What Parsha Shoftim teaches about conviction, radicalization and building a Good Society

Parshat Shoftim offers one of the Torah’s clearest blueprints for building a Good Society. It establishes courts, regulates political and religious authority, demands reliable testimony and insists that justice must not be distorted by money, status or political influence.

Its defining command is:

“Justice, justice shall you pursue.” —Deuteronomy 16:20

Why is the word “justice” repeated? One explanation is that it is not enough to pursue a just outcome; the means used must also be just. Justice must be applied fairly—to our friends and opponents, majorities and minorities, the powerful and the powerless.

We cannot defend morality through corruption, protect freedom through coercion or demand standards from others that we refuse to apply to ourselves.

Yet Shoftim also contains passages that challenge modern sensibilities. The Torah is uncompromising about idolatry and prescribes severe punishments for certain violations. How did Judaism, rooted in such demanding texts, develop into a largely non-missionary faith capable of living alongside people with profoundly different beliefs and ways of life?

The question extends far beyond Judaism: Can a society retain strong moral convictions without turning those convictions into persecution?

Restraining the power to punish

Judaism did not simply remove the Torah’s difficult passages. The Written Torah was interpreted through the Oral Torah: centuries of legal reasoning, disagreement, precedent and safeguards.

The rabbis surrounded capital punishment with extraordinarily demanding requirements concerning witnesses, prior warning, intention and judicial procedure. The Mishnah teaches that a court executing one person in seven years was considered destructive. Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah said once in seventy years, while Rabbis Tarfon and Akiva declared that, had they served on such a court, nobody would have been executed.

The moral boundary remained, but the human power to impose irreversible punishment was restrained.

This distinction is essential. Declaring conduct religiously prohibited does not give the state, religious authorities or individual zealots unlimited power to persecute people. Moral disapproval does not justify cruelty. Religious conviction does not cancel due process. No human being should be reduced to one belief, identity or action.

Consider homosexuality. Traditional Jewish law prohibits a particular sexual act between men. It does not define the modern identity category of “gay,” nor does it permit humiliation, violence or vigilantism. Jewish communities disagree profoundly about how these laws........

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