Ki Teitze: d'var torah

[cellio]

This is (approximately) the d'var torah I gave on yesterday's portion:

Parshat Ki Teitze contains a large number of laws, and the sixth aliyah gives us a miscellaneous collection: a newlywed is exempt from military service for a year; don't take a millstone in pawn; kidnapping is a capital crime; be careful in dealing with leprosy; and rules about how to handle a man's pledge for a debt. Or, maybe they're not as miscellaneous as they might seem.

At some level all of these deal with taking things that are off-limits. The reason the torah gives here for exempting a man from the military is that he owes his wife a year of pleasure. Her needs trump the army's needs -- pretty revolutionary. From this we move to taking items in pawn. A man might be destitute enough to be forced to pawn belongings, but you are not allowed to take the tools he needs to sustain his life -- the millstone that grinds his flour for bread. Then follows kidnapping, possibly the most obvious transgression of the group: pressing a man into servitude or selling him steals his liberty and is dealt with harshly. (There are specific rules by which people can legitimately lose their liberty, but this is not one of them.)

Tzara'at ("leprosy") seems out of place in this list, but the passage gives us the connection: remember what happened to Miriam, who spoke lashon hara about Moshe and thus stole his reputation. And, finally, when you take a pledge for a debt -- which is permitted -- you cannot take it in a way that steals the dignity of the debtor. You don't ransack his house and you don't take away his bed-clothes at night. You handle his debt in a way that still allows him to bless you.

These passages are all about taking things, and specifically about taking things that can't be restored. You can compensate someone for stolen goods, but how do you compensate for stolen liberty, reputation, dignity, marital bliss, or life? You can't. Once you've committed the transgression, the harm is done.

How does this interact with the season we are now in? The high-holy-day liturgy makes clear that God pardons us for our sins only after we have made amends; what happens when we can't make amends? I'm used to thinking of murder as the canonical case here. This sin is theoretical and far away for most of us; I expect everyone in this room to get through life without committing that sin. So since I'm not a murderer, I don't tend to spend time thinking about unforgivable sins when I'm taking personal inventory every Elul.

Well, maybe I should -- as the portion points out, there are lots of ways to do irreparable harm to others, and some of them are not obvious. I haven't murdered, but I'm sure I've done some things that are like those on the parsha's list here, especially if we understand these sins broadly. The torah makes it clear that God takes these types of transgressions seriously; maybe we should too.

There are several conditions for teshuvah, returning from sin. One of them is that you don't repeat the bad behavior when put in a similar situation. Even if I can't make amends by restoring dignity or reputation or others that I've taken in the past, I can pay more attention and try not to do it again. Maybe if I get that right God will forgive me for the past anyway. May this be God's will.

Comments

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

This looks a lot easier than basing d'var torah on the first aliya of this portion. I read the translation at my nephew's bar mitzvah and my jaw dropped. SO out of my ability to understand.

[cellio]

Yeah, that's pretty challenging stuff -- glad I didn't have to talk about it! :-) (My congregation reads on a seven-year cycle; this year we're doing the sixth aliya of each portion.)

I try to always talk about the portion I read, even if it's just a jumping-off point to something else, but it's also fair game to talk about some other part of the parsha, or something seasonal (proximate holiday or the like). Different people in our group handle this differently.