As I study Ki Teitzei, reading commentary and halakhah and related texts on Sefaria, I am struck at the common experience of queerness and slavery, as treated by later interpretations of Torah. The ruling against crossdressing has been expounded upon as a fence around the Torah, forcing anyone who dresses or acts in a gender-noncomforming way to experience marginalization. In subsequent centuries, queer people are hidden as if the Torah can deny their very existence. The mitzvah about slavery is the exact opposite, as the Torah explicitly separates human rights from property rights. “Ahah,” I wanted to say when I read it. “Proof that the Torah can provide real moral instruction!”
My heart sank when I read the commentaries, which unanimously disagree. They say that the mitzvah of protecting a runaway slave as a freed person will only apply to Jewish people entering Israel; or may only apply in wartime based on a flimsy understanding of context; or otherwise will rarely occur. The Talmud even tells a story of Rav Ḥisda, who chased down his own runaway slave with the justification of chattel property laws found in Ki Teitzei. I am still learning and do not know the term for this yet - maybe the idea is that of upholding mercy over justice when applying the least-strict interpretation of halakhah - but for now, I call it “tearing down the fence.” Sages seem to apply their own understanding of moral law and interpret the Torah through that lens, using their rhetorical skills to change what the Torah is saying. In this case, it seems, the Rabbis were trying to be merciful when applying the law - but only considered being merciful to Rav Ḥisda, not his slave.
I was frustrated when studying this. It seems like I am the only person who recognizes the importance of the Torah’s stance on human rights. After some time, I realized that can’t be the case. For one thing, how many Black American Jews would read this part of Torah and agree with the commentaries? Despite the lack of rabbinical support in the English section of Sefaria, I am not the first person to interpret Ki Teitzei this way! So why does it feel like I am? And, come to think of it, why are the rabbis (who are so famous for disagreement) often apparently unified when I read their opinions? Where are the marginalized voices?
Sefaria is by definition not orthodox in the sense that its goal of spreading knowledge freely and indiscriminately is a radical step away from traditional Jewish study. However, its sources are restricted - due to copyright, they cannot be too recent; they are not especially obscure; they cannot be hard to verify and to transcribe. But I knew that already. Any corpus of historical literature is subject to the same biases as the people who originally collected its works.
For queerness, this is a known problem in our history. Anything that broke gender or sexuality norms until very recently (and maybe we are not at the point of full equality in our scholarship even now) may not have been translated or otherwise classified as religious literature. It may have even been considered smut.
Queer Americans know this is not a new problem. We have few elders in the queer community for many reasons but especially due to the AIDS epidemic. Historical references to our existence have been intentionally blotted out by historians themselves through translation, ignoring or discarding texts, and the criminalization of gay/trans+ identities in the texts that are chosen for preservation. If this is a problem in scholarship, it must be even stronger of a bias in the collection of religious texts which purport to be moral teachings.
Those familiar with the modern understanding of genocide will recognize this practice too. One step in cultural genocide is making people’s history inaccessible to themselves. Colonialism has destroyed uncountable native languages almost beyond recovery in the course of a few hundred years.
I cannot speak to the difficulties of losing one’s language or culture, but as a queer person, I can testify that we must always rebuild our own history by reading between the lines. We follow bread crumbs and search in parentheticals to find any implication that we may have existed in the past. (A Rainbow Thread is an excellent book, but most of its ancient sources about homosexuality/gender non-conformity rely on laws against us, simply because it proves that we were present enough to get discriminated against.)
Isn’t that the Jewish experience too? The experience of any minority? Our history is intentionally wiped out. We take the pieces of what remains and we rebuild it, again and again and again. Never completed, never free from it, trying to figure out who we are in defiance of the people who tell us “You are not.”
The way that some Jewish people do this is by taking the Torah and Halakhah as sacred and true, sanctifying the opinions of the rabbis in the Talmud. Others say, “We were wrong” and move on without much argument.
I am told to wrestle with Torah but I am not content with that. I want to wrestle with rabbis, with the Talmud and with the Rambam and with anyone who is willing! I want to learn the logic and the arguments and the rhetorical tactics and the terms they used! I want to be able to take rabbinical interpretation seriously on its own merits and to use its own words to argue against it too.
I know that this would get me kicked out of any historical (and many modern) beit din, but I understand the Torah as flawed because GD is flawed. However, that does not mean that the Torah’s plain-reading text is automatically less valid than the rabbinical interpretations thereafter. The rabbis of the Talmud could disagree amongst themselves because there is room for disagreement in everything, holy or not. If that is not reflected in the historical record, it is our work to fix it!
Whose work? Anyone who reads and understands, who has the capability and inclination. The Jewish people as a group. Jewish people who care. The generation, time, and culture I belong to. Anyone who can carry this burden. Until we rediscover those texts that interpret Torah in a way that makes sense to us, we are obligated to write them ourselves.
The Torah was Gd’s gift to us. It is not outside of us. It cannot exist as something that excludes us. It is part of us and we are part of it, and if that is not obvious already, we must do the work to make it so.
My heart sank when I read the commentaries, which unanimously disagree. They say that the mitzvah of protecting a runaway slave as a freed person will only apply to Jewish people entering Israel; or may only apply in wartime based on a flimsy understanding of context; or otherwise will rarely occur. The Talmud even tells a story of Rav Ḥisda, who chased down his own runaway slave with the justification of chattel property laws found in Ki Teitzei. I am still learning and do not know the term for this yet - maybe the idea is that of upholding mercy over justice when applying the least-strict interpretation of halakhah - but for now, I call it “tearing down the fence.” Sages seem to apply their own understanding of moral law and interpret the Torah through that lens, using their rhetorical skills to change what the Torah is saying. In this case, it seems, the Rabbis were trying to be merciful when applying the law - but only considered being merciful to Rav Ḥisda, not his slave.
I was frustrated when studying this. It seems like I am the only person who recognizes the importance of the Torah’s stance on human rights. After some time, I realized that can’t be the case. For one thing, how many Black American Jews would read this part of Torah and agree with the commentaries? Despite the lack of rabbinical support in the English section of Sefaria, I am not the first person to interpret Ki Teitzei this way! So why does it feel like I am? And, come to think of it, why are the rabbis (who are so famous for disagreement) often apparently unified when I read their opinions? Where are the marginalized voices?
Sefaria is by definition not orthodox in the sense that its goal of spreading knowledge freely and indiscriminately is a radical step away from traditional Jewish study. However, its sources are restricted - due to copyright, they cannot be too recent; they are not especially obscure; they cannot be hard to verify and to transcribe. But I knew that already. Any corpus of historical literature is subject to the same biases as the people who originally collected its works.
For queerness, this is a known problem in our history. Anything that broke gender or sexuality norms until very recently (and maybe we are not at the point of full equality in our scholarship even now) may not have been translated or otherwise classified as religious literature. It may have even been considered smut.
Queer Americans know this is not a new problem. We have few elders in the queer community for many reasons but especially due to the AIDS epidemic. Historical references to our existence have been intentionally blotted out by historians themselves through translation, ignoring or discarding texts, and the criminalization of gay/trans+ identities in the texts that are chosen for preservation. If this is a problem in scholarship, it must be even stronger of a bias in the collection of religious texts which purport to be moral teachings.
Those familiar with the modern understanding of genocide will recognize this practice too. One step in cultural genocide is making people’s history inaccessible to themselves. Colonialism has destroyed uncountable native languages almost beyond recovery in the course of a few hundred years.
I cannot speak to the difficulties of losing one’s language or culture, but as a queer person, I can testify that we must always rebuild our own history by reading between the lines. We follow bread crumbs and search in parentheticals to find any implication that we may have existed in the past. (A Rainbow Thread is an excellent book, but most of its ancient sources about homosexuality/gender non-conformity rely on laws against us, simply because it proves that we were present enough to get discriminated against.)
Isn’t that the Jewish experience too? The experience of any minority? Our history is intentionally wiped out. We take the pieces of what remains and we rebuild it, again and again and again. Never completed, never free from it, trying to figure out who we are in defiance of the people who tell us “You are not.”
The way that some Jewish people do this is by taking the Torah and Halakhah as sacred and true, sanctifying the opinions of the rabbis in the Talmud. Others say, “We were wrong” and move on without much argument.
I am told to wrestle with Torah but I am not content with that. I want to wrestle with rabbis, with the Talmud and with the Rambam and with anyone who is willing! I want to learn the logic and the arguments and the rhetorical tactics and the terms they used! I want to be able to take rabbinical interpretation seriously on its own merits and to use its own words to argue against it too.
I know that this would get me kicked out of any historical (and many modern) beit din, but I understand the Torah as flawed because GD is flawed. However, that does not mean that the Torah’s plain-reading text is automatically less valid than the rabbinical interpretations thereafter. The rabbis of the Talmud could disagree amongst themselves because there is room for disagreement in everything, holy or not. If that is not reflected in the historical record, it is our work to fix it!
Whose work? Anyone who reads and understands, who has the capability and inclination. The Jewish people as a group. Jewish people who care. The generation, time, and culture I belong to. Anyone who can carry this burden. Until we rediscover those texts that interpret Torah in a way that makes sense to us, we are obligated to write them ourselves.
The Torah was Gd’s gift to us. It is not outside of us. It cannot exist as something that excludes us. It is part of us and we are part of it, and if that is not obvious already, we must do the work to make it so.