SHOFTIM

Shoftim, Judges (16:18-21:9) is a parsha that contains both a reiteration of some common themes of Devarim and introduces a few new legal principles. It also contains the famous line “Tzekek, Tzedek, Tirdof—Justice, justice you shall pursue”, and the famous law of Bal Tashchit, the prohibition against cutting down fruit trees when you are conducting a siege.

The themes that are reiterated here include the following:

No asherahs, or other practices of Israelite folk religion (16:21
No damaged animals for sacrifices (17:1)
Stone Israelites who serves other Gods (17:2-5)
No child sacrifices (18:10)
Refugee cities (19:2)
Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth (19:23)

There are also some legal innovations. For instance, the parsha repeats twice that you need 2 witnesses to convict someone (17:6 and 19:15)) and insists that the king is not above the law. (17:18-20) Further, there’s a change in who should be the judges. In Exodus when Yithro visited Moses, he pushed appointing clan elders as judges. Here there’s no mention of clans or tribes, but our text just insists that judges be appointed who should not take bribes (16:18-19). Lastly there are the laws about the siege of a city, discussed below.

I want to discuss four themes.

The pursuit of justice from an earth based perspective
The move in religious specialists from a variety of folk practitioners to a certain kind of prophet
Bal Tashchit
Purification of the land and the ritual testing of elders with the blood of a heifer

Tzedek, Tzedek Tirdof (16:20), “Justice, justice, you shall pursue” is a famous line from this parsha. It’s a clarion call about the importance of justice in our affairs. The Hebrew is in imperative form and the repetition of Tzedek adds emphasis. It is a much discussed phrase. I have nothing to add about the importance of the pursuit of pursuing intraspecies justice. Of course we should.

The questions I want to raise about justice concern the status of the more than human world in terms of justice. What kind of standing does the more than human world have? Does all of the more than human world have the same standing? These aren’t simple questions. For instance do mammals who are more like us than say rocks of microflora have more standing than less complex ones? This is actually a view advocated by some which is rejected by Val Plumwood, may be her memory be for a blessing.

Do keystone species have more standing than invasive ones? Keystone species are species that have “a disproportionately large effect on its natural environment relative to its abundance. The concept was introduced in 1969 by the zoologist Robert T. Paine. Keystone species play a critical role in maintaining the structure of an ecological community, affecting many other organisms in an ecosystem and helping to determine the types and numbers of various other species in the community. Without keystone species, the ecosystem would be dramatically different or cease to exist altogether. (Wikipedia). By definition keystone species are more important than non keystone ones. Does that give them more moral standing?

It might be obvious what justice looks like for species whose ecosystems are under attack. Leave more old growth forest for spotted owls, for instance. But what would justice look like for rocks? What about species that are under threat from the effects of globalization such as Ash or the American chestnut of days past or the lodgepole pines of British Columbia that are being killed by the mountain pine beetle who is no longer being killed by cold winters.

On the other hand, what about the species who have benefitted from human intervention? There are a number of species who are far more prevalent than they would be without human partnership. Corn, cows, tulips, pigs, dogs, cats and the deer who believe that the subdivision I live in is a slice of heaven? What does justice look like for them?

There’s a wonderful utopian novel by Starhawk called The Fifth Sacred Thing. The government of the Bay area of Northern California works in a consensus oriented process and whenever there is an assembly, there are humans tasked with representing three or four core species, if I recall correctly.

I’m not suggesting I have answers here. Right now in the great majority of human jurisprudence, the beings with whom we share the planet aren’t part of the calculus. But if we are to pursue justice, it can’t be for just us.

What kind of standing does the more than human world have? Do beings like us have more standing than beings to whom we have more trouble relating? What about keystone species compared non keystone ones ones? What would justice look like for, for rocks? What about the species who have benefitted from human intervention?

“There shall not be found among you…one who practices enchantment, a soothsayer or a diviner or a sorcerer or one who casts spells or who asks of a ghost or of a spirit of an acquaintance or inquires of the dead because everyone who does these is an offensive thing of YHVH.” (18:10-12.) Instead, “YHVH your God, will raise up for you a prophet from among you….You shall listen to him…I’ll put my words in his mouth and he’ll speak to them [the Israelites] everything that I will command him.” (18:15-18)

This is a clear demand that the prophets of YHVH will replace the various religious specialists that are characteristic of indigenous religion. Our text is not denying the efficacy of these practices. Instead, it is banning them because it can’t control them, the way it can control prophecy that has to accord with a certain vision of YHVH. Further, while we have examples of both male and female practitioners of indigenous practices (think Honi and the “witch” of Endor as examples), the prophets of YHVH are almost exclusively male. So it is hard for me not to read this as part of the patriarchal project.

We do not know the difference between all these terms. The text gives us 8, eight, kinds of practitioners. It’s really hard to reclaim this part of our tradition because we simply don’t know very much about what these different practitioners did or how they did it. I think at a minimum it came from a deep connection to the world beyond the human one along with some serious training. I think the challenge for us is to find ways to access what they accessed in a way that makes sense to us as 21st Century Humans.

How do you relate to this panoply of indigenous religious practitioners? How do you imagine they became practitioners and what did they need to learn? How and what might we reclaim of this lost history?

Bal Tashchit is the law that you can’t destroy fruit bearing trees when you are besieging a city. It is a core text in Jewish ecological thinking. “When you’ll besiege a city many days, fighting against it to capture it, you shall not destroy a tree of it, moving an axe at it, because you will eat from it, so you shall not cut it down; because is a tree of the field a human, to go from in front of you in a siege? Only a tree that you’ll know that it isn’t a tree for eating, that one you may destroy and cut down so you may build a siegework.” (20:19-20)

There’s an important recognition of the differing abilities of trees and humans—a tree can’t flee from a war zone unlike a human. As the text says, “Is a tree of the field a human, to go in front of you in a siege?” If we are going to treat non human beings as beings with legitimate claims of justice upon us, we have to recognize the differences amongst beings. These verses do that.

On the other hand, the perspective is all human. The distinction amongst the trees that is made is between trees from which humans can eat, and trees from which humans cannot eat. There’s no discussion of the life supported by a tree that does not bear food for humans; those (more than human) lives are completely discounted.

It is worth noting that this text has not prevented Jewish settlers in the West Bank from destroying Palestinian olive orchards, even as Jewish allies of Palestinians cite it as a commandment to side with the Palestinians. The legal justification here, from what I have read, is that these olive orchards aren’t part of a city under siege, since cities only refer to places with walls surrounding them. As someone said in another context, there’s always a loophole. A plain reading of the text would forbid this too common practice.

Should something in the more than human world being useful to humans be the key criterion in determining its fate? How do we humans determine what is useful and what is not? Is there such a thing as a being that isn’t useful in some way? Are there legitimate human reasons for cutting down trees? Is war one of them? How do we give all trees a voice in whether they are cut down or not?

The ritual involving elders swearing over the blood of a heifer is an interesting attempt to solve the problem of cleansing the pollution of blood from the land when the murderer is unknown. The ritual is triggered by the discovery of a murdered person in a field outside of a city. If the murder can’t be solved, the elders of the nearest city take a heifer, that is a sexually immature cow, to a strongly flowing body of water and breaks the heifer’s neck in the body of water. This is not a kosher slaughter and the animal cannot be eaten. The elders wash their hands over the heifer but don’t touch it, because that would be transferring any culpability from the elders to the dead heifer and they aren’t culpable of the murder. This heifer is not a scapegoat. Then the elders swear that they had nothing to do with the murder nor do they know anything of what happened. Thus “and for them the blood will be atoned for” (21:8), the land purified and any kind of clan retribution will be avoided.

I think the logic here is that the water washes away the blood of the heifer and thus, by a process of transfer, washes clean the blood pollution of the land from the murdered body. The elders don’t touch it because they are not the guilty party. Water here is crucial to the process of purification, just as it is in a mikveh.

My speculation is that the slaughter is non kosher and the food is not eaten so that no one can benefit from the unsolved murder (it would be a benefit if the meat were eaten.) I don’t have any good ideas for why it has to be a heifer.

I raise this ritual because purification is such an important theme in indigenous spirituality. It is one that we don’t pay much attention to in our modern lives. Further, this purification usually is accomplished by tangible, sensory practices, not just words. We read this parsha right around the beginning of Elul, the month of repentance. If you are like me, you’ve always thought of repentance as something you do with words. But our ancestors are teaching us that purification and repentance needs to include tangible acts beyond words. I want to add that we are taught that true repentance has to include a commitment to stop sinning. So you can’t just pick up some trash by the side of the road, claim that you are now purified, and throw something out the car window the next day.

This ritual also teaches us that the land needs to be purified from human sins. I think we can safely expand this to the whole range of sins that we humans commit against the more than human world. I also want to add that contrary to some deep ecologists, I absolutely believe that humans are not inherently a cancer on the more than human world. I believe with all my heart that we can work together with the land in mutually beneficial ways.

Do you have a purification practice? What kinds of human activities pollute the land? How do we wash the land clean of the pollution caused by humans? Under what circumstances do you feel a need to purify yourself? How might we do this that includes something tangible?

QUESTIONS

What kind of standing does the more than human world have? Do beings like us have more standing than beings to whom we have more trouble relating? What about keystone species compared non keystone ones ones? What would justice look like for, for rocks? What about the species who have benefitted from human intervention?

How do you relate to this panoply of indigenous religious practitioners? How do you imagine they became practitioners and what did they need to learn? How and what might we reclaim of this lost history?

Should something in the more than human world being useful to humans be the key criterion in determining its fate? How do we humans determine what is useful and what is not? Is there such a thing as a being that isn’t useful in some way? Are there legitimate human reasons for cutting down trees? Is war one of them? How do we give all trees a voice in whether they are cut down or not?

Do you have a purification practice? What kinds of human activities pollute the land? How do we wash the land clean of the pollution caused by humans? Under what circumstances do you feel a need to purify yourself? How might we do this that includes something tangible?

KI TEITZEI

RE’EH