The Law of the Land

Like most, my first introduction to law was the rules in my parents’ home. And, like most, my parents were better at parenting than at lawmaking. Now that I am a parent, I sympathize far more with the struggle of making rules. It is not easy to adjudicate cases between an 11-year-old and a 7-year-old. What evidence is necessary to prosecute someone for kicking a hole in their bedroom door when they claim self-defense? Can you prove I was the one who blew out a tire on my dad’s car during an alleged joyride before I even had a license? Homes don’t operate like courts. As comedian Simon Rich imagines in his short story, “If Life Were Like Middle School,” a judge cannot justify locking up a victim by saying, “I don’t care who started it.” The rules of childhood and the law couldn’t be more dissimilar. Law can be harsh and unforgiving, which made me nervous to begin Tractate Sanhedrin, the Talmudic tractate that discusses the Jewish legal system. But deep within its pages, I found an approach to law that is somehow more like the rules of childhood—one that still manages to love us.

The Sanhedrin—from the Greek synedrion, meaning “sitting together” or “a council”—was the ancient Jewish high court and legislative body, responsible for interpreting and enforcing Torah law. Tractate Sanhedrin outlines its structure and judicial procedures, emphasizing principles of justice and due process. Courts ranged from smaller tribunals of 23 judges for capital cases to the Great Sanhedrin of 71, which ruled on national matters. Key legal safeguards included thorough cross-examination of witnesses, a prohibition against self-incrimination, and a bias toward acquittal in capital cases—requiring a majority to convict but only a simple majority to acquit.

After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the Sanhedrin was exiled from Jerusalem to Yavneh, gradually losing power until its eventual disbanding around 425 CE. Although Jews pray daily for the rebuilding of the temple and the reinstitution of the Sanhedrin, many modern Jews grapple with the idea of a powerful religious court. Modern life has made the law suspect, a powerful tool enforcing uniformity rather than serving as a means of order.

“Someone must have slandered Josef K.,” begins Kafka’s The Trial, “for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” Few capture the inscrutability, the inaccessibility, and the utter terror of following the law quite like Kafka. Living in an age when traditional commitment was quickly eroding, Kafka saw the law—an avatar for his relationship with traditional Jewish life—as a faceless accuser constantly asserting his guilt even though he was ignorant of his crimes. “It’s characteristic of this judicial system,” Kafka wrote, “that a man is condemned not only when he’s innocent but also in ignorance.” The law, with its all-encompassing exactitudes, condemns man to a life where our ideals are perpetually out of reach.

This tension—stabilizing society while unsettling individuality—lies at the heart of Tractate Sanhedrin. Beyond its focus on the law, an entire chapter of Talmud is dedicated to aggadah, or theology and narrative. The very opening to this chapter seems to subvert the consequences the law is meant to preserve: “All of Israel has a portion in the World to Come,” begins the Mishnah in the last chapter of Sanhedrin. If I am guaranteed a portion in the World to Come, why is following the law even necessary?

To understand the nature of law in Tractate Sanhedrin, consider the story of the most famous Talmud lecture in history—or, at least, arguably the most famous. More than 65 years ago, a Talmud lecture appeared on the front page of The New York Times, albeit beneath the fold. On Friday, Sept. 13, 1957, Chief Justice Earl Warren and former President Harry Truman attended a Talmud lecture at the Jewish Theological Seminary. The headline read, “Warren Studies Talmudic Law Here.” Chief Justice Warren, the Times reported, “donned a black skull cap” out of respect. When they sat together for Shabbat dinner, attendees were mortified to see Rabbi Saul Lieberman sip his tea through a sugar cube in front of President Truman, a practice I lovingly remember my grandparents doing. As my dear friend Yaakov Sasson has written about in great detail, the topic of Rabbi Lieberman’s lecture was the Jewish legal approach to self-incrimination, a fitting topic as the High Holidays approached. Lieberman explained why Jewish courts do not accept self-incriminating testimony: a person cannot “make themselves wicked.”

Maimonides offered a psychological rationale for this principle, but Lieberman’s insight was profound: The very act of self-incrimination is a form of repentance. Once a court hears such testimony, the guilty party has already repented for the sin in question. This idea reverberated beyond the lecture hall. Less than a decade later, Chief Justice Warren’s court enshrined the right against self-incrimination in Miranda v. Arizona, citing Maimonides to show the ancient roots of the principle. While Warren didn’t cite Lieberman’s logic, the echoes of that Talmud lecture were clear.

Just over 60 blocks from where Lieberman originally delivered his Talmud lecture lies another bastion of Talmudic learning, Yeshiva University. These respective institutions are sometimes seen as rivals given that the seminary is affiliated with Judaism’s Conservative denomination, while Yeshiva University is staunchly Orthodox. Lieberman, however, began his life studying in Orthodox institutions, so it is no surprise that word of his lecture trickled up to Yeshiva University’s campus into the classroom of its senior Talmudic sage, the venerated Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. In fact, Rabbis Soloveitchik and Lieberman were cousins. When Rabbi Soloveitchik heard the points from Lieberman’s lecture, he took issue with the logic he offered for the inadmissibility of self-incrimination. Repentance, Rabbi Soloveitchik insisted, is not admissible in court. Nowhere in Jewish law, he explained, do we find that the repentance of someone convicted in court is taken into consideration. While repentance is admirable, if not required, to mend relationships, most especially with the Divine, it cannot reverse a court’s decision or disqualify accepted testimony.

This debate raises an important question: Why isn’t teshuva (repentance) factored into our legal system? Or as former Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow asks in the title of her book: When, if ever, should the law forgive?

Judaism centers the law in religious life, but it does not define Jewish identity through adherence to the law. Jewish identity is immutable and unchosen. Even a convert, upon completing their conversion, has an irrevocable Jewish identity. In Tractate Sanhedrin, a tractate all about law, the Talmud emphasizes that all Jews, regardless of their observance of the law, have a portion in the World to Come. This reminds us that the core of Jewish identity is our unchosen familial identity. Even the law cannot define or reach the essence of the Jewish people, for there is a trace of God’s infinite love that escapes worldly judgment.

Judaism doesn’t want us to rest on our laurels, though. We follow the law not to “earn” a place in the World to Come—our place is already guaranteed—but to sanctify the interiority of our individual lives. The law is a way to manifest a loving God who cares even about our mundane, finite lives. “Does God really care how I tie my shoelaces?” anyone who has studied Jewish law has privately wondered. But that is exactly the point—the law is a reminder that a God who cares about the details of our individual lives even exists. There’s no place for teshuva in court, as Rav Tzadok explains, because courts govern our behavior, while teshuva returns us to our unalterable essential identity. Teshuva transcends the reach of the court.

So what, then, is the function of Jewish law, if our Jewish identity is immutable?

My childhood rabbi, Rabbi Walter Wurzburger, of blessed memory, shares a story in his book God Is Proof Enough. He was approached by someone who wanted to convert to Judaism. After explaining that even righteous gentiles could earn a place in the World to Come, the potential convert replied, “I don’t want to wait until after I die to experience the World to Come.”

The law reveals the infinity of the World to Come within this finite world. Our essence remains unaltered and eternal.

Jews have long been criticized for emphasizing the law. Paul argued that adherence to the law could not bring salvation, which, he claimed, came only through faith in Jesus. This critique framed Jewish observance as rigid, external, and concerned with ritual rather than spiritual transformation. But Tractate Sanhedrin reminds us that striving toward the ideal of law—rooted in our immutable Jewish identity—is the ultimate expression of our inner spiritual essence. In contrast to Pauline doctrine, Jewish identity is something innate, and striving to keep the law is the ultimate expression of our innate connection to the Divine.

Law is how we use our agency to sanctify the world. But Jewish identity is built upon our unchosen familial identity—the Divine soul that lies at our essence. It is through this unchanging connection to the Divine that we have the capacity to channel the infinite into the finite. Through the law, we can experience the World to Come in this world.

And the nature of our immutable Jewish identity is really a commentary on existence itself. We are all born into circumstances we did not choose. We do not choose our families, our genetics, our birthplace. Most fundamentally, we do not choose to exist. And yet, modernity has taught us to believe that our worth must be earned—that we must justify our existence through success, that we must prove we deserve to be here. But what if existence itself is the ultimate unchosen identity? What if, instead of striving to earn our place, we embraced the inherent meaning of simply being? Judaism offers a framework for this: It is called Halacha or Jewish law. We sanctify time, we honor our familial relationships, we recognize the weight of commandedness—the notion that our lives and actions matter not because we achieve something, but because we are something. Each Jew has a portion in the World to Come, and every Jew has the capacity and responsibility to reveal the World to Come within this world.

This brings us back to Kafka’s terror of the law. In Kafka’s world, law is an opaque, arbitrary force that renders individuals powerless. It’s a source of guilt and uncertainty. But Tractate Sanhedrin tells a different story. Our worthiness isn’t earned; we all have a portion in the World to Come. The law is the key through which we unlock the mystery of our unchosen identity—our existence itself—transforming this mundane world into a spiritual paradise. Kafka once said, “There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.” Tractate Sanhedrin responds, “There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe, and it all comes from us.”

We all have a share in the World to Come. Notice that the Talmud does not say, “We all will have a share in the World to Come.” It’s phrased in the present tense. This is the gift of Jewish law: experiencing eternity within a finite existence. We don’t have to wait for the next world. Striving for holiness is paradise enough, right here and right now.

הדרן עלך מסכת סנהדרין והדרך עלן