Shalom Brothers: The Men Who Can Be Told ‘No’ (Shoftim)

Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed – Executive Director, FJMC International

This weeks Torah reading, Shoftim (trans: Judges), opens with one of the Torah’s most famous commands: “Justice, justice shall you pursue” (Deuteronomy 16:20). But what follows is more interesting than the slogan. Moses does not simply tell Israel to find good people and put them in charge. He builds a system designed around a less flattering assumption: people with power are dangerous when nobody can tell them “no.”

Judges must not accept bribes or show partiality. Courts have procedures. Priests possess authority but are denied the ordinary territorial inheritance that might allow religious authority to become landed power. And then comes the Torah’s remarkable description of the king. He may rule, but he may not accumulate too many horses, too much silver and gold, or too many wives. He must keep a copy of the Torah beside him and read it continually so that “his heart not be exalted above his fellows” (Deuteronomy 17:16–20).

The Torah’s insight is not that power corrupts only bad men. It is that power changes the psychological environment around any man. People laugh harder at his jokes. They hesitate to contradict him. His preferences begin to feel like principles. Eventually he may mistake deference for wisdom. This makes Shoftim an unusually important text about masculinity.

Our culture still has a confused relationship with powerful men. We teach boys to become leaders, winners and providers, but devote less attention to the question that comes afterward: What kind of man will you become when other people start doing what you say?

The Torah’s answer is countercultural. A strong man is not the man who escapes limits. He is the man who willingly submits to them. This is why the Tate brothers (Andrew and Tristan) are worth considering as examples of a particular vision of distorted masculinity. The Tate brothers built enormous online followings around conspicuous wealth, male dominance and misogyny, presenting status, money and command over women as evidence that a man has won at life.

Now they are once again confronting institutions whose defining characteristic is that those institutions do not care how many followers, cars or dollars a person possesses. The brothers have been in federal custody in Miami since July 18 while fighting extradition to Britain, where they face charges including rape and sex trafficking; they deny wrongdoing. Their legal cases will be decided through legal processes, as they should be. But the contrast with Shoftim is striking.

The masculine ideal marketed by figures like Tate is fundamentally about accumulation: more money, more women, more physical power, more status, more control. Deuteronomy 17 reads almost like an ancient rebuttal. The king—the most powerful man in society—is specifically told: Do not accumulate. Why?

Because accumulation can distort the soul. Once masculinity becomes a contest for money, sexual access, followers or dominance, there is no natural point at which a man has enough. Every relationship becomes hierarchical. Other men become competitors. Women become measures of status. Institutions become obstacles. Being corrected feels like humiliation because the entire identity has been built around being the person who cannot be corrected.

Shoftim proposes a different model of masculine authority: strength under discipline. The judge answers to law. The priest serves something larger than himself. The king reads a text that reminds him every day that he is not God.

That may be the men’s-work lesson hiding inside this week’s Torah reading. We spend considerable time asking how to produce better male leaders. Perhaps we should spend more time teaching men how to be led—how to accept correction, submit to ethical boundaries, share authority, hear “no,” and remain psychologically intact when they do not get their way.

Institutions matter precisely because character sometimes fails. A healthy community should not require every leader to be extraordinarily virtuous. It should create structures that prevent ordinary human weakness from becoming extraordinary damage. And healthy masculinity should work the same way.

A mature man does not need to prove that nobody controls him. He creates commitments, relationships and practices strong enough to restrain him when his ego cannot. The Torah does not fear powerful men. It fears powerful men with no one above them.