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250  forty-eight Setting Ourselves Judges Parashat Shoftim (Deuteronomy 16:18–21:9) Julia Watts Belser One of the most stirring calls for justice-seeking in the Torah comes near the beginning of Parashat Shoftim: “Justice, justice shall you pursue” (Deut. 16:20). A longstanding rallying cry for socially engaged Jews, this verse has been an important buttress for queer folk and allies who call for the creation of a Jewish community that includes and celebrates queer experience, as well as Jewish activism for LGBT justice in the wider world. Yet just before this classic phrase, the Torah offers a verse that is just as resonant for queer Jews, but often overshadowed. Parashat Shoftim opens, “Judges and officers shall you give yourselves, in all of your gates which God has given you, for your tribes, and they shall judge the people with right justice” (Deut. 16:18). In the verses that follow, the Torah teaches that these judges must not take bribes or judge unfairly. They must judge righteously, for it is their discerning judgment that will ultimately inspire the larger community to pursue justice. Though the message seems outwardly straightforward, the opening verse of Parashat Shoftim has an odd grammatical structure that caught the attention of classic interpreters. The phrase “for your tribes” protrudes from the otherwise seamless sentence—a dangling clause full of potent meaning for contemporary gay, lesbian, bisexual , and transgender Jews. According to Rashi’s medieval commentary, this phrase teaches that the Torah obligates each of the twelve ancestral tribes to appoint its own judges. The twelve tribes of Israel represent the mythic organization of Jewish genealogy that links us back to one of the twelve sons of Jacob. In Rashi’s reading, the verse’s mandate to establish judges “in all of your gates” and “for all of your tribes” means that each of these ancient tribes must appoint a judge to serve in every place and every city. Whereas Rashi reads this verse as an instruction on the establishment of an actual system of judges and understands the tribes as Judah, Reuben, Gad, and the rest of the “official” twelve, a contemporary queer reading reminds us of the other tribes in our midst: dykes, gender queers, fairies, and more. Read through a queer lens, this verse calls to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender folk as a tribe within the whole—a tribe bound by spiritual kinship and mythic memory, a tribe with an obligation to honor our own particular history, and a tribe that also carries the responsibility for self-governance, moral stature, and right justice. Whereas Rashi speaks of a judge as one who wields legal authority and probably imagines these judges as traditional deciders of Jewish law and practice, a Parashat Shoftim 251 contemporary queer reading must wrestle with the power and danger of the judge. We queers have suffered others’ harsh judgment. We are a people who struggle for a voice in the legislative bodies of this country, who struggle for protection from the courts and the law, who must all too often struggle for a generous hearing from our families. We have known so much judgment and so little justice. In the face of this history, we might well be tempted to eschew judgment altogether, to turn away from the idea of ethical authority, to fear the power of the judge and the moral weight he or she carries. With the vibrant diversity of queer families and queer life paths so often derided and maligned—or overlooked and silenced—by the judgers of this world, we might give up on encountering a judge who recognizes our face, who listens for our story, who hearkens with interest to the intimate texture of its own unfolding. But the Torah obligates us to raise up judges from our own ranks. Reading again the opening verses of Parashat Shoftim from a queer perspective, we hear a call for our tribe to appoint judges and officers for ourselves. Whereas Rashi read these judges as the linchpins of a formalized legal system, a contemporary queer reading sees the judge as a metaphor for leadership and ethical authority, manifest in a variety of forms. Our judges are the ones whose discerning righteousness inspires us toward the pursuit of justice. They are the ones who will see us truly, who will speak hard truths and carry high expectations, who will call forth our own decency and goodness. We are asked to find judges who recognize the landscape of...

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