Posts Tagged 'Ki Tetzei'

Teens and Ki Tetzei: Emi’s Birthday

Published September 9, 2022 5.06 Ki Tetzei Leave a Comment
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Today in the 13th of Elul. It is the Hebrew birthday of our daughter Emunah. Today she is 13 years old. I marvel to see the teenager standing in front of our eyes. We were particularly moved to see how much she changed after 2 months at camp this summer. She has already proven herself to be a nurturing big sister to Libi. This past summer gave her special one-on-one time with Yadid. It was great seeing her deepen her connection with her big brother before he went to Israel for the year. Emunah is curious, caring, loving, and resilient.  Here is a picture of her from when our little angel was just one:

Her birthday marks my writing this blog for 13 years. I take pause today to think ahead to what the next stage of parenting Emunah will look like for us.

In thinking about this rethought about Ki Tetzei , this week’s Torah portion. There we read:

If, along the road, you chance upon a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs and the mother sitting over the fledglings or on the eggs, do not take the mother together with her young. Let the mother go, and take only the young, in order that you may fare well and have a long life. When you build a new house, make a fence around your roof so that you may not bring the guilt of bloodshed on your house if someone falls from the roof.

Deuteronomy 22:6-8

First there is a law about sending away the mother bird from her nest before taking her eggs. Then we are mandated to build a fence around the roof of our houses. This juxtaposition brings interesting things to light. We see the mother bird defending her nest and then we are instructed to be like the bird and make a safer nest on our roofs to defend our young.

Once we make that connection and empathize with the mother bird, we are left asking ourselves a number of questions: How could we ever be that cruel to take the egg or young from the mother bird in the first place? What does it mean for us as parents toward our children? Are we the aggressor who is taking the eggs or the builder of fences there to protect our child? Are we the problem or the solution for our children’s development?

When Emunah was little it made sense for us to protect her in our nest/home. Amidst pandemics, climate catastrophes, War in Ukraine, and so many other things going on we have to question if we could ever build a big enough fence to protect her from the world. As we emerge from the social isolation and confront the MESSH ramifications of snowplow parenting intensified by COVID, I have to question the merit of trying to shield our children from reality. Now that Emunah is getting older and no longer a fledgling and she will experiment with leaving the nest more. As she enters into her teen years she will thirst independence, autonomy, and agency. I recall the dictum that we should prepare the child for the way and not the way for the child.

While she might be at the age of majority in Jewish law, she is far from being an adult. While my days as a builder of fences for her may be limited, I still have a mandate to make sure that she is a force for good in the world. If she is not part of the solution of removing cruelty from the world she will be part of the problem. There is still a lot to be learned from the Torah’s commandment to cultivate empathy. Even in the mundane act of how we treat a bird along the way we learn how we best treat each other with kindness.

Happy Birthday Emunah. Thank you Adina for bringing this miracle into the world and partnering in parenting her. We will do what we can to raise our little birdy and help her take flight. 

Other messages on our Emunah over the years:

  1. Dear Child to Me: On Emunah and this Blog
  2. Little Birdy: Emunah and Protecting Our Children
  3. 7 Years of Emunah: Reflections on Faith and Fidelity
  4. Emunah Second Birthday
  5. Our Type of Emunah
  6. Our Blessing for Emunah
  7. Fearless: On Emunah’s Bat Mitvah and being a Nazir
  8. Blessing of Emunah: Reflections of Faith, Fidelity, & Trust for Emunah’s Bat Mitzvah
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When We ‘Go Out’: Reflecting on Afghanistan

Published August 20, 2021 1.07 VaYetzei , 5.06 Ki Tetzei Leave a Comment
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In Ki Tetzei, this week’s Torah portion, we look at what happens when we go out to war. There we read, ” Ki Tetzei -When you go out to war against your enemies and the Lord your God delivers them into your hands and you take captives.” (Deuteronomy 21:10) Inevitably one things to another and more bad things come to pass. In the Midrash we see:

“When you go out to war [against your enemies, and the Lord your God gives them into your hand and you take them captive].”(Deut. 21:10:) Our masters have taught , “[One] good deed/commandment brings about [another] good deed/commandment, and [one] transgression brings about [another] transgression.” (Avot 4:2) “And when you see among the captives a woman of pretty form [whom you desire to take for a wife. And you shall bring her into your house,] where she shall shave her head and do her nails,”(Deut. 21:11-12:) so that she will not find favor in his eyes…

Midrash Tanchuma, Ki Teitzei 1:1

This midrash explains the flow of the Torah portion. Going to war leads to taking a war captive as a wife. This in turn leads to a man having two wives, one loved more than the other, which leads to having “a defiant and rebellious son.” Just a good deed leads to another good deed a bad deed leads to more bad things happening. Nothing good will come from going to war.

This language of Ki Tetzei – going out got me thinking about the similar language we see at the start of Vayetze, when Yaakov went out. There we read, ” Yaakov left Beer-Sheva, and set out for Haran.” ( Genesis 28:10). On this Rashi opines:

AND YAAKOV WENT OUT—It need have written simply “And Yaakov went to Haran’’; why then does it mention his departure from Beersheba? But it intends to tell us that the departure of a righteous person from his city makes an impression. As long as a righteous man is in his city he is its glory and splendor and beauty; when he leaves it, there depart also its glory, its splendor and its beauty. This, too, is the meaning of (Ruth 1:7) “And she went forth out of the place”, stated in reference to Naomi and Ruth (Genesis Rabbah 68:6).

Rashi on Genesis 28:10

I was thinking about this recently with American’s ‘going out’ of Afghanistan.

US exit from Afghanistan - The Frontier Post

Everyone is quick to criticize Biden for leaving Afghanistan at all or for leaving too quickly. Both are interesting in this context as it paints the United States with a false sense of righteousness. It is as if Kabul like Beer-Sheva is hurting because Yaakov left her.

I was thinking about this when reading a great piece written by my old friend Daniel Silverberg recently in the Atlantic. There he writes:

Biden faced a set of bad options. He ultimately made the difficult but necessary choice to preserve American lives. That decision will have devastating consequences for Afghanistan, and we will learn more in the coming days regarding how the administration might have executed its plans better. But as I saw for myself in 2017, and as many others had also observed, the government we supported never truly controlled the country it governed. Biden did not decide to withdraw so much as he chose to acknowledge a long-festering reality, one accelerated by the previous administration’s withdrawal announcement.

The Atlantic

To be clear there are horrible things happening in Afghanistan that should not be happening. Regardless of why we are in this situation we must do our part to help people currently in pain. And I am not sure anyone really knows why we ‘went out’ for this war in the first place. As see see in our Torah portion, bad deeds lead to more bad deeds. War is horrible and will only lead to more bad things. I am sure in the weeks and months to follow people will explore how this exit was mismanaged. For this Biden’s administration is responsible. But we should not pretend that we are so righteous in being there in the first place. It is hard to place the blame for that on the Biden administration. Many others are responsibility for our ‘going out’ to this war 20 years ago.

Stubborn and Rebellious Son: The Fear of Fascism

Published August 28, 2020 5.06 Ki Tetzei , Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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In Ki Tetzei, this week’s Torah portion, we read about the strange case of the Stubborn and Rebellious Son. There we read:

18 If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, that will not hearken to the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and though they chasten him, will not hearken unto them; 19 then his father and his mother shall lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; 20 and they shall say unto the elders of his city: ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he does not hearken to our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard.’ 21 And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die; so you shall put away the evil from your midst; and all Israel shall hear, and fear. (Deutoronomy 21:18-21)

There are many peculiar elements of this case. One aspect that stands out if the extra language around the voice of the father and the the voice of the mother. What is the significance of their voices?

On this topic the Talmud comments. There we read:

Rabbi Yehudah said: If his mother is not like his father in voice, appearance and stature, he does not become a rebellious son. Why so? — The Torah said, he will not obey our voice, and since they must be alike in voice, they must be also in appearance and stature. With whom does the following Baraisa agree: There never has been a ‘stubborn and rebellious son’,  and never will be. Why then was the law written? That you may study it and receive reward… Rabbi Yonatan said: ‘I saw him and sat on his grave’. (Sanhedrin 71a)

This seems to be the tipping point of their imagination of case ever being a real case. But, why is the unification of their voices the straw that broke the camel’s back?

In some ways this singular voice resonates with the story of the Tower of Babel. There we read:

Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there.They said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and burn them hard.”—Brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as mortar.— And they said, “Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.” ( Genesis 11:1-4)

Pieter Bruegel the Elder - The Tower of Babel (Vienna) - Google Art Project.jpg

They all had the same language and for this their tower was toppled? Like the Stubborn and Rebellious Son they are judged on their ends. Both stories show the Torah’s fear of fascism. The diversity of humanity is the source of our richness. If we silence people and demand a uniformity of voices we are doomed. We need to stand watch at this critical moment in history to safeguard our democracy from falling like a Tower and our education system creating stubborn and rebellious children.

7 Years of Emunah: Reflections on Faith and Fidelity

Published September 16, 2016 5.06 Ki Tetzei 3 Comments
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While her secular birthday was on September 2nd, Emunah’s Hebrew birthday is today. It is crazy to realize that today she is 7 years old. It is also crazy for me to pause to recognize that I have been writing this blog for 7 years. This blog started with her birth and I has grown along with her for the years. Every year around this time I reflect on Emunah, the name, person, and concept. I feel blessed to have them Emunah in my life.

As I have quoted before Martin Buber writes:

This ‘existential’ characteristic of Emunah is not sufficiently expressed in the translation ‘faith’, although the verb often does mean to believe (to believe someone, to believe a thing). It must further be noticed that the conception includes the two aspects of a reciprocity of permanence: the active, ‘fidelity’, and the receptive, ’trust’. If we wish to do justice to the intention of the spirit of the language which is so expressed, then we ought not to understand ’trust’ merely in a psychical sense, as we do not with ’fidelity’. The soul is as fundamentally concerned in the one as in the other, but is decisive for both that the disposition of the soul should become an attitude of life. Both, fidelity and trust, exist in the actual realm of relationship between two persons. Only in the full actuality of such a relationship can one be both loyal and trusting. (Two Types of Faith 28-29)

This year I take pause to thing about what it might mean to falter in one’s Emunah. The paradigm of this in the Talmud is the life of Elisha ben Abuyah a rabbi born in Jerusalem sometime before 70 CE who adopted a worldview considered heretical by his community. So why did he lose his Emunah? We learn in the Talmud:

‘How did this happen to him? He [Elisha] once saw a man climb to the top of a palm-tree on the Sabbath, take the mother-bird with the young, and descend in safety. At the termination of the Sabbath he saw a man climb to the top of a palm-tree and take the young but let the mother bird go free, and as he descended a snake bit him and he died. Elisha exclaimed, ‘It is written, “Send away the mother bird, but the young you may take for yourself; that it may be well with you, and that you may prolong your days (Deuteronomy 22:7).” Where is the well-being of this man, and where is the prolonging of his days!’ He was unaware how Rabbi Akiva explained it, ‘That it may be well with you in the World [to Come] which is wholly good,’ And that you may prolong your days’ in the world which is unending. ( Hagigah 15b)

The Talmud depicts that Elisha lost his faith when he saw injustice in the world. As we see in Ki Tetzei, this week’s Torah portion, there is supposed to be a reward of life for sending away the mother bird before taking her eggs. In comparison Rabbi Akiva kept his faith because of his belief in a world to come where the perceived God’s injustice would be made right. In either of their cases it is about having or not having faith or belief. What about Buber’s idea of having fidelity and relationship?

It is said, “Mr Goldfarb goes to synagogue to be in relationship with God. I go to synagogue to be in relationship with Mr. Goldfarb”. It is interesting the Talmud does not say that Elisa did not believe Rabbi Akiva, but that he was unaware of his teaching. Is the assumption that if he was aware Elisha would have believed Rabbi Akiva? Maybe if Elisha was aware of Rabbi Akiva’s teaching he would have known that the system works for someone in his community and he would have stayed in relationship with Rabbi Akiva and his community.

Seven years later while Emunah my daughter might be a struggle times, my relationship with her is steadfast and unshakable, even if my relationship with faith is often a still struggle. Regardless I am still in dynamic relationship with my Emunah and look forward its development for many years to come.

 

 

What About the T? – Ki Tzetzei and Transgender

Published August 28, 2015 5.06 Ki Tetzei Leave a Comment
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It is great to see some more positive conversation regarding including LGBT members of our community. It is curious to me how the “T” sort of slips in there as if it were the same at the LGB, but at the same time ignored. Who we are attracted to is very different then how we want to present ourselves. Transgender people experience a mismatch between their gender identity or gender expression and their assigned sex. So, what about the T? How does our community deal with transgender members?

In Ki Tetzei, this week’s Torah portion, we read about the prohibition of transgender dressing. There we read:

A man’s attire shall not be on a woman, nor may a man wear a woman’s garment, because whoever does these is an abomination to God, your God. ( Deuteronomy 22:5)

Between the use of the word “abomination” and testing the limits of heteronormative lifestyle I understand why so many people for or against transgender people lump them all together. But still the Torah it seems like a different issue.

According to Rashi on the verse, cross-dressing can lead to promiscuous behavior. Wearing the clothes of a woman would enable a man to mingle inappropriately among women, and vice versa. Alternatively Maimonides argued that some of the ancient pagan rituals involved cross-dressing and that we must therefore distance ourselves from this type of behavior. ( Guide III :37). Beyond the presumptions of the person having lascivious or idolatrous motivations, I wanted to suggest another from the start of this week’s Torah portion. There we read:

When you go out to battle against your enemies, and the Lord your God delivers them into your hands, and you carry away captives, and you see among the captives a woman of goodly form, and you have a desire for her, and would take her as a wife; then you shall bring her home to your house; and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails.( Deuteronomy 21:10-12)

We see here that the practice would be to strip the captive women of the outward appearances of gender to determine his attraction to her. Is it possible that the prohibition for cross-dressing was limited to dealing with the military strategy?

Gender is such a fundamental aspect of what makes us who we are. In my experience of transgender members of our communities their motivation is neither lascivious, idolatrous, and certainly not a military strategu. Their need comes from a profound drive for self-expression. Given the profound amount of violence perpetrated against transgender people I think we need to reconsider how we talk about gender roles in our community and not just sexual orientation.  While we maintain our commitment to tzinuit, modesty, devotion to God, and of course maintaining the peace, how might we make more room for the “T”?

One Leg at a Time

Published September 9, 2011 5.06 Ki Tetzei Leave a Comment
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Our five-year-old Yishama started Kindergarten this week. We were very excited for him to go to the Carmel Academy. His brother Yadid loves the school. While Yishama’s experience has been amazing so far, I did not prepare myself for Yishama’s issues around this transition. Yesterday Yishama got into a bit of fight on the bus.

At the end of Ki Tetzei, this week’s Torah portion, we read:

Remember what Amalek did to you, on the way when you were leaving Egypt, that he happened upon you on the way, and he stuck those of you who were in the rear, all the weaklings at your rear, when you were faint and exhausted, and he did not fear God. ” ( Deuteronomy 25:17-18).

We are commanded to remember what someone did to us while we were in transition from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the land of Israel. It is obvious that transitions are always hard. It is in this time that we are the most vulnerable, but it also during this period that we can grow the most.

As we are making our way into the next phase of our lives, we should not take these transitions for granted. This is a time to remember. We are all pushed to next stage of our unfolding success. As an adult I pause to realize that I have spent the better part of my life putting my best face forward to succeed. When have I taken the time to deeply explore  my failures?

As a parent I want my children to have success.  I cannot just focus on what drives them forward. I need to also empower myself and my children to connect to the weaker parts, those parts of ourselves that might push to the rear. If we do not deal with them in a time of safety, someone else might exploit them later. As much as Yishama might have been a bully on the bus, it was out of weakness. While we might have punished him for his behavior, he needed to be supported to deal with it. This morning Yishama took responsibility for his actions and  made up with the other child.  And yes they hugged. I am confident that this was a huge growing experience for him. Now we just need to deal with Yishama’s difficulty in getting dressed in the morning. I think Yishama might still turn out alright, I just need to give him more time to pick out his pants. We do not want to get left behind and miss the bus.

 

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