Shabbat shalom, fellow outsiders! “Hey, I’m not a outsider!” I don’t know, man, you subscribed. A couple of morning announcements: First, the week of October 14 we’re beginning a study of Amy Jill Levine’s Beginner’s Guide to the Gospel According to John. Please view all details and sign up here. I’m hoping to reach 15 sign-ups to hold the study so that we have good participation and interesting discussion. Plus it’s a nice validation of my time for creating the weekly videos and discussion prompts.
Second, for today’s post, I want to begin with a note on the subject matter: This post includes themes of forcible marriage and sexual assault, appearing in the text. It’s in the Bible, or more pointedly, it’s in Torah, and to be Bible readers of integrity, we have to have some hard conversations. The Hebrew month of Elul, the month we’re in, calls on Jewish people to engage with themes of repentance and an accounting of the soul, in Hebrew, cheshbon hanefesh. So I suggest we do just that but differently: How might we account for our relationship to the sacred literature?
We’re continuing in Deuteronomy for this week’s Torah portion, and Parsha Ki Tetzei presents a lengthy list of mitzvot, or instructions. Totaling 72 commandments in all, the laws cover subjects as diverse as the treatment of women who are taken captive in battle, to daily living, justice, family responsibility, work, and sexuality. This parsha is lighter on the narrative and heavy on the instruction, and this instruction is shockingly archaic—I mean, it’s a few thousand years old, so yeah, but what I mean to signal is concern with the nature of the laws. Taking women captive and stoning rebellious children to death; legislating punishment for a woman who lied about her sexual life (capital punishment) and a man who lied about his (a fine). Laws against men wearing women’s clothing, and laws about a woman’s obligation to marry a man who raped her.
Yeah, not good.
There is an important perspective to bring forward. The laws themselves seem deeply concerned with human dignity. And yes, I am painfully aware, if not disturbingly aware, that I transitioned from a woman’s obligation to marry her rapist to an appraisal of the law that it is concerned with dignity. This is sort of my point. I think modern readers, regardless of perspective or point of view, should be deeply troubled by the legislative code here. But wait, Adam, social justice and human dignity, surely we shouldn’t reject the law code out of hand? I agree that there is value to recover in the text, But neither am I attempting to exculpate the literature. I think that is an apologetic strategy that I’ll discuss. Rather, what I think Torah reading is for, I want to hold a mirror up to ourselves and see if we can observe our own inconsistencies that stand between injustice and dignity. It’s this tension that forms the bulk of my commentary and discussion.
I think in our lives we often stand precariously between injustice and human dignity, and while the people are not a political state, and we should caution ourselves not to conflate the two, I continue to hold a sense of my own people’s position, wrestling with the injustice of Palestinian massacre and the dignity of our core values that speak to repair, justice, cherishing life, and the accounting of our souls. In the parsha, the tension is between a kidnapped woman and her dignity as a person who mourns. The crimes of Netanyahu and the unjust collective punishment and massacre of Palestinians that stands between our dignity as Jews whose values, in my appraisal, demand that we pursue ceasefire and diplomacy.
I’ve heard some say that Zionism is part and parcel of Judaism, while others, myself included, hold that our tradition and values speak against the Zionist project. If we cannot see that the military solution has resulted in the deaths of more than 40,000 people, then how can we move forward with durable solutions for a lasting peace? That is, if we cannot see that the woman is taken in battle and forcibly made a wife to her captor, we cannot be clear-eyed about how we handle the text in a way that seeks to recover dignity.
I’m seeking to evoke our discomfort. It’s through tension and discomfort that we grow.
I begin by repeating the instruction from this week’s parsha: The instruction regarding the woman taken captive demands that the Israelite man who has taken the woman must allow her a month to mourn her family before the man may take her as his wife, that is, forcibly have intercourse with her.
That apparent show of respect for the captive woman within the text is a theme throughout this parsha. Much of the instruction given limits or restrains laws that are presented as common practice. For example, the practice to display at the city gates the dead bodies of executed enemies for political demonstration is eliminated for respect of the dead body. An enslaved person who flees to your town or encampment is allowed refuge and is not to be returned to their enslaver, breaking with near universal Ancient Southwest Asian practice. Children are not to be held accountable for the wrongdoing of their parents. Concerns with sexual exploitation in the text that limit common practice are extended to instruction against economic exploitation. Laws are given that allow the free eating of grain from a neighbor’s field, as long as you don’t fill a container. These themes of providing for others, Israelites and non-Israelites, in the community seem to be presupposed by other stories, like the story of Ruth who is sent to find grain and Levirate marriage, also discussed in this parsha.
Throughout the sacred literature, especially within Torah, where social justice is a recurring theme, and we see this in the prophetic tradition as well, we encounter negative instruction–don’t do this thing–that limits or constraints the unjust aspects of apparent public practice, and positive instruction–do this–much of it grounded in human dignity.
Outside of Deuteronomy, appearing in Exodus, enslaved persons are given rest on the Sabbath, for example, and instruction says to allow enslaved Israelites to go free during the sabbatical year. These positive and negative instructions in service of human dignity leaves us modern readers vulnerable to bad readings of the text.
I think the bad readings naturally emerge from our discomfort with this ancient material and our desire for the literature to always have either a reasonable explanation for these fundamental violations of human rights, or in the absence of explanation, some redeeming factor that absolves the text of what we understand as atrocities, and by extension, we seek to absolve our traditions, or religions, or our people, our sacred literature, indeed, efforts to absolve even God themself of responsibility for the material that we encounter.
For what it’s worth, liberating the concept of God from the framework of the Bible is characteristic of my position. I raised similar points in my commentary about the Parsha Mishpatim:
I want to take this slowly to make plain my objection. Anyone who doesn’t believe in G-d because of all the shitty stuff G-d seems to do, say, or endorse in the Bible must first presuppose that all that stuff accurately describes G-d. The argument needs a G-d to argue against G-d. That’s self defeating.
To absolve God, we seek desperately for a reason why some story was told, a reason why this or that was the righteous action in the moment, a reason to say, “This isn’t what it looks like.” And in Christianity the distinction between testaments is ubiquitous. How many of you have heard about “The violent God of the Old Testament and the Love of Jesus in the New Testament.” Quick reminder that a lot of the statements about love of neighbor that the NT places in Jesus’s mouth are quotes from the Hebrew Bible.
At any rate, it’s easier on our psyches to consider these stories as myths that ground a people’s origin, or to make sense of people’s place in a hostile world as a smaller state among mighty empires, or to simply throw up our hands and say, “This was the custom then,” rather than accept a reality that sees Israelite daughters the property of their fathers, non-Israelite women the property of their captors, wives of any ethnicity the property of their husbands, Holy War instruction to wipe out entire tribes of people, and enslavement an accepted fact.
The problem is that even if our narratives didn’t happen exactly as described, the concepts of war, captivity, property, judgment, child-rearing, cultic practice, enslavement, and so on are the cultural products of people engaged in these activities and the sacred literature manages to make contact with that reality.
The apologist’s inclination is to attribute human suffering to free will, punishment for failing to follow commandments, and when explanations cannot be easily offered, the absence of alternative explanation suggests that we simply cannot comprehend the mind of God. I think I just summarized the Book of Job.
Another apologetic technique is to concede that some legal codes authorize, if not outright endorse, fundamental violations of human rights like chattel slavery, sex trafficking, and ethnic cleansing, but, and here’s where we pick up today’s dilemma, when those atrocities are discussed, see how the Bible limits the wrongdoing or affords some respect within the unjust systems. I am in a lot of internet spaces, and this is a frequent rhetorical point raised by apologists: Yes, enslavement is in the Bible, but see how much more humane the laws of the Bible are compared to other systems of enslavement.
Is this argument enough to recover something suitable for a modern palate? Does an allowance for a woman’s mourning ritual for the death of her family or her being taken from them somehow limit the blameworthiness for capture and sexual assault? Does granting an enslaved person rest or refuge place the biblical literature on higher moral ground than literature that would not afford such human consideration?
I’m living with brain cancer, and something we say in the community is, “There’s no such thing as a good brain tumor.” Sure, you may have a non-malignant tumor that is more manageable than a high grade brain malignancy, but all brain tumors are bad. A slightly more moral system of enslavement is still a system of enslavement.
Before proceeding I want to repeat yet again the first example from the parsha. Here are the first few verses in the NRSVUE:
When you go out to war against your enemies and the Lord your God hands them over to you and you take them captive, suppose you see among the captives a beautiful woman whom you desire and want to marry, and so you bring her home to your house: she shall shave her head, pare her nails, discard her captive’s garb, and remain in your house a full month mourning for her father and mother; after that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. But if you are not satisfied with her, you shall let her go free and certainly not sell her for money. You must not treat her as a slave, since you have dishonored her (Deuteronomy 21:10-25:19).
Yikes.
That’s tough to read, right? If you don’t feel that discomfort, read this again until you do, because here a woman is kidnapped, likely sexually assaulted, then dismissed at the free will of the man, only to be made socially inferior as a “dishonored” woman. It’s tough to recover a positive gloss here, allowance for mourning ritual or not.
And yet, mainstream interpretive tradition has chosen to ignore these details. The commentary on this parsha from My Jewish Learning offers these three discussion questions:
- One mandate within the laws given in this portion is to be fair. What does it mean to be fair?
- Why are the Israelites not to mix varieties of species in planting, nor wear clothing of different materials, nor even plow at the same time with two different kinds of animals?
- The Israelites are told to keep their promises. What is so important about keeping promises?
The Reform movement commentary acknowledges the difficulty, “Ki Teitzei seems, at first glance, to be a hodgepodge of laws which often touch on very painful topics.” But ultimately concludes with highlighting compassion:
Maybe even more basically, these laws about lost property, baby birds, unloved second wives, and even (perhaps) gender norms are meant to teach us compassion; they are there to remind us that we are obligated to love and care for each other.
My effort is not to shame these commentaries. And besides, it is the case that fair weights and measures, concerns with criminal negligence, commands to not be indifferent to a neighbor, and allowing those who are food insecure to eat from your fields and vineyards all appear within the parsha and all are clearly commands on the side compassion, justice, equity, and yes, human dignity.
So what’s my (kosher) beef with the text? Why amplify the worst of the material, when the parsha is concerned with compassion and justice?
An accounting of ourselves demands that we engage in the difficult conversations. This is cheshbon hanefesh. We are instructed to truly introspect and confront our wrongdoing. Elul is about preparing for the coming High Holidays, the days of repentance; of atonement. The coming days when the Books are opened, and we wish each other g’mar chatimah tova; may you have a good sealing. Wishing each other well in our attempts to make amends and clear the air of those things for which we are culpable to have our names inscribed in the Book of Life for another year.
Too often we are satisfied with our best intentions or selectively choose the moments where our better natures prevailed. The truth is, all of us often swim upstream against our own inclinations to find compassion within systems that are otherwise unjust, when it would be better to dismantle the systems themselves.
We cannot be satisfied that a woman taken captive be shown some dignity when the better instruction would be not to take captives at all. The rejoinder is to say that these laws are introducing compassionate measures in incremental progress toward a truly just society. The problem is that to make such a claim requires that we presuppose a teleological aim for the biblical literature, and this presupposition cannot be assumed. The biblical literature is a collection of sources over time, and we cannot impose a narrative arc or goal-directed composition onto the text.
And so, Parsha Ki Teitzei reminds me that we have to sit in our discomfort for a true accounting of ourselves, even if we show signs of our compassion. I do not disagree with the commentaries that choose to amplify the more socially just features of the text; they are certainly present. But I want to hold a mirror up to ourselves and see if we can observe our own inconsistencies that stand between injustice and dignity.
Harm reduction is the mitigation of risk within otherwise harmful systems, but harm reduction should not pacify our desire for true justice; for transformation. Tzedek tzedek tirdof, remember? Justice, justice you shall pursue.
If you made it this far, then you’re into this shit. Why not sign up for the upcoming book study?!
Hitzonim | Outsiders 
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