Judge Thyself

SHOFTIM

Judge Thyself

Parshas Shoftim coincides with the beginning of the month of Elul and opens with the command to appoint judges and officers "in all your gates" and the emphasis on the singular (lecha) points inward: the real courtroom is a person's own mind, and the real gates are sight, hearing, smell, and speech, the points where the outside world first makes contact with the self.

Another lesson that is gleaned from this mitzvah is as a call to judge oneself before judging others, since most conflict comes from holding one standard for our own behavior and a stricter one for everyone else's.

The central idea, though, is that self-control works best as prevention rather than as a fight fought after the fact: once a trigger has already reached awareness and stirred up desire, willpower rarely wins, so the wiser move is to keep the trigger from entering in the first place, whether that means what a person looks at, listens to, or even allows himself to dwell on in thought.