Ethics in Unexpected Places
Photo: www.canadashistory.ca
Parashat Ki Tetse, Deuteronomy 21:10–25:19
Matt Absolon, Beth T’filah, Miramar, FL
When you go out to war against your enemies, and the Lord your God gives them into your hand and you take them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her to be your wife, and you bring her home to your house, she shall shave her head and pare her nails. And she shall take off the clothes in which she was captured and shall remain in your house and lament her father and her mother a full month. After that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. But if you no longer delight in her, you shall let her go where she wants. But you shall not sell her for money, nor shall you treat her as a slave, since you have humiliated her. (Deuteronomy 21:10–14)
This week’s portion opens with a legal code regarding the treatment of prisoners of war that can seem remote from life today, until we set it against the catalogue of wartime horrors compiled over the past century. Read against that record, the distance collapses.
To students of war, we recognize that sexual violence against women is not an unfortunate byproduct of war, but a deliberate tactic perpetuated against civilian populations for the purposes of terror and subjugation. Imperial Japan’s atrocities in China, Nazi Germany’s tyranny of Europe, Russian conduct in Ukraine, and October 7 2023, stand as recent entries in a far longer list. In the light of contemporary and historical record, the awful truth is that this conduct is not an aberration from the norms of warfare . . . it is the norm. What is unusual, historically, is restraint. Torah’s ethic stands in stark relief against that.
First, Torah assigns the captive intrinsic worth. She is not chattel, to be used and discarded at the whim of the conqueror. The Torah does not suspend human dignity upon the defeated, nor does it suspend accountability upon the victor. Instead, it reinforces human dignity towards the captive and it demands personal accountability from the victor.
Second, the Torah requires empathy toward the enemy, allotting a full month for the captive woman to mourn her parents before any claim may be foisted upon her. The law refuses to let the victor reduce “the other” to an object, a restraint that is imposed on the conqueror precisely at the height of his power.
Third, the ritual itself interrogates the victor’s desire. Having the captive shave her head, pare her nails, and remove the garments in which she was captured strips away every external mark of allure. The implication is pointed: the desire that prompted this taking is itself suspect, and the Torah responds by imposing a month-long delay before that desire may be acted upon.
Fourth, the passage concludes by protecting her long-term status: “If you no longer delight in her, you shall let her go where she wants . . . you shall not treat her as a slave, since you have humiliated her.”
Having married her, the man may not humiliate her at will; she may be released, but never sold or enslaved. The sages, for their part, were very vocal regarding this passage, which became known as the law of “yefat toar” (lit. “beautiful of form”). Ibn Ezra charges the victor with acting in deception should he divorce her and Ramban goes further still, holding that the victor is liable to lashes should he violate any of her legal rights as a lawful Jewish wife (Kiddushin 21b).
We see some important ethical teachings in this passage:
Torah extends human dignity to all people, including our enemies, and requires us to do likewise.
Torah permits warfare, if necessary, but demands moral restraint in its execution.
Victory is never a license to unfetter our morality.
Permission is not endorsement: where Torah makes allowances for a base motive, it hedges that allowance with safeguards.
This remains painfully relevant as we grapple with the stories that continue to emerge post-October 7, along with the rising litany of war crimes perpetrated against Ukrainian woman and sub-Saharan African woman alike. It marks a clear ethical line between us and our enemies, past and present: we hold human dignity as non-negotiable even in war’s darkest moments.
A second reading in this week’s passage is that of the rebellious son.
If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives. (Deuteronomy 21:18–19)
In most cultures of the ancient world, a father’s absolute right over the life of his child was simply the legal norm. Rome codified this most starkly in “Patria Potestas” (lit. the power of the father). While patricide was punished with extraordinary cruelty, filicide remained a father’s legal prerogative for most of Rome’s history. The doctrine flowed directly from Roman theology: a pantheon whose gods wielded capricious, unaccountable power over their children and subjects.
Rome was far from alone in its legal code of filicide; comparable paternal authority over a child’s life, marriage, and sale into slavery appears across Babylon, Assyria, the Hittites, classical India, imperial China, the Germanic tribes, ancient Kievan-Rus, and the Aztec world just to name a few. In each case, family law mirrors the theology underpinning the culture; gods who exercised absolute tyranny upon their subjects. Most painfully, our own forefathers were not immune to this horror when we turned to the Canaanite deities, with some of our kings killing their sons as offerings to the gods (2 Kings 16:3; 21:6).
But the Lord our God is different. “Out of all the peoples on the face of the earth, the Lord has chosen you to be his treasured possession (segulah)” (Deuteronomy 14:2; cf. Leviticus 25:55). Torah’s consistent claim is that every Israelite belongs to God as his treasure, not to any human master, and not even to his own parents. We are sons and daughters of the Most High.
This week’s passage lives out that claim. It denies parents of the power of life and death over their children and hands that responsibility to the elders, the very officers the Torah established in last week’s portion, charged to pursue justice, and justice alone. No father’s wounded pride or fractured ego, however severe, ever authorizes him to harm his own child; because the child is the Lord’s treasured possession, his segulah.
The limitation of paternal power is one of the more important, but often overlooked, contrasts between the Torah and the legal code of the nations surrounding Israel. It is a contrast worth naming, especially as we in the modern West still live, largely unaware, inside its long inheritance.
We Messianic Jews do well not to take that inheritance for granted. Where the western world now assumes many of these ethics as simple “status quo,” or as enshrined by law as a human right, it fell to Torah to first establish these rights. However, as recent world events have reminded us, the work of spreading the light of the Torah is never complete, and it falls to us to keep shining that light into a world full of darkness.
Shabbat shalom!