Mina's Musings: Ki Tetze 2014

Doing Battle with the Text and Honoring People

Shabbat Shalom. Mazel tov to the Weiss family. Erica has been doing an outstanding job this morning.

So I have to tell you all something. Our Bat Mitzvah girl Erica is 13 and I remember being 13, for that is when I fell in love for the first time. I had gone to synagogue with my father one Shabbat morning, and as I sat through services, managing to keep up with the Torah reading in the Hebrew while simultaneously scanning the English translation and the commentary on the bottom, it happened. In one afternoon I had fallen head over heels in love with Torah - and studying the Torah. Over the years that love has never diminished, and in fact has grown. But, that doesn’t mean I have never struggled with that love. Because although the Torah is the most sacred text the Jewish people possess, a gift bequeathed to us and through us the entire world, the Torah is not a feel good text. The Torah is a demanding book of moral, legal, and religious instruction written over 3,000 years ago. Despite the years separating us, the Torah is often incredibly modern in its views, offering obvious lessons to us, thousands of years later.

For example, in this morning’s portion Ki Tetze we read that if a neighbor’s animal is hurt we are supposed to help it; we must have honest weights in our business dealings,; there are prohibitions against taking advantage of desperately needy laborers by refusing to pay them properly and promptly. These are laws years - if not millenia - ahead of their time, laws that make us proud to say that we gave these laws to the world.

Other times though, from our perspective in the 21st century, the Torah can be difficult, even painful to read as its teachings go counter to our “modern sensibilities.” And though it pains me to say it since there are many young people here this morning for Erica’s Bat Mitzvah, along with many beautiful teachings, this is one of the portions with some of THE most difficult texts in the entire Torah. These include discussions of how to handle a rebellious child, laws concerning taking of female captives during war, and what happens to women who have been found to have had non-marital or pre-marital sexual relations.

There are a number of ways that people deal with challenging texts. I am going to focus for now on something called “parsing the text.” This means to read the verse very carefully, word by word at face value and see if what you think it says is what it is really saying. And in Jewish tradition parsing in this way includes turning to the rabbinic commentators who have wrestled with these same texts for millenia.

Let me give you an example of such parsing with one of the verses that actually makes more sense than some of the others in this morning’s portion. This is the verse that said if a man attacks a betrothed young woman in a field, he is punished with execution while she is deemed completely innocent. Other than the fact that nowadays we would send the man to jail, not execute him, the verse seems fairly straightforward and makes sense even in the 21st century.

But parsing means careful examining, and the rabbis always have believed in digging into every aspect of each verse to ensure we understood it completely. With this in mind they took note of the fact that after explaining the punishment of the man, the Torah tells us: “This is no different from the case in which a man rises against his neighbor and murders him.”

This additional verse lead the rabbis on to an amazing philosophical point in our Jewish tradition. Their discussion in the Talmud goes like this. We know that if we see someone about to murder another individual, we are commanded to stop them, even up to killing them to save the victim. Since the Torah says the man attacking the woman is the same, do we have the same permission? The rabbis answer their own question with a yes. But then they take it further. They ask, if it is permissible to do whatever necessary to stop these capital crimes, do we have the same permission regarding someone we know is going to violate a ritual commandment such as Shabbat or the worship of an idol which are also considered capital violations in the Torah.  After all, a violation against a person is a violation against one of God’s creatures, while a violation of a ritual commandment is a violation against God’s own self. Shouldn’t the latter be worse? The resounding answer is that no we do NOT take whatever means necessary to stop someone for violating a ritual command. 

The reasoning of the rabbis is based on a verse earlier in Deuteronomy that says if we hearken to the mishpatim - or laws that God gave us then God will love and guard us. However the Torah has two kinds of laws - mishpatim are exclusively between people, hukkim are those between God and individuals. Since the Torah tells us that God will love us if we observe the laws between people, the rabbis infer that God is willing to forgo God’s own honor but is not willing to forgo the honor of His children - thus a violation against a human being is deemed WORSE than a violation against God. Just a month away from Yom Kippur this teaching explains why it is that on Yom Kippur we are told repeatedly that the prayers we utter that day only absolve of us sins between us and God, but in order to atone for sins against another person we must ask forgiveness from them first, not from God.

I began this morning with a story about falling in love. And Elul, the Hebrew month we are in is said to be an acronym for the expression Ani l’dodi v’dodi li, I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine. The rabbis felt this was a month of love between us and God. I love God and I love the Torah, I love to study the Torah, but love isn’t always easy. Even love of God or God’s word. It often requires serious struggle and inquiry. Like all things or people we love, we don’t just ignore or walk way from it or them if the relationship is sometimes challenging.

We are now just a few weeks away from the High Holidays where we will read some of the most beautiful and some of the most difficult passages of both the Torah and of Jewish liturgy. It is easy to let your mind fade in and out during the long hours and difficult passages, to avoid the struggles and challenges the texts present. But that would defeat the whole purpose of the Holidays. The High Holidays aren’t about making us feel good any more than the Torah is. They are about challenging us to be better people, closer to God, kinder to our fellow human beings. The Torah and the liturgy can help us to achieve all of that - if only we love it enough to struggle with it as Jacob once fought with that angel so long ago, to fight with it, to understand it, to make it meaningful to us each day.