שׂ֣וֹם תָּשִׂ֤ים עָלֶ֙יךָ֙ מֶ֔לֶךְ (שפטים יז, טו)
“You shall a king over yourself…” (Deuteronomy 17:15)
Second Reading: Judges and Kings
The Torah portion of Shoftim relates in particular to the judicial system and the appointment of various public officers in the Jewish People; the judges, police officers, the Kohanim (priests), the Levites, and the prophets. The central figure mentioned in the portion is the king.
The current judicial system in the modern State of Israel is based on non-Jewish law. It is not obligated to the Torah. The rabbinical courts are limited to specific areas, and the rulings they make are often severely restricted. Contemplating the hierarchy of the officials in the ideal Jewish government will help us understand our heartfelt prayer, “Return our judges as at first, and our advisors as at the beginning.”
The Judges – The Mind
In general, the pyramid of Jewish government is headed by two bodies: the judges and the king. The judges are also organized in a hierarchical system, from the local judge in the small town up to the Sanhedrin, the Great Court, which resides in the Hall of Hewn Stones, by the Temple in Jerusalem. If a minor court does not reach a satisfactory decision, the Great Court has the final word. Any Torah scholar who violates the ruling of the Great Court is severely punished.
Shoftim (שֹׁפְטִים), the name of the portion, means "Judges." Of the different officials enumerated, the judges are mentioned first. They represent the lucid mind of Torah study. Just as the head is the undisputed ruler of the body, so the judges oversee the behavior of the people, as a nation and as a collective. The Torah encompasses the entire corpus of law, thus everything can be judged by its standards. Additionally, and perhaps surprisingly, the judicial branch of government also possesses some legislative powers.
The King of Israel – The Heart
However, the Sanhedrin does not have exclusive rights to the judiciary either. Jewish government has another branch—where leadership resides: "You shall surely appoint a king."[1] We need to study in depth the passage relating to the appointment of a king that appears in our Torah portion. A Jewish king, and Mashiach, the epitome of righteous royalty, are the antithesis of the image incurred from the world's experience with tyrannical kings. The Torah, the Prophets, and the subject of our prayers focus on reinstating the kingdom of David and the revelation of Mashiach. Once we have learned this passage, we can know what true royalty is about and the type of king for whom we hope and pray.
Nowadays, a royal ruler is a figurehead who authorizes the law in his or her kingdom. He or she has no other special legal authority and is completely obligated to the country's legislation. In Jewish law too, the Torah sets the rules of the game, and the judges are the ones who judge according to them. The king, like his citizens, is subject to the laws of the Torah. From this perspective, he has no regal immunity before the law, and the rule is, "Kings of the Davidic dynasty are judged if there is a case against them."[2]
Yet, there is a broad range of areas in which the king does make major legal decisions. In the extreme case of someone who rebels against his kingdom, the king decides how and when to mete out punishment (or he can choose to pardon the rebel).
Some commentaries distinguish between "Torah Justice," and the "King's Justice." The judges are responsible for "Torah Justice," which is the absolute Divine truth. From it, they establish the principles of Jewish justice. The scope of the king's justice on the other hand is the welfare of the nation. He deals with temporary issues that demand immediate attention. The king decides when to recruit the army to war. Since the king is the leader, why is he not the highest authority in the nation under all circumstances?
The judges of the Sanhedrin represent the rational mind of the nation. This is true to such an extent that in certain cases, the judges are referred to by one of the Names that refers to God, Elokim (אֱ־לֹהִים). The ability to judge is one of the principal attributes of God, as the verse states, “For God judges; He deposes [one individual] and He elevates [the other].”[3]
The king is referred to as a “prince” (נָשִׂיא), who is liable to sin.[4] He represents the heart of the nation. The unrefined heart has a proclivity to sin. The Torah verses emphasize the king's heart, in particular. It limits the number of wives and horses that the king may accumulate, “so that his heart shall not become uplifted.”[5] The king also has a constant commandment to carry a Torah scroll "against his heart." The Torah, his judge and his rational mind, must rule over his heart and he must not become arrogant over his brethren. The heart is sensitive, alive and warm. With every heartbeat it is aware of the moment. The Zohar states, "The mind rules over the heart." The king needs to be subject to the consistency of the law, represented by the coolheaded, stable-minded judges. This subjugation to the judges nurtures an inner sense of lowliness that must accompany every king, as King David said of himself, "I appear lowly in my own eyes."[6]
Yet, the king has special privileges that no other Jew has, even the judges. This grants him an aura of grandiosity in the eyes of his subjects. Everyone must be in awe of the king, and they must keep a respectful distance from him. "A king who relinquishes his honor, his honor is not relinquished."[7] A king who is not "uplifted" over his people is not a king at all!
In the words of Maimonides,[8]
Just as the Torah grants him great honor and everyone is obligated to honor him, so too he is commanded that his heart be lowly within him and hollow, as it says, "And my heart is hollow within me."[9] He should not be overly arrogant towards the Jewish People. He should be pardoning and compassionate towards the lower and upper classes alike, and he should spare the respect of the most minor citizen. He should always behave with great humility, and he should bear their business, and their burden, and their complaints, and their fury, as the nurse carries the suckling. The verse calls him "a shepherd."
The king conveys an outer casing of sovereignty, while paradoxically nurturing an inner sense of profound lowliness and humility. “The heart of kings is unfathomable.”[10] Here we see that the "heart" of the nation, the king, has an external dimension and a deep inner dimension. The innermost point of the king’s humility is the pure origin of the nation's soul. It touches the infinite, where "The heart of a king is in the hands of God."[11]
Chasidut teaches us that above the level at which "The mind rules over the heart," there is a more profound level at which “the innermost point of the heart rules over the mind.”[12] The king’s external demeanor is subject to the rulings and teachings of the judges, but his pure, innermost core of humility rises above, and rules over them. The king's autonomy stems from his lowliness towards the citizens under his rule. As such, the innermost depth of the king's heart reflects the heart of the entire Jewish people. This grants him the power to give a temporary order that is exactly suited to the moment. It may even override the normative ruling of the Torah. This is the aspect of government that is greater than the sages and the judges.
Revealing the King
The Ba'al Shem Tov taught that every Jew has a spark of Mashiach that is waiting to be revealed. We can reveal it by lowering ourselves and developing our innate sensitivity to others. A truly righteous individual, who has refined his heart to such an extent, intuits the Torah’s principles naturally. This corresponds to the state of natural consciousness that can be achieved in the Land of Israel.[13]
We read parashat Shoftim at the beginning of the month of Elul. This is the month in which we do teshuvah, i.e., we return to God, both as individuals, by refining and rectifying our own actions. But we must also return to God as a collective. We can achieve this goal by uniting as Jews and establishing an authentic Jewish leadership. This is our prayer for the return of the judges and reinstatement of the kingdom of David. May it be speedily and in our days.
(from inner.org)
שָׁל֥וֹשׁ עָרִ֖ים תַּבְדִּ֣יל לָ֑ךְ בְּת֣וֹךְ אַרְצְךָ֔ אֲשֶׁר֙ י־הוה אֱ־לֹהֶ֔יךָ נֹתֵ֥ן לְךָ֖ לְרִשְׁתָּֽהּ (שפטים יט, ב)
“You shall set aside three cities in the land that Havayah your God is giving you to possess” (Deut. 19:2)
Fifth Reading: Afflicting the Soul
In parashat Shoftim, the Torah briefly reiterates the commandment of “cities of refuge” (עֲרֵי מִקְלָט), wherein an individual who accidentally murdered another must take refuge. This commandment is first mentioned and described in length in parashat Massei and is repeated once again in the Book of Joshua. In Massei and in the Book of Joshua, the individual who has committed manslaughter is described as “one who accidentally afflicts the soul” (מַכֵּה נֶפֶש בִּשְׁגָגָה); he who commits intentional murder is called “one who afflicts the soul” (מַכֵּה נֶפֶש).
The Lubavitcher Rebbe explains that this commandment and all that it entails regarding manslaughter is relevant even today. He comments that the greater an individual’s spiritual sensitivity, the more he feels that the title “one who afflicts a soul” applies to himself, for he too has afflicted his soul (and that of others, indirectly) by remaining in his comfort zone, unable and unwilling to break out and aspire for more. In fact, nowhere is this sensitivity greater than in the perfectly righteous individual, the tzaddik, who even though he might be a leader of his generation, lives with the knowledge that he has afflicted the soul more than any other. The lower the level of a tzaddik (and the entire Jewish people are tzaddikim), the less sensitive he is to this and the less he can aspire to break out of his comfort zone.
It is the role of the Mashiach to help these tzaddikim taste the sweetness of teshuvah, the act of returning and growing closer to God by aspiring higher, by making them sensitive to how they too have afflicted the soul. Acknowledging how each of us has, at his or her own spiritual level, afflicted the soul requires us to break out of our comfort zone and be able to look at ourselves with a truly Messianic eye. This type of spiritual work is most appropriate for both the Three Weeks (between the 17th of Tammuz and Tisha B’av) when parashat Massei is read and for the month of Elul, when parashat Shoftim is read, the two times of the year that call upon us to break out of our habits and spiritual straits.
In all, we find 7 levels of increasing sensitivity to having afflicted the soul. Naturally, they correspond to the seven lower sefirot, from kingdom to loving-kindness.
Kingdom (malchut): At the lowest level of sensitivity, a person feels perfectly comfortable with himself without a sense of being confined by spiritual barriers. He does not experience how his service of God is less than it might be. He might be convinced that he has already attained the highest level of Divine service, for he already learns Torah and keeps the commandments to their minute details. In short, he does not strive to elevate himself at all, feeling that his current level is just fine. Such is the experience of the sefirah of kingdom, which because it faces downwards, cannot sense the Divine light above and does not realize how limited a view of reality it really has.
Foundation (yesod): A bit more sensitive is the individual who knows that he must constantly strive to ascend higher and higher in his Divine service. But because he also knows that even the greatest of journeys starts with a single step and that the spiritual ladder has many rungs, he does not stress about his current level convinced that the climb upwards must be orderly; there is no need to leap forward. This level describes the underlying experience of the sefirah of foundation, which is all about order and sequence.
Acknowledgment and Victory (netzach and hod): Still more sensitive to the affliction of the soul is one who is moderately bothered by his present spiritual identity and so waits patiently for the first chance to jump out of his spiritual skin. Even more sensitive is he who experiences his present state as a spiritual prison and feels the need, at this very moment, to leap forward in search of a higher more authentic identity. These two levels correspond to the sefirot acknowledgment and victory, which work in conjunction. These two sefirot are described as situated “outside the body”[14] (i.e., the torso, which corresponds to the sefirah of beauty). Thus, in their purest form they reflect a feeling of the body as constricting caused by the fact that the sefirah of understanding, the source of all feelings of teshuvah (return to God) extends all the way to acknowledgment imbuing both acknowledgment and victory together with the prerogative to jump out of their skin.
Beauty (tiferet): Higher still is he who not only aspires to break out of his current spiritual state, realizing how constricted and limited it is, but realizes that everything that he currently calls “serving God” is nothing but a flight of fancy. The entire image he and others may have of him as one who strives to serve the Almighty is simply an illusion. His sensitivity to the affliction of the soul brings him to realize that he has not even begun to travel a spiritual path and is as far from authentic service as can be. The sefirah of beauty is the source of our powers of imagination and false self-image which leads us to boast[15] of having attained levels we have not.
Might (gevurah): At this heightened state of sensitivity, the individual feels that not only has he not started on the path of serving the Almighty, but that on the contrary, all of his actions to date, having been inauthentic at their core, have been nothing but a disservice to the Master of the Universe. Based on the verse, “For there is no righteous person who has done good and not sinned,”[16] the Ba’al Shem Tov taught that even while doing good, a person can be sinning in that very act of goodness. This occurs when the motivation for the good action is anything but God’s commanding it. Performing actions for any other motivation imbues them with a point of sin. This level of sensitivity corresponds to the sefirah of might, the faculty where “harsh judgments” (resulting in such deep self-criticism) manifest.
Loving–Kindness (chesed): Finally, at the very highest level of sensitivity, there is the most beloved individual (“All sevenths are beloved”[17]) who, due to his tremendous love of the Jewish people, feels that with every moment he is responsible for actually afflicting the souls of Israel with his actions. This special individual is constantly concerned that by not being part of the solution (bringing the true and complete redemption closer by serving God), he is part of the problem (resulting in the prolonging of our exile). This righteous individual experiences the need to flee into a city of refuge to save himself and others from the avenger, the great prosecutor'who pursues him. Of course, this final level corresponds to the sefirah of loving-kindness, as it is motivated by the love of others.
It is only the individual who has reached the highest level of sensitivity to his own limitations and spiritual straits that can, with God’s help, leap to an authentic state of boundless possibility. This state is symbolized by his sign from above (in practice, the death of the High Priest) that he is free to leave the city of refuge; free to manifest his truly authentic self with acts of total self-sacrifice while motivated by indescribably great love. It is then, that this individual serves as a revelation of God’s essentially infinite light, which itself has no bound and which was never limited by the act of contraction that started creation.
(from Sha’ashu’im Yom Yom)
כִּ֤י הָֽאָדָם֙ עֵ֣ץ הַשָּׂדֶ֔ה (שפטים כ, יט)
“For man is likened to the tree of the field…” (Deuteronomy 20:19)
Seventh Reading: The Tree of the Field in Man
The Image of the Tree
At the end of our parashah, the Torah describes the laws of battle. If a siege is placed on a city in the Land of Israel to conquer it, the Torah forbids us to destroy its fruit trees. To support this prohibition, the Torah explains, "Man is likened to the tree of the field." God created man in His “image”[18] (tzelem). Significantly, the numerical value of the Hebrew word for “tree” (עֵץ) is 160, also the same numerical value of “image” (צֶלֶם). The tree of the field is the image of man created in God's image.
Knowledge and the Nervous System
The numerical value of the Hebrew expression "the tree of the field" (עֵץ הַשָּׂדֶה) is 474, also the numerical value of “knowledge,” or “consciousness” (דָּעַת), the most central and all-inclusive of the sefirot. Knowledge or consciousness designates the all-inclusive state of the soul that unites the intellect with the emotions. The power of knowledge creates unity within the mind, but its ultimate purpose is to unite all the intellectual and emotive faculties of the soul.
In Kabbalah and Chasidut, we learn that every physiological system corresponds to a supernal sefirah. The sefirah of knowledge corresponds to the nervous system. More than any other physiological system, the nervous system, which conveys the electrical impulses of knowledge throughout the body, can be envisioned as a tree. The trunk is the spinal column, and the branches are the nerves.
The Energy Field
The word “of the field” (הַשָּׂדֶה), has the same value as God’s Name, Shakai (שַׁ-דַּי), which represents energy—the power to project force outward. The tree of the field, representing knowledge and the human nervous system in man, thus symbolizes an energy field.
God's Name, Shakai, also corresponds to the sefirah complementary to knowledge, the sefirah of foundation (yesod), the foundation for all the sexual energies in man. In Kabbalah and Chasidut, we learn that there is a close interdependence between the proper function of the nervous system and the proper use of our creative energies, as represented by yesod. When we meditate on the tree of the field, we must consider the field to be an energy field, directing our potent, creative yesod energies, by means of the force field of knowledge.
The Key to the Chambers of the Heart
Once again, the full phrase, “tree of the field” equals 474. When we divide 474 by the six letters of this phrase, we find that the average value of each letter is 79, the numerical value of “attribute” (דֵּעָה), which shares a root with “knowledge” (דַּעַת).[19] The six “attributes” refer to the six emotive sefirot, from loving-kindness to foundation. The “knowledge” or da’at that is their totality refers to the sefirah of da’at, which is described as the key that opens the six doors to the six chambers of the heart—the six dei'ot. Each chamber is an attribute of the heart, an emotive characteristic. Thus, the tree of the field is the key to all our emotive characteristics.
Serene Pleasure
The gematria of the word “tree” (עֵץ) is also that of the word for “pleasantness” (נֹעַם). Thus, the phrase “tree of the field,” which represents our “consciousness” (דַּעַת), also has the same gematria “the pleasantness of Shakai,” “the pleasantness of the Almighty” (נֹעַם שַׁ-דַּי). We see man then as a tree of the field, whose nervous system directs his creative energies to manifest as Godly serenity and pleasantness.
The Serene Pleasure of Knowing God in all our Ways
The two words of the phrase “the pleasantness of the Almighty” (נֹעַם שַׁ-דַּי) have six letters, three in each word. We will calculate the value of the phrase using a numerical method known as haka'ah pratit, i.e., multiplying the first letter of the first word by the first letter of the second word, the second letter of the first word by the second letter of the second word, and so on, and then summing the products (this is similar to the dot product in vector algebra). This numerical method allows us to discover deeper implications of the phrase. The sum of products calculated this way is 15680, or 10 times 1568, or 10 times the double square of 28.
The sages teach that there is one verse in the Bible that succinctly expresses our service of God as it should be perfected in our consciousness, “In all your ways know Him and He will straighten your paths.”[20] Integral to this verse is the word “know Him” (דָעֵהוּ), from the same root as da'at. Our goal must be to know God in all the paths of our lives, whether in times of war, as in our reading, or in times of peace and prosperity—from the summit of the sublime to the monotony of the mundane.
The verse says to know God in all your ways. God's ways are the ways of His commandments. “Your ways” are all the minute details that weave the fabric of our lives. Whether at work, while eating or even while we sleep, we must know God and be conscious of His presence in our lives and in our every action. If we do so, God promises that He will then straighten all our paths.
The Seven Paths
The numerical value of this verse, “In all your ways know Him and He will straighten your paths” (בְּכָל דְּרָכֶיךָ דָעֵהוּ וְהוּא יְיַשֵּׁר אֹרְחֹתֶיךָ) is 1568, or the double square of 28. Thus, the value of “the pleasantness of the Almighty” (נֹעַם שַׁ-דַּי) in haka'ah pratit is ten times the value of this verse. This verse expresses the experience of knowing God in every facet of our lives with all the ten powers of our souls.
Dividing 1568 by 7 yields 224, the numerical value of “path” (דֶּרֶךְ). There are 7 paths in which each soul root can properly serve God. Our verse, “In all your ways, know Him, and He will straighten your paths” alludes and encompasses all 7 such paths. When we connect to the image of man as a tree of the field, we can direct all our creative energies to one goal—to know God in all our ways and to spread His consciousness throughout the world.
(from inner.org)
[1]. Deuteronomy 17:15.
[2]. Sanhedrin 19a.
[3]. Psalms 74:8.
[4]. Leviticus 4:22.
[5]. Deuteronomy 17:20.
[6]. 2 Samuel 6:22.
[7]. Ketubot 17a.
[8]. Hilchot Melachim 2:6.
[9]. Psalms 109:22.
[10]. Proverbs 25:3.
[11]. Ibid. 21:1.
[12]. See in-depth in Wonders, Issue 108, pp. 3ff.
[13]. See our teachings on “natural consciousness” in the Hebrew volumes Muda’ut Tivit and HaTevah HaYehudi.
[14]. Zohar 2:110b.
[15]. The Hebrew verb for “boasting” (לְהִתְפָּאֵר) stems from the same root as “beauty” (תִּפְאֶרֶת).
[16]. Ecclesiastes 7:20.
[17]. Vayikra Rabbah 29:9.
[18]. Genesis 1:26.
[19]. Incidentally, Maimonides, in his code of Jewish law, devotes an entire section to what he calls “the laws of attributes” (הִלְכוֹת דֵּעוֹת).
[20]. Proverbs 3:6.
