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D'var: Parashat Ki-Teitzei 5783 Commentary by Michael Goldstein Friday, August 25, 2023 |
| Deuteronomy 21:10–25:19 |
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This week’s Parashat is Ki Teitzei which means when you go out. In it, Moses outlines specific rules about proper family relationships and laws involving many aspects of daily living, justice, family responsibility, work, and sexuality.
There are 74 commandments in Ki Teitzei, more than in any other Parashat. There are any number of positive messages in those 74 including charity toward strangers, humane treatment of animals, and not returning a slave who seeks shelter from his master with you. However, for me, one of the most puzzling commandments in the entire Torah is the one that begins this Torah portion. (Deuteronomy 21:10 – 21:14) When you go out to war against your enemies, and the Lord, your God, will deliver him into your hands, and you take his captives, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman and you desire her, you may take [her] for yourself as a wife. You shall bring her into your home, and she shall shave her head and let her nails grow. And she shall remove the garment of her captivity from upon herself, and stay in your house, and weep for her father and her mother for a full month. After that, you may be intimate with her and possess her, and she will be a wife for you. And it will be, if you do not desire her, then you shall send her away wherever she wishes, but you shall not sell her for money. You shall not keep her as a servant, because you have afflicted her. That’s the proposition: War; conquest; captivity; rape. It’s repugnant. Isn't the purpose of the Torah to lead us toward greater moral heights; to elevate us to a life of spirituality, goodness, and holiness? Yet, this commandment seems to give men permission to follow their basest animal instincts. Some contend that the Torah understands man’s evil inclinations and is here speaking to them; that it recognizes that those inclinations are so powerful that, if it is prohibited to use captive women sexually, he would disregard the prohibition, ignore all morality, and do it anyway; that the Torah provides a road map to marriage, thereby ensuring that she have the protections that marriage provides. They add that at the close of the 30 day period of mourning, during which she will be far less attractive by being shaved bald, having very long fingernails, and no longer dressed in an alluring garment, he is permitted to have sex with her, live with her, and make her his wife. If, however, his desire has faded during the month, he is to set her free. He may not sell or otherwise enslave her because he has already afflicted her, both by taking her captive and by using her sexually. But I see that as an accommodation to the sexual violence that was and is so often war’s companion. The soldier may violate the captive woman and then continue to do so as her husband. But first he must abstain, controlling his desire through a procedure designed to lessen or extinguish it. And while the procedure is set up to deal with his desire, it certainly avoids giving the woman any options. Unspoken here, is that even God’s word cannot tame man’s lust in wartime. At best, with time and deception, it can be tricked into a lesser urge. But even then, in contrast to all of the Torah’s myriad, non-negotiable commands, it is not obligatory. The Torah does not explicitly prohibit man’s rapacious wartime actions as it does to so many other human behaviors. Instead, it simply implies disapproval. This connection of war and sexual violation has persisted throughout thousands of years and into our time. Indeed, institutions of international justice took until the 1990’s to recognize rape as one of the gravest international war crimes. And this sea change in the understanding and condemnation of sexual violence during wartime is no longer seen simply as the product of war’s inflamed desires; rape, of both women and men, is understood now as a powerful tool in war’s modern arsenal. It is used to sow terror and demoralization and sometimes even to change a population’s ethnic make-up through widespread, forced pregnancies. We must remember that not everything the Torah allows is necessarily right or just. Sometimes, as in this case, the Torah permits something because it is the lesser of two evils. If one can resist taking a beautiful captive woman in the first place, that is preferable. But if not, the Torah offers a way to blunt some of it. As a man, I cannot begin to understand the depths of fury, fear, and degradation women feel at rape. But as human beings, we all have the sacred duty to be outraged, supportive, and active. It is a hideous crime and neither war nor our laws can be allowed to give it cover. The Torah was written in a time so many years ago; a time when women were chattel and slavery was condoned. If it cannot today voice the unequivocal condemnation of sexual violence during war, then it is up to us, now, to do so in our Torah’s name. Michael Goldstein |
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