Law’s Shadow – Thoughts on Torah Portion Shoftim 2024

 Law’s Shadow

Thoughts on Torah Portion Shoftim 2024 – adapted from previous versions.

In every great piece of literature, law eventually makes its appearance, usually because someone is breaking it. People commit some felony – theft or murder. They might be breaking a civil law, negligently causing harm to their neighbor.  They might be breaking the moral law – unkindness, causing hurt, not fulfilling promises, breaking vows. There might be ethical breaches – not living up to the stated or implicit obligations that bind us as human beings.

Noncompliance with the law is the story of humanity, and a core theme of the Bible. In the Bible, this noncompliance begins with Eve and Adam disobeying God, following the advice of Snake (the name “Conjecture” was a giveaway). Straightway, Cain (Kayin) murders Abel (Hevel) and shows how rhetorical questions are acts of evasion. (“Am I my brother keeper?”) Things skid down the slope from there. Rebecca and Isaac broke a local ordinance about the first born, preferring Jacob over his older brother Esau, claiming they were serving a higher purpose.  Joseph’s brothers intended to murder Joseph passively (by throwing him in a pit), but then just sold him into slavery. They knew it was wrong or they would not have hidden it.

The sin of the molten calf was an honest sin.  The intended to sin and made no excused. The people finally said, “We don’t want this law. We don’t care what its purpose is.”  They didn’t care that the law would save them from themselves. Like a drug addict resisting rehab, they did not want to be saved. They got the law anyway, but even then, the law did not save them from their addiction to the resistance of the teachings.

In fact, the law assumes resistance to the law – otherwise there wouldn’t be law, all the way from the law on the law books to the moral law. Sometimes the resistance is because someone is just a scoundrel or a scofflaw. Other times, though, the resistance is out of character, a crime of passion, due to an unbearable temptation, distraught circumstances. Those transgressions emerge from what Carl Jung would call “the shadow.”

The shadow is the hidden part of the inner life, into which we push all that we cannot admit about ourselves. Our pretensions, our falseness, our willful illusions.

The shadow looms large in the Bible in nearly every law and narrative that matters. Sometimes that ominous, discordant note that comes from the hidden depths is obvious – the sin of the spies comes to mind. The spies arrive back from spying out Canaan filled with fear, ready to rebel.

The malevolence lying in the shadow of God in the book of Job is hidden to most people. The book of Job is not about Job’s suffering or Job’s patience. This book of Job is about the evil that the God in the book does. Job suffers because the God-figure in the book of Job let Satan have his way. Job’s resilience has him not backing down to his friends or to God, and not being afraid of that God. What else could that God do to him? Have his children killed? Satan had already murdered all his children.

In this week’s Torah portion, Shoftim, the shadow is particularly well hidden. One reads along and sees a variety of laws, reasonable attempts to codify justice into law. All looks good. Judaism is ethical and rational, as I was taught.

The Jews, though (more properly, the Israelites), standing for all humanity, were not all ethical or rational. The laws in our portion speak about some people who were on the dark side of ethical and rational. On the other side of every law, we find lawbreakers and venality, criminals and moral turpitude. Every law assumes its opposite, those who break it. We have laws against judges taking bribes because judges took bribes. We have laws against lying witnesses because witnesses lied in court. We have laws against sorcery because sorcery probably had people doing wicked and destructive things. We have laws against war crimes, false prophets and what happens when someone does not securely attach an axe head to an axe. There’s even an unclaimed dead body. You read this Torah portion carefully and you might get the sense that everything is falling apart, and that Law and Justice are valiantly trying to hold back a vicious tide of a humanity bent on harm. You start to feel some sympathy for the God who, in a moment of despair, had flooded the world to start over.

According to the disturbing narrative of Noah’s Flood, however, the God of the Bible admitted to regretting flooding the world, after it was too late to do anything about it. God saw God’s own shadow, you might say, and didn’t like what it caused. “Ok, no more wiping out everything and starting over,” God mutters.

That impulse to destroy remains within us, though. I’ve read about people who are on the record saying just that. They want to destroy everything if they can’t have their way.

The good and the right, the vision and the way, law and justice try to hold back the shadow and chaos that can rage into our inner lives, our families, our communities and the world around us.

Any person trying to establish the rule of virtue in their life will experience the profound pushback of a shadow that does not want to be corralled.

It’s the dead body that haunts me. In Deuteronomy 21:1-9, we are told how the elders of the nearest city deal with the discovery of a nearby corpse. Someone found the forlorn victim, meaning that somebody got away with murder. It seems from the story that no one can even identify the body.

The elders of the closest city to the crime find a nearby backwoods and perform a ritual that says, in effect, “We didn’t do it.” (Then why are their hands shaking?)

Here’s the shadow, as I see it: the elders are thinking, “There’s a Cain walking about, maybe walking among us.” The elders look at each other, “Maybe one of us.” Even elders have shadows, even judges can murder. Chaos is on the loose. Law’s shadow is lurking.

The inner life tradition would tell us this: there’s a Cain lurking about in each of us, deep in the shadow we can’t see in ourselves, a force that we won’t admit to. Maybe, like Cain and his host of descendants, wanting to kill someone else, even just with our words, a cut at a time. Maybe like those who worshipped the molten calf, riotously trying to kill whatever beauty and good remain within us.

Ideas of the good and the right, the vision and the way, law and justice are all we have to stop the flood. When in doubt, when confused, when hope is receding, pursue justice – and love, and truth and beauty. We can push back the flood, the raging waters, and in their place, we can find a fountain of life, pouring jetting) up and or flowing from the soul, pushing back the shadow, giving us light.

And tomorrow, we have to push back the flood again.