KI TEITZEI: JEWISH SPIRITUALITY : RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL: EVOLVING HALAKAH

KI TEITZEI: JEWISH SPIRITUALITY : RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL: EVOLVING HALAKAH

 

 RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL : CHUMASH CANDESCENCE: PARASHA KI TEITZEI: DEUTERONOMY 21:10-25:19

CHUMASH CANDESCENCE

PARASHA KI TEITZEI

DEUTERONOMY 21:10-25:19

RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL

Rabbi Arthur Segal www.jewishspiritualrenewal.org  

Jewish Renewal www.jewishrenewal.info  

Jewish Spiritual Renewal http://rabbiarthursegal.blogspot.com  

Jewish Spirituality

Eco Judaism,

 Spiritual Renewal

www.facebook.com/RabbiArthurSegalJewishSpiritualRenewal

Hilton Head Island, SC, Bluffton, SC, Savannah, GA

 

 

"Bad Boy, Bad Boy, You're Such a Naughty Bad Boy. Beep Beep!"

 

SYNOPTIC ABSTRACT:

This week's parasha is replete with all type of laws to help govern society. We are given the rights of women taken captive in battle, the first born son's inviolable rights, rules of hanging and of burial, obligations to guard and protect our neighbors' property, rules about protective fences, laws for the care of a hen and her chicks, rules against defamation of a married woman's virtue, laws of adultery, rules forbidding and defining incest, rules regarding interest and pledges for loans, rights of workers, rules to protect the poor, the orphaned and the widowed, leverite marriages laws, honest business practice guidelines, and also the lashes one gets for breaking any of these laws.

It would be impossible for me to list and explain each law contained in this portion. This portion needs to be read individually to be appreciated. If you want to learn more and see how I revived a Disco song for this D'var's title, please read further.

 

In the middle of Autumn, we will read the Torah portion about Noah. We will learn about what was occurring during his time that caused God to flood the Earth. It was not a pretty sight. From the way it is described in the Midrash and Talmud, it is no wonder God was determined to flush it away. People were barbaric, amoral, cruel animals to each other. Even the animals were "amoral", if this is possible. I will go into more detail in Autumn, but I am mentioning it here today because the Haftarah portion for this parasha is the same portion that is read for the portion called "Noah."

There is no guidepost telling us this. I  discovered this serendipitously. The reason for this, I decided, is that in Noah's times, the rules we will read about this week, did not exist and life was a essentially a sewer. God promised never to destroy the world again after Noah's flood. In this portion, we are taught that society needs rules and boundaries to prevent us from "flushing" ourselves away.

 Assuming that you will read the portion, I will concentrate on just one of the many commandments listed. It is called the "law of the wayward and rebellious son", and hence the title of this D'var Torah. It is found in Deuteronomy 21:18-21. "If a man will have a wayward and rebellious son, who does not hearken to the voice of his father and the voice of his mother, that they discipline him, but he does not hearken to them, then his father and mother shall grasp him and take him out to the elders of his city and the gate of his place. The shall say to the elders of his city,'This son of ours is wayward and rebellious; he does not hearken to our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard' All of the men of his city shall pelt him with stones and he shall die; you shall remove the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear and they shall fear."

 I picked this law because it allows us to see how our sages dealt with this harsh and strict law by reforming Judaism. The first thing the rabbis did with this law is to try to explain it. They said that the death penalty is not imposed for the sins the son committed, such as disobeying his parents, overeating and getting drunk. The death penalty is imposed for the deeds such a son will commit in the future. These crimes, they posit, will be more severe capital crimes.

 In Talmud Tractate Sanhedrin 72A, the rabbis say,"Let him die while he is innocent, and let him not die when he is guilty of capital crimes." In other words, they are doing this young boy a "favor." By killing him while he is young and a rascal with only harmless sins for which to repent, he will not have the chance to get older and commit major crimes and have heavier sins on his soul.

The second thing that the rabbis do is to legally parse each requirement of the passages. It is obvious that the rabbis do not want this law on the books. But they just cannot erase a Torah law. So they develop so many legal requirements that it is virtually impossible for this commandment ever to be fulfilled. The rabbis say in Sanhedrin 71 A that the death penalty "never occurred and never will occur" for this situation. One mitzvah down; 612 to go.

 For example, they discuss the word "son." This implies that they boy is still a child. As a child, he is not responsible for his actions and these laws and penalties cannot apply at all. A child becomes a man at bar mitzvah, but then the parents no longer have authority over the son anyway. The rabbis decide that the only time-frame when this law applies is the first three months after a bar mitzvah ceremony (Sanhedrin 68B).

More specifically, "from the time he produces two pubic hairs until the time that his public hairs grow round." Rabbi Dimi traveled from Palestine to Babylonia (where the Talmud was being written and said he read in a baraita (part of the discussion of the Talmud that was left on the editing room floor), that "it is when the pubic hair begins to grow around the base of the penis and not yet on the testicles." In this way, the window for this law being effective is shortened to just three months.

 Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsh says that this is when a 13 year old boy's passions become aroused and this is when parents must exert tight discipline over their son's evil inclination, as well as over raging hormones.

 Nachmanides contends that one sin will lead to another. He says these verses are here to teach us that if one shows disrespect to his parents, he will disrespect the Torah. If one is a glutton with food and wine, it is an indication of a lack of self constraint that will make it impossible to be a holy person and develop spiritual limitations. Rabbi Bachya says that these verses teach that parents' love of God must supercede the love of their own children. He sites Abraham and his willingness to sacrifice Isaac as the prime example.

 The sages still try to add more into this verse to keep it from being used. They decide that the child had to have stolen money from his parents to buy enough food and wine to have become a drunkard and a glutton. This would mean that he is addicted to food and wine and will become a murderous thief in the future to continue his habit.

 Because the verse says that a "man" has this wayward son, the rabbis decree that if a minor boy has a son, this son is exempt forever from this law. They decide from their biblical research that a boy as young as nine years old can be a father. They decide that King Solomon's forebearers, on his mother Bathsheba's side, procreated when they were nine years old.

They also decide that Haran was nine years old when he begat Sarah, Abraham's wife. They then decide, according to Rabbi Hillel's academy, that if a boy less than nine years old fondles his mother, even to the point of having penile-vaginal penetration, it is not incest and the mother can still marry a Kohan.

 The rabbis then have the problem of deciding how much a son has to drink and eat to be a glutton. They decide that if the son steals his father's money and buys meat and drink in Jerusalem, he is excused, as the money was spent like the tithe money that is to be spent in the Holy city. If the boy gets drunk and overeats at a public feast, he is excused. They decided that gluttony means eating delicacy cuts of expensive meat and noother foods. Being a drunkard means drinking only the best... rare, strong wines. And the son must be a glutton and a drunkard at the same time. The meat cannot be salted, and the wine cannot be young.

The rabbis get side-tracked discussing their favorite wines and meats, and discussing why if wine is so bad, did God make it for man. The rabbis then derive adages about the benefits of wine and the ills of its excesses.

 After what reads like a wine tasting--gourmet dinner party, the rabbis decide that the boy must steal both from his mother and father; buy the meat and wine; and eat it outside of his parent's property. If he stole the money from people other than his parents; he is not a wayward son. If the boy steals the wine and meat directly, and not the money to buy them; he is not a wayward son. Since the money that his mother has belongs to her husband, it is difficult for the son to actually steal from his mother. The husband would have had to make a legal oath that certain monies were his wife's and were no longer his. If the boy's mother and father disagreed, then the boy could not be a wayward son. And if the mother wasn't in agreement with the father for any reason (i.e. the parents occasionally quarreled); the boy could not be deemed a wayward son either.

The sages also decide that, since the verse says the parents must "grasp" the boy and "take" him, they cannot be lame or have an injured hand. Since they both must talk, they cannot be mute. They cannot be deaf, as they must hear their son's rebuke. And they cannot be blind as they must be able to recognize their son by sight being drunk and overeating. They then decide that if all of these above contingencies are met, that flogging should be the penalty not stoning. But they want at least two witness who saw what the parents saw and who saw the parents warn the son that what he was about to do was punishable by flogging.

But if the boy isn't found guilty until after the three-month window of his bar mitzvah, he is no longer able to be punished.

 The rabbis are also unsettled by the prospect of a precedent being set which allows them to punish people for crimes they "may" commit in the future. They not only are against this, but they bring up famous people who committed crimes, but were not punished because either there were no witnesses against them, or they were doing it for good motives. They speak of Esther, who publicly co-habitated with a non-Jewish man (King Ahashverous) and was not punished. The rabbis say Esther was completely passive when she and the King had sex, so she was not breaking any law. They say she was "as passive as the soil of the earth" when the King "tilled her."

 The rabbis then throw up their hands and ask why this law was given if they cannot follow it. The rabbis mention another law which gave them the same problem in its impossibility to enforce. This is the law of the subverted city (Deut. 13:13-19) from our parasha Re'eh two week's ago. To review, if a city has more than half of its inhabitants worshipping idols, the entire city and all of its people are to be burned in the town square. The rabbis first decide that if the town had no square, the law could not be carried out. They eventually decide that if just one mezuzah appeared in the town, it could not be destroyed.

Since every town in the land of Israel had to have at least one mezuzah, they say that this law also was never carried out and will never be carried out (Sanhedrin 71A). Two mitzvoth down; 611 to go.

 They also discuss the law about the house with tzaraas (mistranslated as leprosy) in Leviticus 14:33-53. This was a house whose walls turned  scaly colors. They agree that this only happened twice, as there were ruins of houses in both Gaza and the Galilee that the people there called "tzaraas house ruins." But they all agree that for many reasons  they could never declare a house afflicted with tzaraas and condemn it to be destroyed in the future. Three mitzvoth down; 610 to go.

 The rabbis decide that all of these laws were never meant to be enacted but were in the Torah for teaching purposes. What the rabbis do is to use the passages to give child-rearing advice. For example, they use the example of the phraseology of "both" a mother's and father's "voice" to show that if parents do not speak in one consistent voice, a child will grow up confused and will be apt to commit sins and crimes.

 As spiritual Jews today we need to look at the words of Torah and Talmud, not as only as divinely-given but as teachings that are divinely-inspired. The laws are there not to be followed or understood literally, but to guide us in our daily trials of being ethical and good people.

 The ancient sages, even before the time of the two Temples' destruction, amended and bent the Torah to adapt to changing times without losing its core belief-system. This adaptability is the beauty of Judaism, and it is in this spirit that Judaism must continue to evolve and reform.

 Shabbat Shalom,

RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL

Rabbi Arthur Segal www.jewishspiritualrenewal.org  

Jewish Renewal www.jewishrenewal.info  

Jewish Spiritual Renewal http://rabbiarthursegal.blogspot.com  

Jewish Spirituality,Eco Judaism, Spiritual Renewal

www.facebook.com/RabbiArthurSegalJewishSpiritualRenewal   

Hilton Head Island, SC, Bluffton, SC, Savannah, GA

If visiting SC's Low Country, contact us for a Shabbat meal, in our home by the sea, our beth yam.

Maker of Shalom (Oseh Shalom) help make us deserving of Shalom beyond all human comprehension!