Justice Without Leaning
There’s a verse in this week’s Torah portion, Mishpatim, that catches me every year.
The Torah tells us not to favor the rich in judgment. That part feels obvious. But then it says something harder: don’t favor the poor either. And honestly… that can be difficult to sit with.
Because most of us carry an instinct to lean. Sometimes toward power and influence. Sometimes, as a moral correction, toward those we feel deserve extra protection. We want to help. We want to balance the scales. We want things to feel fair.
And yet the Torah seems to know something about us. We are easily swayed — by money, by emotion, by popularity, by outrage. So Mishpatim calls us toward something steadier. Not coldness. Not indifference. But disciplined fairness. Because if justice bends toward either power or pity, it stops being justice.
Outside the courtroom, Torah leans hard toward compassion. Again and again it tells us to care for the stranger, protect the vulnerable, remember what it felt like to be powerless ourselves. Compassion is not optional. But when it comes to judgment, the Torah asks for clarity rather than leaning.
Showing deference to the rich corrupts justice through power. Showing deference to the poor corrupts justice through sentiment. The challenge is not to stop caring — it is to see clearly.
And this is where Torah was quietly revolutionary. In the ancient Near East, many legal systems — like the law code of Hammurabi — assigned different penalties depending on a person’s class or social status. The value of a person could shift depending on wealth or rank. Torah insists on something different: every human being stands equally accountable before divine law.
That doesn’t mean life is equal in every way. People come into the world with different resources, different struggles, different fears. But before justice — and before God — their moral worth does not rise or fall with circumstance.
Maybe that is why this teaching feels uncomfortable even now. Because deference is easier than fairness. Deference lets us react; fairness asks us to pause. Deference follows feeling; justice asks for discipline.
And maybe that’s the quiet spiritual question Mishpatim leaves us with: can we look at one another without immediately leaning? Can we hold compassion in our hearts without letting it blur what we see? Can we practice a justice that is steady enough to honor the divine image in everyone?
If we can, then justice stops being merely a legal principle. It becomes a spiritual practice.
And maybe that is part of what Shabbat invites us to practice — sitting together long enough to see one another clearly, and gently learning again how not to lean too quickly.
,שבת שלום
Ben
*published Feb. 13, 2026