At first glance Ki Tetzei looks like a parashah replete with unrelated laws, thrown together without regard to theme and structure. It’s almost as if Moshe Rabbeinu had suddenly said, “Right – this book is coming to an end. I’d better throw in all the unrelated loose ends in here before it’s too late.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
Though Rabbeim have long struggled to find common themes, or attempted to relate the order or sequence, or category of one law to another, to me there is a distinct theme….and not such a difficult one to come upon. Robert Frost commented in Mending Wall that doggedly proscribing to the concept “good fences make good neighbors,” is tantamount to dogmatically adhering to traditions without thought.
But fences, walls and borders are in fact the theme of this week’s parashah.
The primary concern of Ki Tetzei is the concept of examining what you are permitted to keep within your personal fence, your civic fence, and your national borders. In each instance, the question is protection: how will you protect your family, your kinsmen, your country? Which limits to personal freedom are necessary to maintain a society?
Rather than examine the laws in the order they appear, I will adopt the technique of looking for the ripple effect. Any parent knows that what you teach your children at home, is known to your neighborhood. If a certain type of neighborhood springs up, with like-minded people, then others who think or act or believe that way will be attracted. Towns develop reputations as well – whether it’s for tolerance, religious dogma, supporters of various traditions, arts, and industries. Wealth, success, industry, poverty, immoral behavior – towns develop associations. Any town under a centralized governmental body will cough up the proceeds of local taxation to attain benefits such as transportation, educational services, and of course police and military protection. And what a country chooses to repel from its borders flavors how it will be treated both by its enemies, and by its allies.
So let’s begin in the innermost circle: put a parapet on your roof, to protect your house. Curious that the pasuk does not say that this is to protect the inhabitants – the purpose of the parapet is to protect the physical structure of the house itself.
Let’s look at that:
בי תבנה בית חדש ועשית מעקה לגגך ולא-תשים דמים בביתך כי-יפל הנפל ממנו:
If you build a new house, you shall make a fence for your roof, so that you do not bring bloodguilt on your house if anyone should fall from it. (Deuteronomy 22:8)
To understand this better, we will need to examine the standard domestic structures of the region during the last phases of the Late Bronze Age, which continued throughout both the early and later Iron Age*: the Israelite four-room house. Many remains of this most basic domestic structure have been excavated and reconstructed, with the densest inhabitation of the Israelite period extending from the hill country of Samaria and Hebron to Beer Sheva and Ein Bokek in the south, and as far north as Hazor in the Galilee, up to Katzrin in the Golan Heights, and along the inner coastal plain bordering the Philistine regions, up to the Tel Shikmona, just south of modern Haifa. Similar earlier antecedent structures have been excavated in Egypt, especially during the Hyksos period at Medinat Habu. **
Horbat Haluqim Four Room House
This Israelite four room house, also referred to as a pillared house, is currently believed to house livestock and stores on the ground floor, with living quarters above, and roof space for drying and preparation of agricultural produce, the basic structure is similar throughout all these regions. It’s a modest, rather egalitarian structure.
Whether the roof was used for food preparation, summer sleeping space, or for storage of agricultural implements, it is clear that a fall from a roof would represent such a common danger that a parapet was halachically necessary.
Although it’s odd to think of a physical object having bloodguilt, houses were multi-generational, and archaeological evidence shows that they were often inhabited for many generations. So while bloodguilt might attach itself to a person, the danger that an unsecured roof might present could outlast many generations.
If the most intimate structure is a family home, which must be safely structured to ensure that no one will come to harm, then the ripples of what happens within a family extend outward. If you move from the beginning of the parasha, we begin with the laws regarding who may marry foreign women captured in war. Women were chattel, and if a soldier captured a foreign woman who had no place to go, and he wanted her, she was halachically entitled to mourn her parents for a month before converting in order to marry into a tribe. While Judaism is clearly matrilineal, the necessity to introduce a wider gene pool is thus halachically supported. This is the basis for the concept of conversion, and the halacha surrounding who may and may not marry a convert, as well as society’s obligation to respect converts as full Jews, as long as they uphold all the halachic obligations of a Jew. Moving closer to the home, the parasha then deals legal rights of children with regard to inheritance and birth order, and then to the laws to protect against immoral behavior of rebellious sons, and laws to protect against the immoral behavior of consenting adults. All of these laws deal specifically with who may build a house within Israel, and how to protect the interior workings of household.
Once we know who may form a household, there are several laws that basically pertain to the internal workings of the ‘hood, as it were. These are laws regarding returning lost property, especially grazing animals. These laws ensure that the courts would not be tied up with continuously bickering neighbors arguing over whose sheep belongs to whom. Such was life before microchipping, branding, or even tattooing your livestock became common practice. And anyway – you couldn’t maim or alter an animal that might potentially be used for sacrifice.
The next laws have to do with more intimate familial tendencies. Although it is a bit shocking to think of it, even back then one might want to hide a relative with a taste for cross-dressing. Today the lines are blurred between what constitutes male and female garb. Having recently left louche, morally loose Egypt, this is a clearly defined law condemning one whose tendency might be either too swish or too butch. No cross-dressing allowed, as tolerance of drastically counter-culture behavior would weaken familial structure. Thus men are condemned for being obsessed with personal grooming, and women are prohibited from battle-gear. The final halacha that appears before the building of a proper house deals with ecological kindness. One may not slaughter a mother bird in order to capture its eggs. This is an intimate prohibition designed to ensure that we educate our children to be sensitive to nature, designed to inculcate kindness, compassion and mercy amongst the members of one’s household.
Plowing with an ass and an ox together
The ripple of laws extending on the other side of one’s personal roof, deal with forbidden mixtures. Nature enables species to cross breed, but inevitably leaves them sterile. Thus we are forbidden to deliberately breed a donkey with a horse, or even hook up an ox and a donkey to the same plow. Neither can we sow mixed crops, nor can we wear garments made of wool mixed with flax (shatnez). Keep your categories distinct and separate. Don’t confuse your animals, don’t confuse your crops.
Shatnez Centre, London
Are there exceptions to this? Well, yes – there are. After all, tehellet, the blue-dyed thread of tzitit, was woolen, and could be attached to a linen talit katan. Here we have a positive commandment (to dye a thread of the tzitzit blue) overriding a negative one (don’t mix wool and linen). What does this mean? It means to do something that sounds like it should be forbidden, you need to learn and understand the halacha. Or avoid it completely. And that is why it is here, protected by the roof of one’s dwelling – where else does a family deal with the day-to-day halachic concerns like learning and applying the laws of shatnez?
The remaining laws deal with divorce, protection of brides against accusations of immoral behavior prior to their marriage, and ultimately what to do with the fact that rape exists. Rather than brush it under the rug and deny its very existence, the halacha brings the issue right out in the open. If a maiden is raped in town, and she cries out for help, she will surely receive it, as neighbors would run to help her. And so she may not be blamed. But if a girl is raped outside in the fields, no blame can attach to her, as she was unable to call for help. Let’s remember that girls rarely were given tasks that would take them far from their family compounds, and if they did travel, it was usually not alone. So these laws govern what one can expect from one’s neighbors.
The next ripple of laws extends farther than the neighborhood. The laws regarding who may convert, and how many generations they must live within the halacha to be considered full Jews show that the descendants of Edom and Egypt could convert, and marry other converts and continue to live Jewish lives. The third generation – their grandchildren would be entitled marry other Jews. Edom are kinsmen, through Esau. And we soujuorned in the land of Egypt.
This is in stark contrast to mamzerim, who can only marry each other for ten generations. Who are mamzerim? Not just a bastard – the child of an unmarried woman. That’s no big deal – as long as she is Jewish, so are her children. A mamzer is actually the offspring of a man and a woman married to someone else. This is the worst of stigmas. If you really want to know why “Who is a Jew” is such an important issue, think about what a mamzer really is, and how easily a child could be conceived who would grow up under this burden. Imagine an Ethiopian Jewess, walking to Eretz HaKodesh. Her husband has gone ahead to scout the way. They become separated and he is gone for months. She hears from witnesses that her husband has died. She remarries and has a child, only to find when she arrives in Eretz HaKodesh that her first husband is still alive. The child is a mamzer. An American woman marries a Jew, gets a secular divorce, and then remarries and has children. Are the children of her second marriage kosher? Not if she didn’t receive a get from her first husband. They have the status of mamzerim.
The flip side of this is that the laws of mamzerut protect us all. If you can prove you are a Jew, you will know who you are. You will know who both your parents are, and you will know what your rights are, and where you belong. A little ketubah goes a long way…
The parasha concludes with laws that outwardly affect the health of towns, cities, and interdependent financial structures. Rudimentary laws governing sanitation are followed by general laws of kindness and morality towards escaped slaves. Knowing that you would be returning a slave to a life of idolatry, it’s better to allow him to live amongst Jews, if he chooses. This is a matter of being personally kind.
Laws of usury follow. Of course loans were needed for larger enterprises, but usurping undue profits amongst fellow Jews was not allowed. Likewise laws regarding collecting debts and securities are always evaluated against the ability of the person in debt to pay. Thus, one can’t take a person’s livelihood as a pledge against a loan:
:לא-יחבל רחים ורכב כי-נפש הוא חבל
One may not take an upper or lower millstone as a pledge against a loan, for you would be taking a life as a pledge. (Deuteronomy 24:6)
Neither can one take the garment of a widow or an orphan as a pledge – one can’t strip the poor of their most basic belongings. Moreover, in a basic social provision for the most destitute, a man can’t strip a field bare, or even an olive tree. Something must be left for the poor to glean. Weights and measures must be seen to be fair. And an unmarried man whose married brother dies without issue, is encouraged to marry the widow, in order to preserve his name and his land holdings.
All of these laws provide social welfare for the weakest members of society, preventing them from starvation, while guaranteeing that the land remains within the tribes who inherited it originally.
The parasha finally ends with the ultimate protection that Am Israel needs – the protection of its borders against an enemy who desires to destroy the people, and take over the Land:
זכור את אשר-עשהלך עמלק בדרך בצאתכם ממצרים: אשר קרך בדרך ויזנב בך כל-הנחשלים אחריך ואתה עיף ויגע ולא ירא אלוקים: והיה בהניח ה’ אלוקיך לך מכל-איביך מסביב בארץ אשר ה’-אלוקיך נתן נחלה לרשתה תמחה את-זכר עמלק מתחת השמים לא תשכח:
Remember what Amalek did to you, on the way, when you were leaving Egypt, that he happened upon you on the way, and he sruck those of you who were straggling at the end, all the weakest ones at the rear, when you were faint and exhausted, and he did not fwear G-d. It shall be that Hashem your G-d, gives you rest from all your enemies all around, in the Land that Hashem your G-d, gives you as an inheritance to possess. You shall wipe out the very memory of Amalek from under the heaven – you shall not forget! (Deuteronomy 25:17-19)
Is there is an enemy whose stated goal is to destroy Am Israel, to push Israel into the sea, to sieze every bit of land from border to border? There is. To protect most borders, all you need is a simple fence: a railing around one’s roof, a fence around your financial dealings, a social buttress for the poor. Some enemies are reasonable enough to form treaties with. Their goal is not to see you destroyed. They don’t deliberately target your civilian population, children on school buses, people shopping in markets. But if there is an enemy whose stated goal is to take your Land, and to destroy Am Israel, targeting the innocent and the weak, then surely they are Amalek. To attain national security, and achieve real peace in the region, Amalek must be completely destroyed. A fence is not enough.
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* Iron Age I (IA I) 1200-1000 BCE
Iron Age IIA (IA IIA) 1000-925 BCE
Iron Age IIB-C (IA IIB-C) 925-586 BCE
Iron Age III 586-539 BCE (Neo-Babylonian period)
** http://members.bib-arch.org/publication.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=29&Issue=5&ArticleID=9