Tzedek, Tzedek Tirdof–Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue
By Shahar Masori in San Mateo, California
There is a difference between order and justice. Authoritarian systems depend on people confusing the two. Order is what power demands. Justice is what power must submit to if democracy is to survive.
The killings in Minnesota matter not only because Renee Good and Alex Pretti are dead, but because of what followed. The speed of the denials by the highest officials in the land. The flattening of facts. The insistence that outrage itself was the problem. The suggestion, explicit or implied, that questioning federal force was somehow more dangerous than the force itself.
We should be precise with our language. These were not accidents. They were not misunderstandings. They were killings, murders, assassinations carried out by agents of the state. That inversion should unsettle anyone who still believes democracy is more than branding.
In Jewish law, justice is not defined by results alone. To quote Deuteronomy (D’varim) 16:20 צֶדֶק צֶדֶק תִּרְדֹּף Tzedek, Tzedek Tirdof, justice, justice shall you pursue.
The repetition is deliberate. Justice must exist both in outcome and in process. Remove either one, the word loses its meaning.
Force without accountability is not order. It is fear. And fear, once normalized, does not stay contained.
Governments often justify force by invoking safety. But safety without transparency is indistinguishable from control. When the state asks citizens to trust its conclusions while withholding its reasoning, it is no longer asking for confidence, it is asking for submission.
It doesn’t necessarily take tanks in the streets, or dramatic coups for democracy to erode; all it requires is a steady narrowing of what may be questioned.
I’ve watched the press briefings that followed the murders. Not casually, but carefully. The language matters. Again and again, the justification was repeated, “we are stopping murderers, rapists, and violent criminals.” Numbers were recited. Sexual offenders were invoked. The message was clear, force was not only necessary, it was righteous.
If I had been in that room, I would have asked a simple question.
Does this standard apply universally?
Because if the principle is that proximity to power does not excuse past harm, then it cannot stop at the gates of the White House. If the government’s moral authority rests on removing dangerous individuals from public life, then selective enforcement is not justice, it is marketing.
It begs the question, what about the convicted sexual offender sitting in the White House right now? Are you going after him?
Justice is not defined by whom it targets. It is defined by whom it does not exempt.
This is precisely why process matters. Why accountability cannot be situational. Why moral clarity collapses the moment it becomes performative.
When the state invokes the language of protection while quietly carving out exceptions for itself, it is no longer pursuing justice. It is managing perception. And perception, unlike justice, has no obligation to be consistent. A society committed to justice does not fear questions. It invites them.
Authoritarian systems do the opposite. They frame doubt as disloyalty. They recast calls for accountability as obstruction. They insist that trust must precede transparency, rather than result from it.
This is not uniquely American. Across the world, governments facing instability increasingly rely on spectacle, certainty, and force to compensate for declining credibility. The pattern is familiar, when legitimacy weakens, power hardens.
But democracies are not meant to operate on faith alone. They are built on visible constraints, on the idea that no authority is exempt from explanation. The danger is not that mistakes are made.
The danger is when mistakes become unreviewable.
Jewish tradition does not romanticize power. Kings are warned more than celebrated. Judges are scrutinized. Authority is always provisional, always conditional, always accountable to law. The system assumes fallibility and builds safeguards around it.
When those safeguards are treated as inconveniences, justice becomes theater.
This is why the response to Minnesota matters more than any single incident. It signals a preference for control over clarity. A belief that order alone is sufficient. It is not!!!
A society can survive insecurity. It cannot survive the normalization of fear.
This is not a call to despair. It is a call to insist, quietly, firmly, relentlessly, that justice must be pursued in daylight. That process matters. That power must explain itself.
Because when justice becomes a performance, history shows what follows.
Not chaos at first. Not collapse. Just silence. And then the rules change.
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Shahar Masori is an Israeli American freelance columnist based in San Diego.