On Ki Teitzei

Torah can be hard to read. The parsha of Ki Teitzei is one of those that, despite being read in the month of Elul, outlines behavior that itself demands profound, almost unimaginable, teshuva.

“When you take the field against your enemies, and the Lord your God delivers them into your power and you take some of them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman and you desire her and would take her to wife, you shall bring her into your house and she shall trim her hair, pare her nails, and discard her captive’s garb. She will spend a month’s time in your house lamenting her father and mother; after that you may come to her and possess her, and she shall be your wife.”

Torah can best be read as an attempt to liberate the world and to interpret the divine element that seems to animate existence, but that doesn’t mean any of the many authors who revised this text actually understood what liberation demands of us. Instead, the type of war coercion described in this passage is simply a frequent and cruel crime of empire, including Israel's own violent attacks on Palestinians, and yet we are confronted with this moral despotism presented as an ethical virtue.

Just next we hear about how a “wayward and defiant son” is to be treated: with public stonings, particularly if he eats the food of others or engages in public drunkenness.

Torah is filled with these profound betrayals of our moral selves, commandments of cruelty phrased as legal dictates. And the blank depravity on the page has not just disturbed centuries of rabbis and scholars, it has forced them to act: it cannot just mean what it seems to.

This brings us back to what the Oral Law actually is, the commentary on Torah. When Moses received the Torah on Sinai he received what we know became the Tanakh, but also all commentaries to come: the Talmud, the midrash, kabbalah, chassidus, even the dvar you give at Torah service. This is why this commentary is “revealed” and not simply an original thought. When you comment on the text that commentary existed before you did, you simply acquire it through a divine revelation that someone, Moses, already knew would come to pass. 

In a recent class I took with Rabbi Aron Wander, we looked at the rabbinic re-interpretations of the “wayward and defiant son.” The rabbis of the Talmud were exceedingly disturbed by the idea that such rather common behavior could lead to not just death, but to force parents to lead the charge of execution. The rabbis also believe that if a Sanhedrin was to order a death within a 70 year period is ”murderous,” then we cannot believe that every “wayward and defiant son” is to actually be killed. Instead, the rabbis negotiate this text, often to the point of irrelevance. 

"A wayward and defiant son never was and never will be," it says in Sanhedrin 71a, where following commentaries provide a rather high bar for when an estranged son becomes truly wayward. He must steal the food from his father and eat it in his house, both parents must want it, and so on. So the standard for a son to be named wayward and defiant becomes so high than none exist, rendering the moral complication mute. But Rabbi Yohanan has an answer to these mitigations: "I saw him and I sat on his grave."

So what does it mean that there never was a wayward and defiant son, and that Yohanan sat on his grave? “Interpret and receive a reward.” There are many deflections that have, over the years, tried to explain this. It could be that the threat is good enough that no parent would ever allow their son to become wayward and defiant. It could be that these judgements are too complicated for humans to weigh in on, only Hashem can decide life and death. More appropriately, even, it could be less literal and more about Yisrael as a collective: we have been dependable, verifiably, wayward and defiant. Many have sat on our grave.

As the Rambam teaches, there are problems with reading the text literally since it contains profound contradictions. When G-d behaves as a person, this is in direct violation with what we know about G-d’s nature. This means it must be a metaphor, a totem by which we then need to interpret, negotiate, and then “reveal” the true meaning. Rabbinic Judaism always knew that this process was necessary for revelation, almost as if the negotiations itself was the essence of the Jewish experience. 

We can consider the Jewish revelation in a number of ways. Israelite philosophy is based specifically on divine revelation, unlike the logic proposed by the Greeks. But what does revelation actually mean? It could mean a literal process as described in the Prophets, but if we look at their experiences with the same vantage the Rambam proposes, what would it look like to incur kadosh chazon (holy visions). This may indicate something less quantitative though very real: call it a conscience, call it revelation, call it noticing, there are some ways of knowing that are experienced as intuitive. Not everything is justifiable with formal argument and there exists gut feelings and unconscious impulses that remain just as valid as a philosophical treatise. What this impulse is remains unclear, it could be supernatural or completely material, but its mystery is the source of its mystical nature. Our attempts at revelation, which in this context means the re-assessment of a text for negotiation, is itself a way of unpacking our own divine information. Why does this text make me uncomfortable? What does it mean to change it, shrink it, flip it, contort it so it can match up with what Hashem is clearly telling me?

In the month of Elul we re-assess the text of our own lives, to figure out where teshuva is necessary to return to a state of possible wholeness, but there is no reason that teshuva for Torah may also be necessary. Torah existed for Moses as existing in its entirety before it was written, which is a way of saying all Torah has existed at all times in its entirety. It is then our process to kabbalah, to receive what Moses already knew: Torah cannot mean what it says and remain the moral paragon that Moses claimed it to hold. Instead, we need to engage in the Jewish experience, to discover what G-d is telling us by seeing the text as the incredibly fallible document it is. As a rabbi once told me, without the Oral Torah the Torah is meaningless, it is our work to discover it that gives it the whole of its content.

Part of this process is that the revelations we receive, as holy as we assume they are, are painted with a lot of profoundly human colors: biases, bigotries, trauma, falsehoods. The story told in Torah is a story about freeing oneself, but not a roadmap to become free. We simply have to accept that many, many people have gotten this story wrong. Even today, there is a giant cadre of Torah scholars in Israel claiming that those opening passages mean what they say: that a “holy army” must follow through on its mission to “cleanse our land.” Instead of simply accepting their authority, we engage in teshuva, we return to the moral and liberatory call that the revelation of Torah tried to discover. We haven’t reached its true nature yet, maybe we will at the end of time. Only Moses knows.

The truth of Torah is in its process, in the fact that laws must be the same for all people, that privilege and power should not allow any party to pass on their moral responsibilities. When the commandments conflict with that declaration, Oral Torah is meant to fill in the vowels. That is the process where our moral judgment becomes the commentary, when we have to renegotiate what it says, as all generations have done for all time. It is that process that will hopefully lead to the divine truth, that which only becomes possible when a world is redeemed. The way towards the World to Come is the process where we engage in reappraisal and teshuva, to actually determine what a just world could possibly look like. Right now, all we know is what has been said. The commentary on it remains invisible, but not unwritten. 

The real lesson, as revealed today, of Ki Tezei is that the lesson will not be found on the Torah scroll. Instead, it is only discovered when we ask bigger questions about what the implications are of the orders we are given. I would love to say that there “has never been and never will be” a captive as described, but I know that is not true. Instead, I can say that “there never should be again,” and it is up to us to show why that is the message G-d desperately wants us to hear. Otherwise we obfuscate our role to make teshuva, for Torah, for Am Yisrael, and for ourselves as complicit actors in a society full of crimes. Nothing can be allowed to exist just as it is, everything is movable, which is what makes another world possible.