What happens when the law gets it right—and people still feel wronged? What happens when someone dies and the court declares it an accident, but the victim’s brother can’t sleep at night because the man who caused his pain walks free? The final chapters of Numbers confront this question head-on. As The Children of Israel prepare to enter the land, the Torah lays out a legal mechanism both ancient and startlingly relevant: arei miklat, cities of refuge for the person guilty of manslaughter.
Why does justice sometimes fail to bring peace?
The Torah understands that in a world of tribes and families, of honor and grief, truth isn’t always enough to calm the human heart.
The law clearly distinguishes between murder and manslaughter. But it doesn’t stop there. The person who kills unintentionally is exiled—not for a year, not until their case is retried, but until the death of the kohen gadol, the High Priest.
That’s where things get interesting.
Why should the manslaughterer’s exile depend on the High Priest’s death? What does one have to do with the other? Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l explored two radically different approaches, drawn from our tradition’s deepest wells of legal and philosophical thought. One comes from the Babylonian Talmud, the other from The Guide for the Perplexed by Maimonides—and between them lies a fundamental divide in how we understand justice, leadership, and the human psyche.
According to the Talmud, the High Priest bears some spiritual responsibility for the moral climate of his generation. If he had prayed more fervently, with greater sincerity, the accidental death might never have happened. His failure is not criminal—but it is real. His death becomes the moment of atonement, the release valve for a tragedy that has no one to blame and yet cannot go unmarked. The person in exile has suffered, the High Priest dies, and only then can we say: the moral scales have balanced. Justice, in this view, requires shared burden—even when no one is guilty.
Maimonides doesn’t buy it. In The Guide for the Perplexed, he strips away mysticism and reads the verse through human nature. The exile isn’t about guilt, he argues. It’s about safety. The manslaughterer didn’t sin; he made a terrible mistake, and the victim’s family might not be ready to hear that. So he’s removed from view. He stays in the city of refuge until the High Priest dies—not because the Priest was to blame, but because his death is a moment of national mourning, a kind of emotional reset. When the nation is grieving together, individual vendettas lose their edge. The blood is still spilled, but the fire of revenge dies down.
These two views couldn’t be more different.
One sees the world through the lens of spiritual accountability: prayer matters, leaders carry moral weight, and unseen guilt can ripple across a nation. The other sees the world through psychology: exile is about cooling tempers, grief is softened by collective sorrow, and justice works best when it aligns with how people actually behave.
Both are Torah.
But the real question isn’t just about the High Priest—it’s about how we understand law and leadership today. Is a leader responsible for what happens under their watch, even when they didn’t cause it? Does communal safety require shared suffering? Or do we seek policies rooted in the psychology of peace, even when they don’t feel like justice?
Rabbi Sacks pointed out that this tension—between the supernatural and the natural, the priestly and the philosophical—runs deep through Jewish thought. The mystical and the rational aren’t enemies, but they are different ways of engaging with the same eternal truths.
Justice is not a feeling. But feelings can undermine justice.
The Torah, in its final chapters, doesn’t just offer laws. It gives us a mirror. And in that mirror we see a truth we don’t always want to face: Sometimes, the hardest part of justice isn’t determining guilt. It’s knowing what to do with grief.
