d’var torah
Here Comes the Judge
BY RABBI MEGAN GOLDMARCHE
A Parshat Re’eh
s we enter the month of
Rosh Hashanah, I get a bit
more self-refl ective. Both in
the lovely thoughtful way and in the
self-criticizing judgy way. Am I being
the person I want to be? How many
al-heits will I have to say with genuine
admonition this Yom Kippur?
While we all claim to not want to be
judgmental, we also play the judge all the
time, for our friends and family, for our-
selves and, for most of us, for strangers,
famous people and just about anyone else
with whom we come into contact.

Th is parsha is defi nitely not anti-judg-
ing: We are told we must set up judges in
all of our cities, but, of course, it is not just
left at that. It is written in Deuteronomy 16:
“Th ey [the judges] shall judge the peo-
ple [with] righteous judgment. You shall
not pervert justice; you shall not show
favoritism, and you shall not take a bribe,
for bribery blinds the eyes of the wise and
perverts just words.”
Of course, it would be ideal if we all
judged that way but is that really how
it works? Is it possible to avoid favorit-
ism? Research shows that we are biased
toward people who we like, people like us
and people who have been good toward
us in the past. We can and should work
to eliminate these biases, but they are
natural and diffi cult to uproot.

Th is leads me to one of my favorite
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Talmud passages, from B. Sanhedrin 17a:
Rabbi Yohanan says: Th ey place on the
Sanhedrin only judges of high stature, and
of wisdom, and of pleasant appearance,
and of suitable age so that they will be
respected. And they must also be masters
of sorcery, i.e., they know the nature of
sorcery, so that they can judge sorcerers,
and they must know all seventy languages
in order that the Sanhedrin will not need
to hear testimony from the mouth of a
translator in a case where a witness speaks
a diff erent language. Rav Yehuda says that
Rav says: Th ey place on the Sanhedrin only
one who knows how to render a carcass of a
creeping animal pure by Torah law.

Based on this passage, to be one of the
judges we are talking about in the Torah,
one needs to be wise, powerful, attractive,
not too old or too young, experts in magic,
fl uent in 70 languages and able to produce
a convincing argument that creeping ani-
mals, which the Torah states explicitly are
ritually impure, are actually pure.

What is this telling us? Basically no
one is fi t to be a judge. But, of course, we
need judges; the Torah just told us we
must appoint them.

What does this have to do with me,
a local rabbi who recently moved to
town to lead Tribe 12, a local nonprofi t
that connects people in their 20s and
30s to Jewish life and community in
Philadelphia today so they will choose to
stay connected tomorrow?
I am pretty sure that I am one of the
foremost experts in 20s/30s Jewish life
based on my work experience. I have
been working with 18-39-year-olds to
build Jewish community since 2006 and,
before that, I was doing the work as a
college student at Penn.

And yet I acknowledge that in reality to
really know exactly what all 20s and 30s
young Jews want and need, you need to
be simultaneously 22 and 26 and 30 and
35 and 39. And you need to be single and
coupled and queer and straight and white
and a person of color and neurotypical
and neurodiverse. You need to be Reform,
Reconstructionist, Conservative, Orthodox
and post and non-denominational. You
need to come from an interfaith family and
a Sephardic family and from the FSU. And
I could go on and on and on.

And you can see where I am going. No
one person can have all of these traits.

And yet we need to do the work of build-
ing community for this population and
all other populations.

So what do we do? We try our best.

At Tribe 12, we pay attention, actively
listen and then respond, we create diverse
off erings, we live in the now and watch
for what’s next, but most importantly, we
are not convinced we are right. We know
that what was explicitly impure yesterday
may be the purest thing we need tomor-
row. We have always been committed to
disrupting the ordinary, and we do our
best to do it righteously, knowing every
day we have a chance to do better.

Th ank you for such a warm welcome
to Philadelphia and happy end to 5782! JE
Rabbi Megan GoldMarche is the executive
director of Tribe 12. Th e Board of Rabbis
of Greater Philadelphia is proud to pro-
vide diverse perspectives on Torah commen-
tary for the Jewish Exponent. Th e opinions
expressed in this column are the author’s
own and do not refl ect the view of the Board
of Rabbis.

nmls 215-901-6521 • 561-631-1701