Ki Teitzei: The importance of interpretation

Tonight’s parasha is Ki Teitzei, meaning “when you go,” and covers Deuteronomy 21:10 through 25:19. This parasha is teeming with topics that are all worthy of their own discussion, since tonight’s portion contains 74 mitzvot! Some are about kindness to animals, some are about mixing fabric types or crops, others include the supposed prohibition on crossdressing or the way we are supposed to treat our kidnapped wives.

However, tonight I’m focusing on just two.

Firstly, we have the commandment regarding a rebellious son:

This sounds troubling - of all things, why is this rebellious son given the death penalty seemingly out of nowhere? It sounds like the parents don’t have any choice in the matter - and what child hasn’t gone through a rebellious phase? Well, that’s when we turn to our great sages to interpret the Torah.

In the Talmud, interpretations vary about exactly defines a rebellious son. No matter how you read it, some assumptions have to be made to understand the law. For example, what exactly does it mean to be a glutton or a drunkard? The son would have to be both at the same time. The rabbis’ interpretations become more and more elaborate until we approach this section of the Talmud (which I’m editing for brevity):

That’s incredible. This method of interpretation gives us so much freedom with the Torah, doesn’t it? We see a mitzvah that sounds immoral, but if we look at it under a microscope, we realize that’s not really what the Torah says at all. This is why studying is such an important part of the Jewish tradition.

Moving on, there are another passages that don’t get the same amount of modern “press” as the rebellious son, but they seem to be equally important - if not more important. In chapter 22, we learn:

And in chapter 23:

These sound like pretty obvious moral laws to us now. Be nice to each other. But in a time and place where slavery is legal and of everyday business, this is absolutely radical.

The instructions on freeing people from slavery is separate from the instructions on how to treat your objects or livestock or even the poor in your midst. Instead of talking about charitable deeds, like when it talks about widows or poor laborers, the Torah doesn’t tell us to pity people who were recently enslaved. It goes out of its way to talk about them as equals who can choose where to live and how they want to live!

And on top of that, I was stumped trying to interpret this verse because, you might remember, many of our moral instructions say to do this or that “because you were slaves in Egypt.” But that’s not in this parasha at all.

I personally think the only way to understand this passage is that the Torah is emphasizing the distinction between property rights and human rights. We don’t support oppressed people because we used to be oppressed. Not here. We support oppressed people because that is the right thing to do - not even as a moral choice, as a “well, if you like the person who ran away from his slaver.” Not “if it doesn’t cause you undue financial hardship.” Not “if it seems important to you at the time.” No, this is part of the fundamental makeup of society, the crucial difference between people and things. The Torah leaves absolutely no room for question.

But, as before, let’s consult the Talmud for its insights.

There are many opinions, because that’s what the Talmud does. This is what I found:

I tried to find context. What I found was this.

This hurts. It hurts to read, but how much more must it have hurt for the people who were directly affected by this ruling, for the people who the rabbis treated like donkeys or garments, for the history after the Talmud where these opinions were considered for literal millennia!

If you google the phrase “slave mitzvah,” this opinion is still the first halakhah to show up, totally uncritically! Not the mitzvah to assist someone who escaped human trafficking, but a mitzvah that you couldn’t free a slave even if you wanted to! I’m not going to get into the minutiae of these mitzvot, of what nationalities deserve to be enslaved, because I don’t want to even repeat these arguments.

I want to understand Torah. We’re supposed to wrestle with it, not necessarily to agree, right? That’s how the oral Torah, our tradition of study, can preserve our tradition in a beautiful way.

But what do you do when the written Torah is radically good but the oral Torah rejects that? When Gd Gdself said “human life has value,” and the Talmud said, “Not for this human life.” How can we reconcile any of this with what we actually believe and practice?

I don’t have an answer.

I don’t know more than our sages. I know so much less of the Torah than they did, and I am still struggling to understand the basics of what other people have spent a lifetime studying. But they can still make mistakes. Those mistakes can be dangerous. They can hurt people.

While trying to understand Ki Teitzei, I came across other talmudic wisdom which I think helps to make sense of this:

And

The rabbis acknowledge that they can mess up, and when they do, their words become like poison - hurting not just themselves, but their students and everyone who learns from those students.

To me, the takeaway from Ki Teitzei is:

When we read the Torah, we all take something different away from it. It may be helpful. It may be harmful. But as soon as we think we’ve got it all figured out, that we’re doing the right thing and following our own personal code of conduct to the letter - if we totally understand what is right and wrong, how we know what to do for any situation no matter who is involved or what’s at stake, how we’re going to look good for everyone else whose opinion matters to us - how the ideas that challenge us are theoretical, or don’t apply, or don’t need to be disputed at all -

That’s when we need to stop. And question. And look for answers as if we’re starting from scratch.

Right now, we’re defining how the Torah will be read for our own generation and the next and the next. We are all responsible for telling each other what the Torah means. We are the ones who choose whether Torah is helpful or harmful for the generations that come after us.

I hope none of us takes that responsibility lightly.