Your dignity reading this column must be astonishing given the conduct of the High Court hearings. Well, sir, right. The pompous rhetoric that this distinguished columnist uses makes him feel a sense of longing for more human discourse. A discourse of compassion. In the case of Yalla-Yalla: Judges are also human beings. 

I could go on and on about this, my dear readers. With a bit of formal discourse rules and a handful of superlative ones, ordinary people who read a column in a common paper can also win sparks of legal dignity. And if ordinary people too, sorry: my honorable shoes, can get a bit of a judicial aura, so our top judges are sometimes just plain human.

And we saw them this week in the full human misery: the sagging belly, the mask that distresses and thins off the chin, the mustache that comes with or without a beard, uncontrollable giggles, the funny accent, the maternal tone, the jolts and the loss of patience. The judges like to say (in the third person, of course) that the court speaks to the public through the verdicts, but this week they finally spoke to the public by mouth, the look in their eyes and their facial expressions. Finally.

The hearing in the High Court feels to many a blasphemy: The raw material of judicial decisions should not be transmitted to the public in this way. It is not good for the judges to come out of the cloud of fog and wear a human photographer. We are better off getting the finished product, the official logo paper, with the numbered lines and carefully played paragraphs The arguments are built for the Talpiot and are preceded by precedents and quotes collected by the legal aides, but the truth is that it did a great service to the public.

If the debate is broken down into layers, the following conclusion can be reached: When it comes to their distinguished profession, our judges are first-rate. They control the legal material, know from memory whether it was shagger or shine in the name of the case, and whistle tirelessly. Well done, really. Like any professional craftsman, they specialize in law. 

But the exact opposite can be said of the political tier: when the judges, and the petitioners, go beyond the professional core of the profession - that is, mastery of legal literature - they turn out to be no more intelligent than the reasonable man from the street. In fact, take a random neighborhood parliamentary call and add "Your Honor", "My Friend", "Sir", "On" and some "Here" here and there, and you will receive a much more learned, in-depth and wise political conversation than some of the remarks heard this week in the courtroom. 

It is better for our professional judges to deal with law, for historians of ancient Rome to deal with history, and for politics to deal with politicians. How did Judge Barak say? It really doesn't matter.