Ki Teitzei : On The Diversity of Commandments

The commandments given in Ki Tetsei ( Devarim/Deut 21:10-25:19) illustrate everything that is most incomprehensible and frustrating to me about Halacha (Jewish Law). Some of the commandments -- and the fences and explanations and illustrations that the Rabbis have built around them over thousands of years -- are masterpieces of ethical lawmaking. A famous example is 22:8: “When you build a new house you shall make a parapet for your roof.” We are required by God to be careful, for ourselves, and for others. Our building, which has a flat, black roof, doesn’t in fact have a parapet all around; you can walk right off the back to fall four floors to your death on the back patio. Maybe if you’re lucky the overgrown forsythia will break your fall. When we need to put on a new roof, I’d like to put a parapet up back there. I dread some child or drunk person going up for a lark and going over the edge. So that’s sensible.

And then there is 22:11, “but don’t weave two types of fabric together”. This sounds like nothing so much as my three-year-old complaining about a tiny, tiny piece of green stuff on her pasta. There’s nothing ethically wrong with mixing fabrics. It’s just irrelevant, and what is it doing there in the same parsha as 24:17 “You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the fatherless,” which is so beautiful as to make one cry? It’s infuriating. And finally, there are the commandments that are actively obnoxious: 23:2 is an injunction against allowing men with ‘crushed testicles’ to convert to Judaism, and 25:11 says that if two men are fighting and the wife of one of them helps her husband in the fight by running up and grabbing his adversary’s genitals, the wife’s hand should be cut off, I presume because she has possibly prevented the adversary from becoming a convert? (I jest. I know that’s not why, because the law probably only ever applied if the adversary was already Jewish! No Jewish woman is going to get her hand chopped off over hurting gentile testicles! )

So there’s the situation. We traditionally identify 613 different commandments in the Torah, and they exhibit a diversity of subject matter, apparent intention, palatability to modern people, and importance or triviality that is truly boggling. Like each commandment evolved on a different island, in very different microclimates, and then were all gathered together and thrown into a big dusty storage room somewhere in the Victoria and Albert museum.

Actually, that’s probably pretty much exactly what happened.

Re'eh -- On gods whom you have not experienced

Sorry, devoted readers (hi Mom!), I was offline for a whole week in Vermont, and so I missed posting Re’eh on (late) time.

In Re’eh, we get admonitions to follow only Adonai, our God, and not to follow any other Gods, “whom you have not experienced.” We also get some of the classic Deuteronomic admonitions to only worship and sacrifice to God at His Temple in Jerusalem, and not to sacrifice at ‘high places’ all around the land of Israel, as had been done in the past. These admonitions reflect a priestly concern during the time of King Josiah to consolidate worship at the temple, and to root out practices like sacrificing at stone pillars that bring Israelites, so the priests worried, perilously close to idolatry. (No matter that all the earliest ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob among others, are specifically recorded to have erected stone monuments at sacred places all over Canaan, and sacrificed to their God at those places. Such is no longer to be countenanced, in this Temple phase of Israelite religion.)

It’s easy to be flippant about the ulterior motives of the authors and collectors of the Torah, this oddest of collections: Well, this guy was making a power grab. This was an old ‘just so’ story about how a place came to be named what it was named. These are records of wars; these are myths that came from Babylonia; everyone tells this story of a great Flood; lots of nations had legal codes with language just like this one. What’s so special about all this, that I should read it still and think about it still and struggle still with its words, infuriating, evocative, repetitive, inexplicable, dull, ridiculous, contradictory words?