Welcome to The Morning Scroll! I'm Rabbi Deena Cowans from Mishkan Chicago and you're listening to what will be a quick dive into this week's parsha. If you’ve been meaning to brush up on your Jewish literacy, or you’re looking for some inspiration, you’ve come to the right place. This week, we read Parashat Ki Teitzei, meaning “when you go out” and y’all… buckle up. It’s really just a LOT of laws, the most of any parsha in the Torah. We’ll start with a brief recap:
We start by revisiting the laws on female captives of war, and what a soldier needs to do to marry a captive. We then get some other laws about inheritance, and a commandment to stone a rebellious child in the town square. Then, more laws: we should bury a dead person as soon as possible, return lost objects, help a neighbor, send away a mother bird before taking her chicks, build a safety fence around a roof, wear tzitzit, and some negative commandments such as not mixing seeds or animals. We get a brief law break for some punishments, such as those for a husband who publicly humiliates his wife, adultery, rape, and then it’s back to laws like keeping a pure and hygenic camp, what to do if one has a nighttime emission, a commandment to honor vows and commandments against prostitution and lending with interest, and then a section on worker’s rights to eat the produce they’re harvesting. Then some laws of marriage and divorce, and laws to protect the poor, such as not taking their necessities as collateral and making sure to pay them on time. Then a commandment to remember that Miriam, Moshe’s sister, got tzaraat for gossiping about him, then back to laws, including mandatory gifts for the poor, how to carry out corporal punishment, the laws of Levirate marriage, in which a man dies childless, his brother is commanded to marry his widow or go through a ritual called chalitza, which frees him from the obligation to marry her but also he has to… take off his shoe in public. This is not a joke, apparently being barefoot in public is a real shame. Ok then two more laws: one to maintain accurate weights and measures so we don’t cheat in business, and a commandment to remember how Amalek attacked the Israeites from behind once.
Kind of an emotionally and intellectually exhausting parsha, no? There are entire chapters of the Talmud based on some of the laws here, so obviously there’s a lot to unpack. Today, I want to look at just one of those laws: the verses on what to do with a rebellious son, which the Torah makes clear involves publicly chastising him and then stoning him to death. It’s a grand total of four verses in the Torah, and there’s an entire 14 page chapter dedicated to it in the Talmud. So what’s the deal? Well, in short, the Talmud doesn’t love these verses. But it isn’t really the Talmud’s style to be like “Nope, thank you, next.” So instead the Talmud uses its own tricks to minimize the impact of these laws, carving out exception after exception until the possible number of situations in which the law is infinitesimally small. The rabbis of the Talmud do this by picking apart each and every word of these verses, and finding ways to define them with an incredibly narrow scope: for example, they notice that it says son and interpret that these laws don’t apply to daughters; then they narrow the age range down to just a few months of puberty, and so on. We can think what we want about the laws, but I love the paradigm: when we’re confronted with something in our tradition that makes us uncomfortable, we don’t need to throw out the tradition to avoid the thing. We can be intellectually creative, finding ways to minimize the scope of the law such that it doesn’t apply to us, or doesn’t even seem practical or realistic. It’s a master class in not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
I want to offer a blessing to these rabbis, who did the tough work of trying to figure out a way to live with an imperfect tradition. They didn’t do a perfect job either, but that’s the best part of their legacy: they left us the tools to continue to rely on our tradition and our values to shape our religious practice and our world. And I want to extend that blessing to you, for grappling with how to fit this ancient tradition into your modern life, and for continuing to learn and iterate.