Shoftim — Not Your Business

Parshat Shoftim is largely about authority: judges, kings, priests, prophets and witnesses. But beneath all of those institutions lies a less obvious question: 

When does something become your business? 

It is possible to know something that is true and still have no authority to act upon it. And as we enter Elul, that may be one of the harder forms of judgment the parsha asks us to exercise.

Consider the eid zomem. The Torah’s problem is not necessarily that the event he describes never happened. The Gemara in Makkot discusses a case where the accused really did commit the murder — just not when these witnesses claimed to have seen it. Their testimony remains eidut zomemet because the second witnesses establish, “imanu heyitem”: you were somewhere else. 

Shoftim gives us a remarkably similar category regarding prophecy. A navi sheker includes not only someone who invents a prophecy, but also someone who presents as his own a prophecy actually given to another prophet. Once again, the statement itself can be completely true. God really said it; the murder really happened. The falsehood is the same: you have placed yourself inside a truth to which you were not given standing.

That distinction extends beyond courts and prophecy. Chizkiyahu saw through ruach hakodesh that wicked children would descend from him, and therefore declined to have children. Yeshayahu did not tell him that his vision was false; Menashe was indeed coming. Instead he answered, “Bahadei kivshei deRachmana lama lach?” Why are you involving yourself in God’s hidden business? Your information may be correct, but your job is to perform the mitzvah you were given.

Korach may have made a still more catastrophic version of the same mistake. Chazal say that he saw that Shmuel and generations of great men would descend from him and asked how such greatness could emerge from him if he were wrong. Again, what he saw was not simply imaginary: Shmuel really would emerge from his family. What Korach could not see was how the story would get there. He converted knowledge of God’s future into authority over God’s present.

The parsha offers another, almost startling, illustration: the Torah sends home from battle someone who has built a house, planted a vineyard or betrothed a woman, and Rashi, citing the Sifrei, explains “pen yamut bamilchamah”: he should return lest he die, because if he refuses to listen to the Kohen, he deserves to die. He cannot answer, “But there is a war going on. Klal Yisrael needs soldiers. I am going anyway.” Even responsibility for the entire nation does not authorize us to invent our own assignment.

There is an echo of this in the story of Uriah. David orders him, “Red leveitcha” — go home — and Uriah refuses: the Aron, Israel and Yehudah are in temporary quarters, Yoav and the king’s soldiers are camping in the field, so how can he go home to eat, drink and be with his wife? His argument sounds almost heroic. And unlike the Torah’s Kohen, David has a terrible ulterior motive: he wants Uriah home to conceal what he has done with Batsheva.

That makes Uriah an important test case. You may be completely right about the moral ugliness of the situation, and the person telling you what to do — even David HaMelech — may be terribly wrong. Yet being right about him does not automatically make everything else your business. Chazal identify Uriah’s actual meridah bemalchut with his reference to “my master Yoav” in David’s presence, so we should not turn his refusal to go home into a simplistic halachic ruling. But his rhetoric still exposes the temptation: everyone else is fighting, therefore I must decide for myself that I belong at the front.

That may be particularly important during Elul, when we become more conscious not only of our own conduct but of everyone else’s. Hocheach tochiach et amitecha creates a real obligation of rebuke, and arevut means that another Jew’s actions sometimes really might be our business. Shabbat 54b holds someone responsible for failing to protest wrongdoing when efshar limchot — he could effectively have protested it. Silence can itself become a sin.

But Chazal also place boundaries around that obligation. Yevamot 65b teaches that just as it is a mitzvah to say something that will be heard, it is a mitzvah not to say something that will not be heard; one opinion calls the latter an obligation. Arakhin 16b questions whether its own generation even possessed people who knew how to give rebuke properly. Sometimes we must speak; sometimes we may need only to withhold our approval; and sometimes the mitzvah may be to say nothing.

The difficult question, then, is not merely, “Am I right?” The eid zomem may be right about the murder. The navi sheker may be right about what God said. Chizkiyahu may be right about Menashe, Korach about Shmuel, and Uriah may even be right about the man giving him orders; but truth -  Truth, even - does not automatically confer jurisdiction.

In Elul we rightly ask where we remained silent when arevut required us to speak. But we should also ask where we appointed ourselves judge, witness or prophet over matters never assigned to us. Don’t say “not my business” when God has made it yours — but don’t say “I’m going anyway” when He has not. Part of judging ourselves is knowing the difference.