There are verses from the Torah that almost everyone seems to know.  ‘In the beginning God created…’ – ‘Let my people go…’ – ‘Get up and leave your home toward the Land that I will show you…’ And, this week, in the Torah portion comes another one that may not be as well known but ought to be. Four words. Six syllables in Hebrew. And yet Jewish tradition has spent three thousand years unable to stop talking about them.

צֶ֥דֶק צֶ֖דֶק תִּרְדֹּ֑ף

“Tzedek, tzedek tirdof.”

Justice, justice, you shall pursue.

Now, if you know anything about how the Torah uses language, you know it doesn’t repeat itself for style. Torah is economical. It doesn’t pad. So when the text says the word “justice” twice in a row, back to back, our tradition sits up and asks: why?

Rashi, our great medieval commentator, gives us one answer. He says the doubling teaches us to seek out a good court — not just any court, but a court staffed with judges of real competence and integrity. One “tzedek” tells us to pursue justice; the second “tzedek” tells us to pursue it through just means. In other words, you cannot get to a righteous outcome through a corrupt process. The ends do not justify the means. If you want justice, the way you pursue it has to itself be just. This is a profound thought. Think about how much of our world operates on the opposite assumption — that if the goal is good enough, we can cut corners to get there. The Torah says no. Tzedek, tzedek. Justice twice, because the path and the destination must match.

I like Rashi’s answer.  But as with anything Jewish, there is always more than one perspective.

The Hasidic master Reb Simcha Bunim offers something different. He says: one “tzedek” is for you, and one “tzedek” is for your neighbor. We are remarkably good at demanding justice when we are the ones who feel wronged. We pursue that tzedek with real vigor. But the second tzedek — the justice owed someone else, the person we disagree with, the person we’ve already decided is in the wrong — that pursuit is much harder, and much rarer. Two words, because justice has two directions: outward and toward the self, and it is far too easy to only chase one of them.

I like that answer, too. Very psychological, very personal.

But I want to offer you one more way into this verse — a way that has less to do with grammar and more to do with the body. I thought of this interpretation while walking through the parking lot of CBI in this nearly-intolerable heat and humidity. I never thought a parking lot could teach me Torah but, here we are!

Here is my parking-lot epiphany: Think about someone crossing a desert. Not a metaphorical desert — an actual, brutal, sun-scorched desert, like the one our ancestors crossed for forty years. When that traveler finally sees water, what do they cry out? Not “water.” They cry, “Water, water.” And every commentator who has ever noticed this pattern of doubling in the Torah has asked: why the repetition? And the answer that speaks most to me is this — the doubling isn’t redundancy. It’s urgency. It’s the sound of a need that doesn’t quiet down after being named once. A person dying of thirst doesn’t say the word “water” as information. They say it twice because the thirst itself is relentless, because one utterance doesn’t capture how badly, how continuously, the body is crying out.

That is what I think is happening with tzedek, tzedek.

Justice is not a place you arrive at and then rest. It is not a box you check. The Torah does not say “tzedek tirdof” — pursue justice, once, as if pursuit has a finish line. It says the word twice, because justice is like that traveler’s thirst: you satisfy it, and it returns. You build a just court this year, and next year new inequities emerge that need addressing. You right one wrong, and you discover another wrong standing right behind it. Justice, justice — because the moment you think you have achieved it fully and finally, you have stopped pursuing it, and the pursuit is the whole point.

Notice, too, that the verb here is tirdof — pursue, chase, run after. Not tasig, attain. Not timtza, find. The Torah could have said “justice, achieve it.” Instead it says “justice, chase it,” and chasing is a verb with no natural stopping point. You don’t pursue something you’ve already caught. The Torah is telling us, gently but unmistakably, that a righteous society is not a status. It’s a direction. It’s a way of walking through the world where you never quite say, “we’re done here.” True, it is a kind of obsession but obsession can lead to a near-perfection.

Consider this true story: In 2011, a documentary came out called Jiro Dreams of Sushi. It is a documentary about Jiro Ono, a Japanese sushi chef so devoted to his craft that his tiny restaurant, located in a subway station, received a three-star Michelin rating. Ono was so exacting in his demands that employees weren’t permitted to prepare food until they’d learned the proper way to squeeze the hand towels offered to guests upon arrival, which could take weeks or even years; when an apprentice finally made a passable tamago omelet, he wept with joy. Audiences arrived in droves, but critics were torn about Ono’s single-mindedness. One said, “This is a portrait of tunnel vision,” and he didn’t mean it as a compliment — noting that Ono’s relationship to a meal that can be consumed in a matter of minutes “wavers between love and madness.”

And while there may be a difference between sushi and justice, there is something to be said for the singlemindedness that people or societies pursue. What a different place this world would be if every government was obsessed with justice in the same way that Jiro is obsessed with sushi!

Our sages understood this. That’s why the tradition has never stopped writing new commentary on justice, generation after generation, court after court, responsum after responsum and not simply to be read as theory but to be practiced and obsessed over. Keep in mind, this obsessive pursuit happens not because the earlier answers were wrong, but because tzedek is a well you return to, thirsty again, no matter how many times you’ve already drunk from it.

So as we read Shoftim this week, I don’t think the question is: have we achieved justice? I think the question the Torah wants us to ask is smaller and harder: are we still pursuing it? Are we still saying the word twice — once for the process, once for the outcome; once for ourselves, once for our neighbor; once for today, and again, because tomorrow the thirst returns?

Tzedek, tzedek tirdof. Justice, justice, you shall pursue. May we never stop saying it twice.

Shabbat Shalom.