Parshat Shoftim opens by setting up a court system. שפטים ושטרים תתן לך בכל שעריך. Appoint judges and officers in all your gates. On the surface it’s about running a fair society, courts, police, the rule of law.

But there’s an old reading of that line that I heard years ago, and I keep coming back to it. The gates aren’t only the gates of a city. They’re my gates. My eyes. My ears. My mouth. And I’m told to post a guard at every one of them.

Which hits a little different in a year when the busiest gate I’ve got is the phone in my pocket, and it never actually closes. Neither does my head.

The gates nobody’s watching

Here’s the thing about my eyes and my ears. Everything I feel is downstream of what I let in through them, and most days I’m not guarding those gates at all. I let almost anything walk through.

I’d never let a stranger stroll into my house at three in the morning. Or would I. But I’ll lie in bed and let absolutely anything walk straight into my head through a screen at midnight. The bad news. The person whose life looks better than mine. The argument that isn’t even mine to have. It all pours in through the gate, and then I wonder why I feel the way I feel by morning.

The parsha isn’t telling me to wall myself off. A city with its gates cemented shut is a dead city, not a safe one. The gates are supposed to be open. Someone is just supposed to be standing there deciding what gets to come through. That someone is meant to be me, and honestly, most nights the post is empty.

The judge I never interviewed

Here’s the harder one, and it has taken me a long time to see it.

The pasuk says appoint judges. But the truth is I already have a judge sitting at my gate, and I never interviewed him for the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)