement officials alongside judges highlights that they, too, exercise judgment, and are thus just as susceptible to bias and corruption. As a midrash comparing the two roles notes: “The Rabbis say: Officers should be like judges in that their deeds should face the rod and the whip, so that the one who uses violence not be required to be lashed.” In other words, officials who mete out violence on behalf of the state cannot exercise proper judgment in the application of the rod and whip unless they constantly face a threat of harsh punishment if they misstep. They can be trusted to do their job only if they work in conditions of utmost accountability and oversight. Their accountability is a matter of spiritual gravity: The Talmud teaches, “the Blessed, Holy One will not rest the Divine Presence over the Jewish people until bad judges and law enforcement officials are eliminated from the Jewish people.”

It is a farcical understatement to note that our parshah’s warnings are not heeded by American institutions and cultures of policing. In 2024, police killed at least 1,260 people in the US, more than any other year in the previous decade. In most of these killings, the police were responding to suspected non-violent offenses or cases with no crime reported at all. Officers were charged with a crime in only nine of those killings. The theory that has allowed this ghastly, Orwellian reality of death-as-public safety may have no better exemplar than the former mayor of my home city, Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, who is ghoulishly plotting a return from the political trash heap to haunt us all. As mayor, in 2015, Emanuel said the reason violent crime had spiked in Chicago was because the police, fearful of recent scrutiny, had “gone fetal,” simply avoiding dicey police work. Emanuel’s point was that in order to do their difficult work, police need to be freed from scrutiny and oversight, so that they are not fettered with fear of punishment. As we’ve seen, our Torah—Rahm Emanuel’s Torah, too, for that matter—says exactly the opposite: Law enforcement officials can be trusted to do their work only if they work under scrutiny and oversight, chastened by the fear of punishment, “facing the rod and the whip.”

These are not abolitionist texts. Elsewhere in rabbinic literature, we see a broader vision for an alternative to police culture. The Talmud Yerushalmi tells of rabbis who are sent throughout the land of Israel to appoint teachers. When the rabbis arrived in a particular town, they “couldn’t find any teachers of Torah or Mishnah.” They say to the city’s residents: “Bring us the city’s protectors.” In an attempt to comply, the residents bring the guards of the city. The rabbis respond: “These aren’t the city’s protectors; they are nothing but the city’s destroyers!” When the residents ask who, then, counts as the city’s protectors, the rabbis respond: “Teachers of Torah and Mishnah,” and cite as evidence a verse from Psalms: “Unless God watches over the city, the watchman keeps watch in vain.”

When the rabbis ask the townspeople to bring them the city’s protectors, they are really asking, “Who keeps you safe?” It’s a bit of rhetorical sleight of hand. If someone asked me to identify security personnel in my city, I’d also probably point them to the police. But if I were asked what keeps me safe, I’d probably say: knowing my neighbors; good city infrastructure, such as lights, health clinics, traffic signs, and sanitation systems; and, yes, good schools and cultural resources. The rabbis engage in a minor charade in order to draw the citizens didactically into an understanding that it’s really Torah infrastructure that protects them.

One way of understanding the upshot of this story is to take it literally and narrowly: Only Torah protects us. Jewish communities should withdraw from policing and statecraft and invest all community resources into Torah learning, on account of which God protects us. This has been the most prominent reading of this passage in the last century, primarily by Haredi interpreters. Indeed, the Neturei Karta, the Haredi group that is most extreme and uncompromising in its opposition to Zionism and a pre-Messianic, human-led Jewish state took its name from the Aramaic term for “city’s protectors” used in this passage. For them, all the soldiers, police, and government officials of Israel don’t protect the Jewish polity. On the contrary, they destroy it. Only Torah, they argue, protects us.

Another reading of the passage, though, makes better sense of why the rabbis objected to police presence specifically in a town that had “no teachers of Torah and Mishnah.” There may or may not be a role for some law enforcement in society, but that question is useless in a town with no teachers. It’s perverse to think that cops will protect a community that has no educational infrastructure. I think of the South and West sides of Chicago, where Emanuel closed over 50 public schools, robbing resource-starved communities from anchor institutions and, of course, causing disruptions in public safety. Just a couple of years later, he added over 900 new police officers. The rabbis rebuke a government like Emanuel’s: All the cops in the world won’t keep you safe if you’re gutting the schools and cultural opportunities that foster belonging, relationships, and purpose.

It’s not simply better for public safety to have more schools and fewer cops. There’s a creative vision for a liberated world radiating through such policy choices. The passage cited earlier about eliminating bad law enforcement officials has a parallel with a striking difference: “Rabbi Simlai said in the name of Rabbi El‘azar, son of Rabbi Shim‘on: The descendant of David [the Messiah] will not come until all judges and law enforcement officials are eliminated from the Jewish people”—not just the “bad” ones. A truly liberated world cannot arrive until we abolish the police. The Talmudic story about the rabbis questioning the townspeople points to this Messianic, abolitionist vision. “Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions,” prison scholar and abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore teaches. Defunding and abolishing the police is part of the task of cultivating flourishing cultures of learning, wisdom, and relationships—the stuff of true safety.

Why is the liberated world dependent on abolition? A subtle detail of halakha may enlighten us. Though the Torah stipulates liability for hurting other people, it never explicitly prohibits general civilians from striking another person. The Rabbis, however, claim that the Torah does prohibit civilian, interpersonal violence. Their source? The prohibition against law enforcement officials using excessive force. Civilian violence is derivative of police violence, their logic implies. Police set violence in motion; we have to prohibit and restrain the violence that the police have unleashed. Abolishing police is not a luxury to achieve after we eradicate violence in our communities; it is a part of the conditions necessary to eradicate public violence in the first place.

Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein is a Torah teacher and political educator based in Chicago, where he directs the Avodah Justice Fellowship.