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PARASHA KI TEITZEI
DEUTERONOMY 21:10-25:19
RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL
Jewish Spiritual Renewal
Jewish Renewal
Hilton Head Island, SC
Bluffton,SC
"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 recently came to 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 no
other 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 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
Hebrew College, Newton Centre, MA, USA
via Shamash on-line class service
Jewish Spiritual Renewal
Jewish Renewal
Hilton Head Island, SC
Bluffton,SC
Original version done while scholar-in-residence at Congregation Temple Mickve Israel, Savannah, GA
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