What Does a Friendly Eye See? -- Devarim 5786

Earlier this month, I found myself in a sharp but respectful exchange with Rabbi David Ingber, a rabbi I admire.

Rabbi Ingber, the founder of Romemu in New York City, had written an essay arguing that liberal rabbis are often quick to invoke the biblical prophets when criticizing Israel, Jewish institutions, or Jewish power, yet less willing to summon that same moral clarity when confronting Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, antisemitism, or the failures of our progressive allies.

I resonated with some of what he wrote. Since October 7, many Jews have discovered that people fluent in the language of justice can become evasive or cruel when the victims are Jews—rushing to explain the massacre before grieving with us, or seeing every exercise of Israeli power and almost none of Jewish vulnerability.

But Rabbi Ingber and I disagreed about what follows. He worries that liberal Jewish life has developed an unhealthy reflex of criticizing Israel and Jewish power; I worry that parts of the Jewish community have developed an unhealthy reflex of treating criticism of Israel as evidence of disloyalty. Underneath our disagreement was a harder question: when criticism comes from outside, how do we know whether we are hearing a necessary truth or a distortion shaped by hostility? When criticism comes from within, how do we know whether it arises from covenantal responsibility or from alienation and contempt? How do we defend the Jewish people against lies without becoming unable to hear truths we would rather avoid?

Those questions recur in this week’s Torah portion, as Moses stands on the eastern bank of the Jordan, near the end of his life, and begins retelling the story of Israel’s forty years in the wilderness.

Early in that retelling, Moses says:

“The Infinite your God has multiplied you, and here you are today, as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

It is a beautiful image, echoing God’s ancient promise to Abraham. After generations of slavery and wandering, the promise has begun to be fulfilled. Yet almost immediately, Moses says:

"Eikhah essa levadi torḥakhem u-masa’akhem ve-rivkhem? / How can I bear alone your trouble, your burden, and your disputes?”

The blessing seems to have become a something of a curse. Moses says: God has made you as numerous as the stars -- and therefore I can no longer carry you.

Moses then recounts how he addressed this problem by appointing judges. We know this story from Exodus, where his father-in-law, Jethro, watches Moses sit all day hearing disputes and urges him to appoint capable, trustworthy people to hear the smaller cases.

But when Moses retells the story in Deuteronomy, Jethro has disappeared. Moses does not explicitly deny Jethro’s role, but he remembers himself telling the Israelites that he could no longer bear them alone and instructing them to identify wise, discerning, and respected people from among their tribes. The people approve the proposal, and Moses appoints the judges.

Perhaps Moses is simplifying the story, or, nearing the end of his life, burnishing his legacy a little. Or perhaps Deuteronomy is less interested in where the idea originated than in what Israel must do with it now. Moses and Jethro will be absent from the society Israel is about to build; the institution Jethro proposed, and the habits of judgment it requires, must become part of Israel’s communal life.

Moses recalls telling them:

“Choose for yourselves, from your tribes, people who are wise, discerning, and known, and I will appoint them as your heads.… At that time I instructed your judges, saying: Shamoa bein aḥeikhem, ushefatetem tzedek bein ish uvein aḥiv uvein gero—listen to what is between your kin, and judge justly between a person and his fellow, or the stranger who is with him. Lo takiru panim ba-mishpat; ka-katon ka-gadol tishma’un; lo taguru mipnei ish, ki ha-mishpat l’Elohim hu—do not show partiality in judgment; hear the small and the great alike; do not be afraid of anyone, for judgment belongs to God.”

Once the whole instruction is before us, its peculiarities become more apparent. The administrative connection between a growing population and a larger caseload is obvious enough, but why does Moses frame Israel’s growth through the covenantal image of the stars? Why is his answer not simply more judges, but judges trained above all to listen? And why does a passage that begins with disputes among “your kin” suddenly insist upon justice for the ger?

The biblical ger is not simply a tourist or a person passing through. The term generally refers to an outsider settled among Israel, living under Israelite authority without the protections of native kinship, ancestral land, or established communal standing. Such a person is especially vulnerable in a legal dispute, where everyone else knows the customs, influential families, and reputations.

Which may be why Moses’ instruction begins, not with deciding, but with hearing: Shamoa bein aḥeikhem — listen to what lies between them. Something has happened between the people standing before the judge: a history, a wound, a conflict, perhaps a crime. Their accounts may not fit neatly together, and the judge must enter that contested space and understand what happened before deciding what justice requires.

Then Moses says it again: Ka-katon ka-gadol tishma’un — you shall hear the small and the great alike.

The repetition suggests that Moses is addressing something deeper than courtroom procedure. He emphasizes both the size of the Israelite community and the discipline of listening because scale changes the way we perceive. When we look up at the night sky with the naked eye, the stars may appear almost interchangeable, one small point of light beside another, even though each occupies its own place, lies at its own distance, and burns in its own way. Where we stand also affects what we see: the sky above Times Square appears almost empty, while a dark field discloses thousands of lights that were present all along.

People, too, become harder to see as individuals when we encounter them as part of a vast and complicated multitude. Israelites and strangers. Israelis and Palestinians. Zionists and anti-Zionists. Progressives and Conservatives. Friends and enemies. Categories help make the world intelligible, but they can also obscure more than they reveal, allowing us to believe we know a person before hearing them.

Perhaps that is the deeper connection Moses is making. Israel’s growth is a blessing, but it creates a moral danger: a people as numerous as the stars can become an undifferentiated mass, even to its own leaders. Justice therefore requires a structure capable of recovering the individual from the multitude and listening to one human being at a time.

The ger is in a sense the hardest test of that discipline, because an outsider is a person most likely to disappear inside a category. Before the stranger speaks, everyone may already believe they know what kind of person stands before them and what their testimony is worth. There is therefore an irony in Moses’ retelling that, once noticed, is difficult to ignore: the outsider whose wisdom helped establish Israel’s system of justice disappears from the story, while the system itself is commanded to protect the outsider standing before it.

Communities often benefit from strangers and then forget them, absorbing their ideas, labor, and contributions while later speaking as though all wisdom and strength came from within. Jethro’s absence may therefore sharpen the force of the ger’s presence. Can Israel create a system that hears the outsider even when Israel forgets how much it has learned from outsiders?

That question stands behind the Torah’s next command: Lo takiru panim ba-mishpat — literally, “Do not recognize faces in judgment.” The expression is strange, since justice surely requires recognizing the human being before us. Moses warns against allowing identity, status, nationality, wealth, vulnerability, or political allegiance to settle the case before the testimony is heard. Power must not purchase credibility; vulnerability cannot by itself prove a claim; kinship cannot guarantee innocence; foreignness cannot establish guilt. What matters is not where the person comes from, but whether the claim is just.

The danger becomes especially acute when loyalty is involved. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Cassius complains that Brutus has been too attentive to his faults:

Cassius insists, “A friendly eye could never see such faults.”

Brutus answers, “A flatterer’s would not, though they do appearAs huge as high Olympus.”

Cassius imagines that friendship should produce acquittal in advance; Brutus insists that an eye incapable of seeing obvious faults belongs not to a friend, but to a flatterer. Love should not make us eager to condemn, but neither can it require us to look away. It obligates us to hear the case honestly, precisely because the relationship matters.

That kind of love demands courage, which is why Moses continues: Lo taguru mipnei ish — do not be afraid of anyone. Do not fear the powerful person who may punish you, the crowd that has already reached its verdict, your own community when justice requires disappointing it, or outsiders who may seize upon your words and use them dishonestly.

Yet courage can easily become certainty, and certainty can become self-righteousness, so Moses adds one final restraint: Ki ha-mishpat l’Elohim hu — judgment belongs to God. The judge must decide, but must never confuse a partial human perspective with divine omniscience. We see the portion of the sky visible from where we stand; God sees every star, including those hidden from us by distance, darkness, or glare. We are responsible for judging actions and claims, while remembering that none of us possesses the whole truth about another person, movement, nation, or people.

This is part of why I find contemporary discourse about Israel so painful. Rabbi Ingber is right that some critics prejudge the case according to identity and power: Israel is powerful, therefore Israel must be guilty; Jews are perceived as privileged, therefore Jewish fear must be manipulative; Palestinian testimony is treated as inherently credible, while Israeli testimony is regarded as propaganda.

But many defenders of Israel commit the same error in reverse: Israel is ours, therefore Israel must be innocent; the speaker is Palestinian, progressive, antiwar, or critical of Zionism, therefore nothing that person says can be true; every difficult report becomes propaganda and every demand for accountability becomes betrayal.

The Torah does not teach that the truth always lies in the middle, nor does it insist that every claim deserves equal weight. Judgment must be earned through disciplined hearing rather than determined by loyalty, fear, or the category into which we place the speaker.

On the Shabbat before Tisha B’Av, when we mourn the destruction of Jerusalem and other catastrophes in Jewish history, tradition pairs Parashat Devarim with Isaiah’s opening chapter.

Because the haftarah begins "Hazon Yeshayahu / the vision of Isaiah” — this day is called Shabbat Hazon, the Sabbath of Vision. Yet Isaiah’s vision begins with a command to hear: “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth.” He looks upon a society full of religious activity — sacrifices, prayers, festivals, sacred assemblies — and sees blood on the hands raised toward heaven, rulers who accept bribes, and vulnerable people whose pleas never reach them. “Learn to do good,” he pleads. “Seek justice. Aid the wronged. Defend the orphan. Plead for the widow.”

Isaiah speaks fiercely because Jerusalem is his city and Israel is his people; he sees their future as bound up with his own, and his criticism attempts to interrupt disaster while return is still possible. Even after everything he has condemned, he still envisions God saying, “Come, let us reason together.” The rebuke is severe because the possibility of repentance remains real.

Our sages noticed that Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah each use the word eikhah —“How?” Moses asks, Eikhah essa levadi? How can I carry your burdens and conflicts alone? Isaiah asks, Eikhah hayetah lezonah kiryah ne’emanah? How has the faithful city become corrupt? And Jeremiah, traditionally believed to be the author of the book of Lamentations (which is read on the eve of Tisha B'Av), caries after the destruction of Jerusalem, Eikhah yashvah vadad? How does the city sit alone?

Conflicts we fail to hear become corruption we refuse to see, until we are left amid a ruin we cannot understand. The judge and the prophet both try to interrupt that movement before lament becomes the only language left.

If we could learn to practice this demanding form of moral attention, we might become a Jewish community capable of hearing Jewish fear without allowing fear to decide every case; confronting antisemitism without turning every critic into an antisemite; hearing Palestinian suffering without minimizing October 7, and remembering October 7 without silencing Palestinian suffering. We might learn to love Israel enough to defend it against lies and enough to refuse the lies we tell ourselves, cultivating a solidarity strong enough to survive moral honesty and a moral honesty rooted deeply enough in love that it never becomes contempt.

Such a community would be stronger, and it might help Israel become stronger as well— not only more secure, but more faithful to the covenant in whose name the Jewish people returned to sovereignty.

So on this Shabbat Hazon, I pray: May the One who promised that Abraham’s descendants would become as numerous as the stars teach us never to lose the individual within the multitude.

May God give us ears that can hear what lies between people, minds disciplined enough to distinguish one claim from another, and hearts strong enough to remain open when fear tells us to close them; may God give us the courage to confront those who lie about our people, the honesty to face truths we would rather avoid, and the wisdom to know the difference.

May we hear the small and the great, the familiar and the foreign, the voice that confirms what we believe and the voice that unsettles us; may we refuse the comfort of flattery and the seduction of contempt; may we defend Jewish lives without diminishing other lives, uphold Jewish sovereignty without abandoning Jewish responsibility, and love Israel in a way that protects its body, strengthens its character, and helps redeem its soul.

May we become a people capable of clear sight and careful hearing, courageous in judgment and humble before the Judge of all the earth.

And when the sky feels too vast, the voices too many, and the whole truth beyond our sight, may we listen for the one person standing before us—and remember that judgment belongs to God.

So may it be God's will. Amen.