Boulder Aish Kodesh

Parshat Kit Tetze deals with, in order: war, a female captive of war (possibly raped on the battlefield), a wife who is hated, a rebellious child, the corpse of a person, sentenced to death, hung naked from a tree, a lost animal, an over-burdened animal, the prohibition of men wearing women’s clothing, and v.v. After a short excursion into kinder, gentler laws such as the commandment to chase away a mother bird before taking her young, the injunction to build a fence around one’s roof so that no one will fall, and the prohibition against mixing certain crops, mixing certain animals in the yolk, and mixing certain materials in a garment, we re-enter an ugly world: a man who hates his new bride and therefore accuses her of not being a virgin, a bride who turns out not to have been a virgin (she is killed by stoning in front of her father’s house), an adulterous man and woman, a woman raped (or seduced) in a city, a woman raped in a field, a man who seduces an available woman (and then must marry her), the prohibition against marrying one’s father’s wife, and the prohibition against a eunuch, a bastard, a Moabite and an Ammonite becoming Jewish.

After a short respite to assure us that An Edomite and Egyptian may join after three generations, we are right back into the grind: the injunction that one who has had a seminal emission must leave the warring army’s camp, the commandment to dig a whole in which to move one’s bowels when one is at war, the laws concerning a runaway slave, the prohibition against allowing male or female prostitutes to live among Israel, the prohibition against using money raised by prostitution or selling dogs as an offering to the Temple, and the prohibition against charging interest. The Parsha continues in this fashion, and ends with the commandment to remember Amalek.

This Parsha certainly deals with some of the most uncomfortable issues in the human experience: rape, hatred, divorce, death, bias, chaotic family situations, cheating, bowel movements, etc. The Torah, it seems, has, in Rebbe Nachman’s words, ‘gone down into the mud.’ But like Rebbe Nachman continued, ‘sometimes you have to go down into the mud to drag somebody out.’

If the Parsha did not deal with these issues, it would not be the Torah. It would be a collection of stories and homilies, and not the Tree of Life. For Life, after all, gets messy. And even when it gets messy, we need a guide book to help us deal with it.

The Torah is not wont to legislate emotions. There is, for example, no commandment to love one’s parents – only to respect and fear them. And the Rabbis were actually kind enough to tell us exactly how to respect them: bring them a drink, stand when they come in their room, don’t call them by their first name, don’t contradict them in public. And these are hard enough. But if the Torah were to say, ‘Thou shall not hate thy wife’ or ‘Thou shall not rebel against thy parents’ then we would have people feeling these emotions anyway, and also feeling like G-d and the Torah cannot help them with those feelings.

The Torah honors the fact that these emotions, ugly as they may be, are a genuine expression of the human experience. Then we are offered a sense of direction from that dark place.

Rebbe Nachman in Likutei Moharan I:6 writes that our goal is to be in a constant state of teshuva – return to G-d. Since there is always a deeper level of closeness to G-d, we must be in a constant state of movement toward that elusive goal. That process, says Rebbe Nachman, is marked by two different kinds of time – those times when one’s next step is clear and one need only move forward, and those times when the process is marked by disintegration of one’s current self in order to be able to move forward. Each type of time calls for a distinct set of attitudes and postures – almost opposite in nature. Both types of time, however, are characterized by a sense of moving toward G-d; put another way, each has its own capacity to distract the seeker from the ultimate goal – closeness to G-d – and therefore they have ‘focus on the ultimate goal’ as a common ground between them.

To describe these two states as they work together to comprise the process of teshuva, Rebbe Nachman brings a verse from Psalm 139: ‘If I go up to heaven, there you are; and if I lay my bed in hell, here you are.’ G-d is to be found in both the highest heights and the deepest depths. But the way G-d is found there is different: in heaven, G-d is ‘there’. In hell, G-d is ‘here’.

Our Parsha is hell – war, hatred, family dysfunction, divorce, rape, and incest. And it is essential to know and to believe that, despite the fact that one has descended to such places of suffering, G-d is there. And the connection to G-d is path toward light.

Though the Torah does not offer solace per se in these unfortunate eventualities, it does offer direction. There is mitzvah, even there. One cannot claim that the relationship to G-d does not extend to hatred and war; this might lead one to continue one’s descent. One must realize that there is still mitzvah, still relationship to the ultimate goal, even in these dark places.

And so the laws are explained: if a man should have a wife that he hates and a wife that he loves, and the hate done bore him his first-born son, then that son is the inheritor of the portion of the first-born, though he would rather bestow that portion upon the child of the beloved wife. And though a man be sentenced to death and hung from a tree, the body shall be taken down and buried, for to leave the body up would be a disgrace. And though one is at war, one must bury one’s waste, and one who is impure cannot enter the camp. It is a Parsha of maintaining standards despite the large dose of chaos and animalistic behavior flooding a situation.

We must always know that, no matter where we have descended to, there is no giving up. Every situation is along the road toward G-d. Every situation can be a point of departure for that journey.