God Is in The Field (Not Only in The Temple)
D’var Torah for Ki Teitzei
By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman
September 7, 2022
Like a teacher who realizes that the term is about to end and there is yet so much more material to cover, so this week’s Torah portion (Ki Teitzei, “When you go out,” Deuteronomy 21:10—25:19) is crammed with commandments. 74 to be precise, more than any other portion in the Torah!
They cover a wide variety of topics: War, business, family matters, and even how to treat your animals. Justice, ethics, and dignity are the common thread that bind them all together. Some commandments reflect archaic attitudes; others pave the road toward to a new understanding of humanity and manifest the highest ideals.
The portion begins with a discussion of how to treat an attractive woman taken captive in war. We are forbidden from treating her with the violence that was (and tragically, still is) common practice in war, but rather to be respectful of her feelings and emotions. If her captor ultimately decides not to marry her—then he must let her go as a free woman. War of course is a portal to hell—not only in the suffering and destruction it causes, but also because it allows us to unleash our worst impulses. These verses in our Torah portion, appearing in the 8th century BCE, are therefore nothing less than astonishing.
A law that I would find difficult to obey would be not to hate an Edomite or an Egyptian—the Edomite because he is our brother (the Edomites are said to be descendants of Esau, Jacob’s twin brother); the Egyptian because we lived as strangers in Egypt—and presumably not all Egyptians acted as horribly toward us as did Pharaoh and his henchmen. It would be hard for me, personally, to forget that the Edomites helped the Babylonians in the destruction of Judea and Jerusalem in the year 586 BCE, ensnaring fugitives and indiscriminately putting them to the sword. Equally difficult for me would be the memory of the drowning of Hebrew male infants in Egypt. Yet the Torah instructs us not to hold a grudge, not to participate in collective punishment, but rather to punish only the guilty.
Yet Ki Teitzei also instructs us never to forget or forgive another tribe: the Amalekites. In the Torah, Amalek becomes the very symbol of evil—not only for attacking the Israelites at night, by stealth (actually pretty clever tactics in war), but rather because they attacked the rear of the Israelite camp, where the stragglers, the weary, the sick, the children, and all those who had lost hope and strength lagged behind. If helping the needy is holy, what the Amalekites did constitutes the very essence of evil—and that is what we must always remember.
One of my favorite commandments in this portion—one that I try to follow whenever possible—is to pay a day laborer at the end of the day. I don’t ask for an invoice in the mail. The Torah explains: this is what he will use to buy food for his family and himself. The laborer must not be forced to beg: His dignity is in his work, and we are commanded to show appreciation—and pay on time!
With 74 commandments, there are sure to be some that we would deem archaic, or perhaps even unjust by our present-day understanding. At the same time, however, there are others that speak to us directly and that we are called upon to follow even if it means that we must change something in the way we live, speak or act.
The important teaching of Ki Teitzei is that justice, dignity and morality are not only the domain of God and the Temple. Holiness is present all about us—at home as in the field, at the temple as at our workplace. Holiness is not only found in the way we worship and believe, but also in the way we speak and behave.
© 2022 by Boaz D. Heilman
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