Why is the word "Justice" (Tzedek) written twice?
צֶדֶק צֶדֶק תִּרְדֹּף לְמַעַן תִּחְיֶה: (ט"ז כ')
"Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may live" (16:20) The Gemarra (Shabbos 156b) brings two stories:
1. The Story of Shmuel and Avlet שְׁמוּאֵל וְאַבְלֵט
Shmuel and Avlet, a non-Jewish astrologer, were sitting together and saw a person walking toward a river. Avlet said to Shmuel: "That man is walking away, but he will not return. A snake will bite him, and he will die." Shmuel replied: "If he is a Jew, he will return!" And indeed, the man returned. Avlet took down the bundle the Jew was carrying and found a dead snake inside. Shmuel asked the man: "What good deed did you do?" The man replied: "Every day, we pool our bread together and share it. One day, one of our friends had no bread to contribute. I offered to go around and collect the bread myself, and I pretended to take bread from him so that he would not be embarrassed." Shmuel said: "You have performed a great mitzvah!" Shmuel went out and expounded the Posuk (Mishlei 10:2) וּצְדָקָה תַּצִּיל מִמָּוֶת: "And charity saves from death"—not just from an unnatural death, but death itself.
2. The Story of Rabbi Akiva's Daughter**
The Talmud further relates that astrologers told Rabbi Akiva that on the day of his daughter's wedding, a snake would bite her and she would die. Rabbi Akiva was worried all day. On her wedding night, the daughter took her golden hairpin and stuck it into a crevice in the wall. Unknowingly, the needle of the pin pierced the eye of a snake and killed it. In the morning, when she pulled her pin out of the wall, the dead snake came dragging out with it! When Rabbi Akiva saw this, he asked his daughter: "What good deed did you do?" She told him: "In the morning, a poor man came and knocked at the door. Everyone was busy preparing for the wedding, so no one opened the door for him. I opened the door and gave him the meal that had been prepared for me." Rabbi Akiva said to her: "You have performed a great mitzvah!" Rabbi Akiva went out and expounded: וּצְדָקָה תַּצִּיל מִמָּוֶת: "And charity saves from death—not just from an unnatural death, but death itself."
From this we learn that prayer is a great thing; however, when a person performs an extraordinary act of tzedakah, that is when charity saves from death." The proof of this is that they were not asked, "Did you pray?" Instead, they were asked, "What deed did you perform?"—meaning, through what merit were you saved? This explains the repetition in the verse: צֶדֶק צֶדֶק—an extraordinary act of charity תִּרְדֹּף shall you pursue. In that merit, it will be: לְמַעַן תִּחְיֶה "that you will live." (Yehuda Z. Klitnick)
