At the second Constitutional Congress, Benjamin Franklin was not well. In his 80s and affected by gout and kidney stones, some days he was carried into the room in a chair. On September 17, 1787, he was in so much pain that he could not even read the speech he had prepared. But he was there for the long debates and upon exiting, Elizabeth Willing Powel asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin’s reply? “A republic, if you can keep it.”

A snappy line to be sure. The Founding Fathers had a fondness for riffing on Biblical texts. The Liberty Bell has a scriptural citation on it and Washington’s letter to the Congregation in Newport, RI described us as the children of Abrham and referenced the Prophet Micah. It would not be inconsistent then, although I have no evidence that the idea for his response to Ms. Willing Powell came from this weeks’ parasha.

What then, does it take to establish a just society? The Founding Fathers debated and discussed this at length, and gave form to the Republic. As for the Israelites, the foundation of their society, our society, was tzedek – justice. The phrase: tzedek tzedek tirdof, justice, justice shall you pursue has caught the attention of Supreme Court Justices, rabbis, and lawyers alike. But that is not the whole thing. The parasha goes on. The very next thing it tells us is that the pursuit of justice is necessary to our continuing to live and live well, on the land. That is the “if you can keep it” or perhaps the “how you keep it” clause.

From there, it seems as though the Torah abruptly switches directions. The next thing we are told “You shall not set up a sacred post—any kind of pole beside the altar of the ETERNAL your God that you may make—or erect a stone pillar; for such the ETERNAL your God detests.” This is not just God marking God’s territory. It is a response to the laws and practices of the Canaanites and other communities of the time. The Hebrew is: לֹֽא־תִטַּ֥ע לְךָ֛ אֲשֵׁרָ֖ה you shall not set up a sacred post. But Ashera was also the name of a Canaanite Goddess – we are being told not to set up foreign Gods and Goddesses, not to adopt their rules or laws, or their systems of values.

It goes on from there, laying out many more laws and regulations, most of which we would recognize as part of a legal system: civil and criminal laws, instructions for judges and witnesses. And those are our laws, too. Many of them were novel or revolutionary in the ancient world. But it started with the idea of justice and that it had to be ours. It could not survive if we did not safeguard it or keep to its principles. Justice is the one that all others depend on. Rabbi Simcha Bunim explained that a just goal cannot be met by unjust means and that even the most worthy of goals is diminished if we have to compromise justice to attain it.

These ideals are still ours. We still hold up this vision of a just society. Add to that thousands of years of oppression, struggle, and dreams of a better world, and we have our duty. In the Torah, the ones most responsible for that were the judges and officers. But that does not mean we can transfer our obligations to them alone. We are responsible for bringing putting those people in power. The Talmud cautions us, “A leader is not to be appointed unless the community is first consulted” (Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 55a). And we ourselves are responsible every day for living our values, for modeling them for the people around us, and for protecting those values. That is a responsibility we carry within our country and communities and amongst ourselves in this community. We are under the same obligations of 19th century Politician Carl Schurz, who famously professed, “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

“Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land that the ETERNAL your God is giving you.” It is up to us to ensure that justice reigns. Rabbi Mo Paul writes in a (M)oral Torah essay that “Parshat Shoftim is not a set of instructions for how to reform a broken system. It is a world-building exercise where, with God’s instructions, we create new systems with just processes and just outcomes.” This is another connection between the words of our tradition and the founding of our nation – penned by another group of idealistic underdogs, nearly 250 years ago.

Our tradition is much older, as is our responsibility to defend it. “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” It is the pursuit of justice that we must do. It is active, it is current, it is vital. We have known injustice and been victims of societies where it was the law of the land. And we have seen those societies fall. So we pursue justice whether or not it benefits us because no society can stand without justice.