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.

Chukkat, part two, the d'var

Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai said, of the ritual of the red cow, two different things. To non-Jews, he said it was an exorcism. To Jews, he said “It makes no sense, it has no point, but God commands it, so we do it.” (from Midrash Tanhuma).

I read in my Chumash, also, that King Solomon himself labored to understand this ritual, and could not.

I don’t get that. The Torah is full of bizarre rituals, rituals that seem like magic. At the same time the Torah itself, and the Rabbis who followed, are careful to note that the rituals are NOT magic. Their effectiveness stems from God, not from any other forces called into service by the specific actions. It is commanded by God that this is what you do, and so you must do it exactly as God commands. But the fact that you do it precisely is not what makes it work. You do it precisely only because God commands you to do so. That is why the rituals are not magic. But why should the ritual of the brown cow be more mysterious than the others?