This has
been a dismal summer, filled with terrible news of war in many
locations around the globe, from Africa to Lithuania to the Middle East. War is brutal, but is it always barbaric? Last
week we read Parshat Shoftim, which includes the laws pertaining to warfare.
Not surprisingly, when I sat down to study Parshat Ki Teitzei, the
opening verses jumped out at me:
When
you [an Israelite warrior] take the field against your enemies, and Adonai your
God delivers them into your power and you take some of them captive, and you
see among the captives a beautiful woman and you desire her and would take her
[into your household] as your wife, you shall bring her into your household,
and she shall trim her hair, pare her nails, and discard her captives’s
garb. She shall spend a month’s time in your
house lamenting her father and mother; after that you may come to her and thus
become her husband, and she shall be your wife. Then, should you no longer want
her, you must release her outright. You must not sell her for money: since you
had your will of her, you must not enslave her. (Deuteronomy 21:10-14)
Where to
begin? Let’s begin
with Phyllis Trible, who wrote about “texts of terror,” the stories of Hagar[1], Tamar[2], the
daughters of Jephthah[3], and the
unnamed concubine[4], women
who are enslaved, abused, rejected, raped, discarded and even dismembered in
narratives that seem to regard such treatment of women as business-as-usual.
Trible’s feminist
approach examines “the
status quo, pronouncing judgment, and calling for repentance.”[5]
The
opening passage from Parshat Ki Teitzei might belong on the list of “texts of
terror.” That women are viewed as chattel is
just the tip of the iceberg. The Etz Hayyim commentary explains: “Most
female captives in the ancient world became slaves but in some cases a soldier
found one whom he desired to take as a wife or concubine, a practice well known
from Homeric Greece and early Arabia.” True
enough, but the claim in Etz Hayyim that, “Several laws in this section reflect
Deuteronomy’s
consideration for the welfare of women,” is
a challenging thesis to prove on the surface. While we might be inclined to
claim that Torah demands compassion for the captive woman—after all,
she is given a month to mourn for her
lost family—we cannot
ignore that it seems more the case that she is given a month to “get it out
of her system” and
prepare herself to please the man who now controls her body and her life. To
those who point out that her captor may not sleep with her, reaping the harvest
of his booty, and then sell her to another, we might respond that once he has
slept with her and thereby married her, if he turns her out, where will she go?
She cannot return to her family (even if they are still alive); she is an alien
in a strange community, and no one will want to marry her.
It’s
difficult to find redeeming meaning in this passage, but perhaps not
impossible. The inherent cruelty and injustice of claiming women as the spoils
of war is more subtly communicated by the ordering of the material in this
section of the Torah. Considering this
passage in its broader context reveals a larger meaning. The passage cited
above follows Torah’s
discussion of the rules of warfare (Deuteronomy 20:1-20). Captive women were a
common phenomenon in warfare then, as we have seen this summer, they are today
among some barbarians; the passage is followed by two topics that seem to flow
directly from the horrible situation of a woman captured in war forced to marry
her captor: The first (Deuteronomy
21:15-17)
concerns the situation in which a man has two wives—one whom
he loves and the other who has fallen out of favor. The second (Deuteronomy
21:18-21), following on its tail, is the famous (or infamous) law of the ben
sorer u’moreh (the rebellious son). In the case of
the former, a man may not disinherit the son of the wife he no longer loves;
perhaps the biblical editor had in mind the captured woman, who was alluring
when first he acquired her, but then lost her luster? In the case of the
latter, a son who is wild and rebellious and out of control is taken before the
elders of the city and stoned to death. There are volumes to say about both
these passages, but for our purposes here, it is the juxtaposition of these
passages to the initial “text
of terror” that interests me.
Could it
be that Torah is warning us that a man who treats a woman captured in war as
mere booty—which was
common practice in the ancient world, and certainly “legal” by the standards of ancient societies—is being
warned: (1) Stop and think about this; give it a month. Don’t sleep
with her and thereby marry her until you have witnessed her pain. And know that
you cannot simply sell her off if she doesn’t please you. (2) If you nonetheless
marry her, and then down the road become bored with her and no longer love her,
you are still obligated to her and her children. You cannot disinherit them in
favor of the children of a preferred wife. (3) If you marry a captive woman,
this arrangement may well produce angry, rebellious, defiant children who
absorb the pain of their mother and act upon it. What a mess!
Taken in
context, the law of the captive woman may well be Torah’s way, if
not condemning the practice, at least warning that no good comes of it. In the
heat of the battle (so to speak) people do things they come to regret.
Torah then
seems to head off in another direction, but perhaps it’s not a
different direction at all. Perhaps it is meant to teach a different
perspective which, if one absorbs, will obviate the situation of the captive
woman and the cascade of problems that may arise from this horrendous practice.
The very next verses tell us:
If
someone is guilty of a capital offense and is put to death, and you impale the
body on a stake, you must not let the corpse remain on the stake overnight, but
must bury it the same day. For an impaled body is an affront to God: you shall
not defile the land that Adonai your God is giving you to possess. (Deuteronomy
21:22-23)
Even a
corpse must be treated with respect. Presumably, the body is that of someone
who has committed murder, someone that we might think is the least person due
respect. Yet even that person is the image of God, as the Rabbis explained with
a parable: There were once twin brothers identical in
their appearance. One was appointed king, while the other became a brigand and
was hanged. Now when people passed by and saw the brigand hanging, they
exclaimed, “The king is hanged.”
(Midrash Tannaim to Deuteronomy 21:23) This is
the new starting point: Every human being reflects the image of God. Who
could fail to understand that if a convicted murderer is of concern to God,
then certainly the innocent woman must be of concern to God?
The second step is to respect people’s property, which sounds simple, but is far from easy. If you see a stray animal, why not just claim it as your own? Torah requires us to go out of our way to return it to the owner, even care for it until the owner arrives to claim the animal:
If
you see your fellow Israelite’s ox or sheep
gone astray, do not ignore it; you must take it back to your peer. If your
fellow Israelite does not live near you and you do not know who [the owner is],
you shall bring it home and it shall remain with you until your peer claims it;
then you shall give it back. You shall do the same with that person’s
donkey; you shall do the same with that person’s
garment; and so too shall you do with anything that your fellow Israelite loses
and you find: you must not remain indifferent. (Deuteronomy 22:1-3)
The last
verse is the key. Do not remain indifferent. Care about the welfare of
others. Respect their property; even take care of their property until they
arrive to claim it.
And then
we find this unusual commandment:
If,
along the road, you chance upon a bird’s nest, in any
tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs and the mother sitting over the
fledglings or on the eggs, do not take the mother together with her young. Let
the mother go, and take only the young, in order that you may fare well and
have a long life. (Deuteronomy 22:6-7)
What is
Torah concerned about here? There are as many explanations are their are
commentators for this verse. Some say that Torah’s concern is that we not deplete the
population of animals on which we depend for food by killing off two
generations at once. But others say that this is a mitzvah that inculcates
compassion: Torah instructs us to consider the pain of the mother bird when her
eggs or fledglings are taken. Send the mother bird away so she will not see her
eggs or fledglings taken; spare her the pain. There is something unique about
this mitzvah: it is the only one for which Torah promises the reward of long
life. Compassion is unique among mitzvot. The Rabbis bolstered this priority,
teaching, “Just as
God shows compassion for humans, so does God [show compassion] for beasts and
birds.” But it’s not God’s
compassion that Torah speaks of. It is ours, the compassion God encourage in us
and requires of us as human beings. When the psalmist says, “God’s mercies
are upon all God’s
works” that is not a description of a world
where only mercy reigns, but a prescription for us to do our best to live godly
lives.
Perhaps
this is Torah’s
way of training us to compassion so when war breaks out, with all its horrors
and tragedies, we can continue to see people as humans and not as chattel, and
we can treat them with the respect they deserve as reflections of the image of
God. Many events of this past summer make this goal seem idealistic and
unrealistic, but we have also seen the extent to which Israel has suffered
years of assault by thousands of Hamas rockets aimed at her civilian population
without responding, and when entering Gaza became necessary to dismantle rocket
launchers and blow up attack tunnels to prevent a massacre of Israelis, Israel
attempted to warn people to leave ammunitions, rocket-launching, and planning
targets in order to civilian casualties despite Hamas’ efforts to promote civilian
casualties for the purpose of good PR. Torah teaches us, and we have seen this
summer, that while war is brutal, but it doesn’t have to be barbaric.
© Rabbi
Amy Scheinerman
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