There is a teaching that comes up often in the recovery circles I help facilitate.

One of my co-facilitators returns to it so frequently that I have come to anticipate it. Every few weeks, someone in the circle begins speaking about themselves with a certainty that leaves no room for mercy, sometimes sounding like shame, sometimes like pride. Either way, he reaches for the same teaching.

Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa taught that every person should carry two notes, one in each pocket. In one pocket: “Bishvili nivrah ha’olam”—”For my sake the world was created” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5). In the other: “Va’anochi afar v’efer”—”I am but dust and ashes” (Bereishit 18:27). Knowing which pocket this moment requires matters more than deciding which note is true.

Studying Parshat Shoftim this year, I returned again to those two pockets. The parsha opens with a command to build a justice system. “You shall appoint judges and officers in all your gates…and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment” (Devarim 16:18). Just two verses later, the Torah continues: “Justice, justice shall you pursue” (Devarim 16:20).
The commentators linger over the repetition. Why say tzedek (justice) twice?

Some explain that both the ends and the means must be just. Others understand the repetition as an instruction to pursue justice under every circumstance. Something else in these verses caught my attention this year: Before the Torah commands us to pursue justice, it commands us to appoint judges (Devarim 16:18).

I spend much of my life thinking about the voices we carry inside us. As a parent and a therapist, I have watched children slowly borrow the voices of the adults who love them until those voices become their own. Long after they stop asking us what to think, they continue asking themselves in words that sound remarkably familiar.

The same is true of us. There is a judge within each of us. That judge listens to the evidence at the end of every day: the conversation we wish we had handled differently, the child we lost patience with, the email we forgot to answer, the apology we offered, the kindness no one else noticed, the effort it took simply to get out of bed.

Some judges hear only one witness. Others refuse to issue a verdict until the whole story has been told.

Perhaps that is one way to read the opening of Shoftim. Before justice, the Torah asks who is doing the judging.

The room is quiet. My co-facilitator catches the speaker’s eye from across the circle and taps the pocket of his jacket. The man nods. His hand slips into an empty pocket. He unfolds an invisible piece of paper, reads it for a long moment, folds it carefully, and puts it back. Then he begins again.

The Torah does not say to appoint judges only in the capital, or only in the courts already built for judgment. Rather, it commands us to appoint them b’khol she’arekha—”in all your gates” (Devarim 16:18).

Every threshold is a gate, a place where something is about to be let in or kept out.

I think of the gates I pass through in a single day: the hard email read before coffee, the child’s voice sharpened by exhaustion that could be met with more of the same or with something else. Some mornings even my own face in the mirror looks like a courtroom.

We tend to think of judgment as something that happens after the fact, a verdict rendered once the evidence is in, yet the Torah’s instruction suggests otherwise. Before the case, appoint the judge. Before the moment arrives, decide who will be sitting when it does.

This is the real difficulty in Rabbi Simcha Bunim’s teaching. It is not hard to know that both notes are true. Of course the world was created for your sake. Of course you are dust and ash. The difficulty is that by the time you need one of them, you are usually too far into the moment to reach for it. The verdict has already been announced. The judge was already on the bench before you knew the court was in session.

So maybe the appointing has to happen earlier than the gate. Maybe it happens in the quiet stretches when nothing is being tried at all, when making the same breakfast every day, and the drive home. Perhaps, it happens in the circle where a person learns, week after week, to notice which pocket their hand is reaching for before speaking.

The man’s shoulders drop half an inch. He waits one breath longer than he used to before he speaks.

“Justice, justice shall you pursue,” twice, because the pursuit is never finished and never single.

The man folds the invisible paper and puts it back in his pocket. He begins again.

I do not know what is written on the notes in your pockets. I do not know which one you have reached for too often, or which one you have forgotten how to find, though I know the gates do not wait for us to be ready. They open on their own schedule, in an inbox or a hallway, in the space between what someone said and what we decide it meant.

B’khol she’arekha. In all your gates.

When the gate opens, all that is left is to reach into the right pocket and begin again.