Our youngest child also turned two this past week. We celebrated with an Elephant and Piggie theme, as she has somewhat of a cult following to the Mo Willems series. It’s impossible that she’s only been with us for two years, it feels like she’s always been part of our family, like she’s been with us, here, the whole time. We held a family Shabbat dinner with a grilled peach & feta salad for eleven, with a massive 2-layer 8″ chocolate cake for dessert. We spent the morning at The Magic House, and it was a great celebration.
A huge takeaway for me, as we slowly wrap up this project, is that there are so many rules and laws that God is begging us to follow, rules that show us how to act compassionately, justly, and morally. The do’s and also the don’t’s to live a moral and just life. A life filled with order and purpose. That’s mainly what struck me when we opened up Ki Teitzei — laws on capturing a woman during wartime, dividing up your property to your sons, even if your firstborn son is from the wife you don’t love, dealing with disloyal and defiant children (don’t murder them, Lindsay Clancy!), and even, burying a corpse that was put to death for capital offense. No other culture or society or religion has us act in such a civilized way. The Torah was revolutionary at the time, and I find it so frustrating that we’ve let so much of it go.
And then, as we open chapter 22, it teaches us how to handle less serious situations, though situations that occur quite often in our physical world. Such as rules and laws about seeing your fellows animal going astray, how you must not remain indifferent. Because I believe we need both. We need to know how to treat people on a fundamental level, but also on a day to day level, how to treat people well. It’s one thing to abstain from murder and stealing, but are you also capable of being a thoughtful and considerate person to your fellow neighbor? If you see his sheep or ox outside his property, are you kind enough to go retrieve it for him? A civilized society isn’t merely one where people refrain from committing atrocities. It’s one where people actively practice consideration. We all want this. Yet, how many of us are actually willing to take responsibility for things that technically isn’t our problem?
And then we get into something that always intrigues me when I come across it in scripture, where God proclaims something as abhorrent: a woman must not put on man’s apparel, nor shall a man wear woman’s clothing; for whoever does these things is abhorrent to the Lord your God 22:5
The Torah is fundamentally rooted into distinctions, as Dennis Prager notes:
- God and man
- God and nature
- Man and animal
- Good and evil
- Life and death
- Parent and child
- Holy and profane
- Male and female
The natural state of the world is chaos, the divine state of the world is ordered, and order means distinctions. Whenever distinctions are obliterated, chaos ensues. So going back to 22:5, men dressing like women, and women dressing like men. Many rabbis attribute this to cross-dressing for the purpose of gaining access to private spaces. Anyone with a brain would understand why it’s best to keep locker rooms and restrooms single sex, however, we’ve blurred those lines, once again. I’m going to ask this once more, because I think it’s worth asking: as a Western society, in a country founded with Christian values, what are we doing? I can’t help but wonder at the rapid downfall of our society under the guise of ‘progress.’
Ki Teitzei is a grab-bag of laws, none more important than the other, but all laws that when society abides by, the result is a good, moral, just place to co-exist in. It’s a place where I want to live. I’ll leave you with a few questions to ponder this week: What happens when a culture stops believing that distinctions matter? What happens when we abandon the idea that there is a divinely—or morally—ordered way to live? And what do we lose when “progress” becomes synonymous with erasing every boundary?