KI TEITZEI
Ki Teitzei (21:10-25:19) “When you will go out” is a parsha with a mishmash of laws that don’t seem particularly related to each other. Chapter 21, for instance, talks about rules around taking a woman captured in war as a wife, what to do about the birthright if your eldest son is from a wife you don’t like if you also have a wife you do love who has sons, how you should punish a rebellious son (stone him, of course), and that you have to bury someone who has been legally hanged that very day, because leaving him up in the tree would make the land ritually polluted (tamei). Chapter 22 says no finders keepers for stray animals, bans a variety of mixtures including the famous mitzvah prohibiting wearing linen and wool together, the commandment to wear tzitzit, ritual fringes, the odd case of proving a woman is a virgin by her clothing if her new husband accuses her of not being one (as if the women of the tribe hadn’t figured out how to fake that), the punishment of stoning a man who has sex with a married woman and the apparent ability to take a wife by raping a woman.
Chapter 23 prohibits bastards, Ammonites and Moabites from becoming members of Israel, but not Edomites or Egyptians, bans sacred sex priests and priestesses and charging interest to fellow Israelites, though charging interest to non Israelites is fine. You are allowed to munch on your neighbors grapes but not bring a container to take more than you can eat. Chapter 24 includes the rules for remarrying someone if you have divorced them and they have married someone else in the interim (oddly specific), the inability to let your poor neighbor use their clothing for collateral for a loan, the necessity to pay a day laborer his/her wages at the end of the day, and a reiteration of gleaning laws. Chapter 25 includes not muzzling an ox when he is threshing, laws governing Levirite marriage, and laws about weights.
Two things: if you can find narrative coherence in this, you are a more creative reader than I am. Second, I hope that they served some really strong coffee to the gathered multitude who listened to this speech from Moses, because falling asleep would be both impolite and an irresistible temptation.
I want to discuss these four themes
The prohibition against mixing
The original mixing of types.
Should we regard bodily emissions as polluting?
Scale disease as a moral only problem to be addressed only by priests
This parsha contains a ban on mixing things up that are supposed to be in their own lane. This includes cross dressing, taking both a mother bird and the eggs, prohibiting seeding your vineyard with two kinds of grapes, plowing with an ox and an ass together and not wearing wool and linen together, all in the course of a few verses (22:5-11). This also harkens back to the prohibition of mixing meat and milk (Exodus 23:19 and Exodus 34:26. Our text wants as little mixing as possible. There are ongoing preoccupations with worshipping only YHVH and not mixing this worship with worshipping any other God, delineating who belongs to the Israelite people and who does not, and keeping the land and the people ritually pure (tahor).
We can readily speculate that their concern with having really tight boundaries and high walls separating them from their neighbors around them were a function of their perceived weakness and vulnerability to other peoples. This is part of the core thesis of the wonderful book by Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger; societies that feel threatened build higher barriers than societies that feel confident. This cultural theory is demonstrated, for instance, in the White Christian ethno-nationalism we are witnessing throughout the developed world.
We should remember that most of Devarim was probably written about one hundred years after the destruction of the Northern Kingdom by Assyrians and the destruction of the Southern Kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians was less than fifty years in the future. The weakness of the people, their inability to be masters of their own fate and resist their more powerful neighbors was readily apparent. Hence build a wall.
Building walls usually doesn’t work very well. It forces people to both conform and be as strict as possible. If that appeals to you, become ultra-orthodox—this part of the community is growing precisely in response to the threat of the cultural blending of modernity.
But what do we do instead if we want to both preserve our tribal identity which provides our grounding and be open to the inevitable influx of the other? How do we both preserve our heritage and be open to the other?
I think we have to become even more Jewish, even more grounded in our tradition, but not in a way that dismisses the other as subhuman, not in a closed off way, but in a way that is open to the other. Back in the days of the shtetl for those of us who are Ashkenazi Jews, assimilation wasn’t much of a choice, and our ancestors were Jewish as a matter of course, surrounded in a Jewish world. But being Jewish or being anything in our modern world other than simply conforming to mainstream culture--this is something we have to actively choose. What kind of Jewish world do we want to live in and to what the extent do we live grounded in our Jewishness? Because, Lord knows, it is easy in America to assimilate.
How, if at all, are you grounded in your Jewish (or other) identity? How well or solidly are you grounded? How do you decide what to be open to and what to reject that comes from outside your heritage?
The original prohibition against mixing of kinds was in the Garden of Eden. The snake in the Garden of Eden tells Eve that the reason God has prohibited eating from the tree that is in the middle of the garden is that if they eat it they will become like Gods, knowing good and bad (Genesis 3:5). This is the original blending of what our ancestors thought should be kept separate because this blending is seen as unholy. And yet eating from the tree does indeed make us more holy, more like the divine.
This connects with our parsha in one really confusing verse. “You shall not seed your vineyard with two kinds, or else the whole of the seed that you’ll sow and the vineyard’s produce will become holy.” (22:9) Huh? Why would this mixture become holy when it is being forbidden? This is so problematic or unclear that JPS simply removes the idea of holiness and says “The yield of the vineyard may not be used.” Artscoll mangles this translation as “lest the growth of the seed that you plant and the produce of the vineyard become forbidden.” Fox translates more literally (as usual) “lest you forfeit as holy the full yield from the seed that you sow and the produce of the vineyard.” But if it is holy, why should it be forfeit?
Friedman points out that the law against cooking a kid in its mother’s milk may be related to the god El, from a Ugaritic (nearby tribe), source having a meal of a kid cooked in its mothers milk. So maybe “holy” here refers to holiness in a different culture. The prohibition against cross dressing would support such an interpretation since cross dressing is something that is present in pagan myths, according to Friedman (he does not specify which ones).
The problem with Friedman’s approach is that our text isn’t exactly shy about condemning the sacred practices of other people as forbidden and abominations. Why use such a confusing phrasing instead of just saying that seeding the vineyard with two kinds of grapes is an abomination and should be not practiced?
I think our verse is a harkening back to Genesis. It is, in my interpretation, a warning against being too much like the divine and therefore too powerful. It’s a stay in your lane message not because what you are doing is an abomination, but because it is too God like. But why would planting two kinds of grapes be too God like? I don’t have a good answer for that.
This problem of becoming too God like and therefore too powerful certainly has contemporary implications. Haven’t we become like Gods in our ability to reshape the earth for our (short term and profit driven) purposes? If we read stories of Gods from different cultures, there are times when the Gods are wise, but there are also plenty of times when the Gods are powerful idiots—and that’s us. Toddlers throwing temper tantrums only with the ability to impact the whole earth. We’re faced with the dilemma handed us from Adam and Eve—now that we have eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and bad, how do we restrain ourselves to our proper place as one being amongst an infinite number in the more than human world? One being who is no better or worse than others, but who has the unique ability to screw up the ecosystem for the millions of beings who depend upon its stability.
I think a core spiritual task and an invitation is to figure out how to have a proper role amidst the wide range of different beings. I think that stewardship becomes both our moral and spiritual task so that all beings, human and more than human, can survive and flourish. But there are deep ecologists who disparage the possibility of stewardship and think that the human presence must radically shrink if the rest of the beings in our world are to live the lives that are possible for them.
How do we need to change our thinking about our relationship with the more than human world? What kinds of actions might we take? Or is it simply hopeless and humans are inevitably a cancer on the planet?
A man who has a nocturnal emission is determined to be ritually polluted and must go out from the camp until evening when he washes with water, is purified and can return. (23:10-12). We saw much the same thing with menstrual blood in Leviticus, although of course the pollution lasted longer. This is ritual pollution, not moral pollution. The man hasn’t done anything morally wrong, he just can’t make offerings because he is ritually polluted.
But that boundary between ritual and moral pollution can be hard to maintain, especially for us where ritual pollution isn’t a category in our lives. It is too easy for us to be ashamed of our bodies as they bleed or ejaculate, as we are too fat or too thin, this body part too big or too small. It is too easy for us to view our bodies as something other than ourselves from which we’d like to distance ourselves.
This isn’t just a problem for us. The stories of the Baal Shem Tov, for instance, show an inordinate concern with male nocturnal emissions. It’s hard to escape the impression that these emissions are considered morally impure. Same thing with my orthodox male relatives who consider the whole topic of sex and especially masturbation as sinful and want to do anything other than talk about it. One reason they get married so early is so they can stop sinning, since sex in heterosexual marriage isn’t a sin (as long as it is only during certain times of the month) but nocturnal emissions are.
So how do we reclaim our bodies and understand deeply that the separation between “ourselves” and “our bodies” is a false one? How do we feel pure (tahor) in our sexuality and in our bodily functions? Bonus questions since we often read this parsha during Elul, the month that focuses on repentance. Is there anyone you need to forgive who played a role in your feeling unclean?
“Be watchful with the plague of scale disease (tzaraat), to be very watchful and to do according to everything that the Levite priests will instruct you.” (24:8) Why go and listen to the priests? Because scale disease (often mistranslated as leprosy) is viewed as a moral/spiritual issue and our authors want you to go to an approved moral/spiritual practitioner—and that’s the priests
Now one of our ancestors who contracted scale disease had three theoretical choices about where to go for treatment (apart from doing nothing). Or so it seems to me. One approach would be to treat it as a strictly or mostly physical problem and go to what we today would call a medical practitioner who would probably prescribe something like herbal poultices. Or they could go to a moral/spiritual non priest practitioner who could take any number of possible approaches about which we could speculate using cross cultural approaches. These are the kinds of practitioners who are listed and proscribed in last weeks’ parsha (Deuteronomy 18:10-12). Practically, these two possibilities were at least sometimes combined in the same person.
Priests are a third possibility who have, as far as we know, no medical training and no medical qualifications. You would only go to a priest if you were convinced that the scale disease was only a physical manifestation of a moral/spiritual problem that could be addressed by the priesthood. Color me skeptical that this was the belief of the majority of our ancestors; I would be shocked if most of them didn’t visit one of the first two possibilities upon the onset of symptoms.
Illness was often seen in indigenous societies as having a moral component. We retain some vestiges of this (for instance around things like diabetes and obesity). However, the rise of viewing the body as something mechanical has led to modern medicine with its incredibly wide range of mechanical answers for all of our bodily ills. I absolutely believe that illness may well have a moral component, but not necessarily an individual one. For instance, it’s not someone’s individual fault if they get cancer, but a whole lot of cancer is a societal moral issue since we pump the environment full of chemicals that poison us and other beings.
Why does out text insist that you should go to the Levites when you have scale disease and only listen to them? I believe that this is another way of insisting that only the priests of YHVH have a connection to the spiritual world. Don’t, the text is saying, go to a witch or a Reiki practitioner or some other kind of energy healer or a body worker etc etc.
What are your beliefs around physical illness and the moral/spiritual component of them? What kind of practitioners do you use in what contexts?
QUESTIONS
How, if at all, are you grounded in your Jewish (or other) identity? How well or solidly are you grounded? How do you decide what to be open to and what to reject that comes from outside your heritage?
How do we need to change our thinking about our relationship with the more than human world? What kinds of actions might we take? Or is it simply hopeless and humans are inevitably a cancer on the planet?
So how do we reclaim our bodies and understand deeply that the separation between “ourselves” and “our bodies” is a false one? How do we feel pure (tahor) in our sexuality and in our bodily functions? Bonus questions since we often read this parsha during Elul, the month that focuses on repentance. Is there anyone you need to forgive who played a role in your feeling unclean?
What are your beliefs around physical illness and the moral/spiritual component of them? What kind of practitioners do you use in what contexts?
Wool and Linen