By Rabbi Susan Laemmle, September 14, 2024
Drash for Russell&Rachel Library Minyan Aufruf: Parshat KiTetzei
Ki Tetze l’milchamah: A young man goes forth from Cleveland, via New Haven, to Hollywood to battle inertia and conformity — and find an arena for his creative energies. Like the Israelites of old, he pauses for Shabbat, which takes him to the Library Minyan. There he beholds eshet y’fat toar: a beautiful woman — whom he brings into his house as she brings him into hers, so that eventually they merge households and decide to get married. Her hair and nails are just fine as they are, and her parents support their love, as do his — so rather than mourn, they all decide to rejoice in anticipation of November nuptials. And here we are today, Berwald and Cohen families and friends from across the country together with Library Minyan regulars and newcomers. And here I am, Rachel & Russell’s Library Minyan friend, alluding to this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tetzei — which means “when you go out.”
This parsha contains 74 commandments, more than any other Torah portion. The range of mitzvot is unusually wide — often private matters concerning individuals, their families and their neighbors. Women figure prominently, but — as is to be expected — the millennial-old Torah text views them from a male perspective. The opening scenario deals with eshet y’fat toar: a beautiful woman from the enemy camp who’s desired by the Israelite warrior who’s captured her.
Since early encounters with this Torah portion, I’ve been taken by its unusually striking opening. Rabbi Sampson Raphael Hirsch, the late-19th century German founder of Modern Orthodoxy, views this situation in a reassuring way, as “a case that proclaims the inviolability of the female sex against wanton abuse by the passions of the male.” This assertion gains support from the process outlined in the Torah text: If the man desires to marry his beautiful captive, he takes her into his house for a month-long period of mourning the parents and identity she will be leaving behind, at the outset of which her hair and nails are cut and her old clothing discarded. Rabbinic commentary envisions her then going through a conversion before marriage. Finally, the Torah carries their relationship into the future in a way that further supports Rabbi Hirsch’s assertion: If her husband later tires of her, she exits as a free woman, released outright rather than sold; after all, he has already humbled her.
As the parsha continues, women find themselves in other difficult situations, nearly all of which would be different or not even occur today: (1) being the unloved one among a man’s two wives; (2) being publicly accused of not being a virgin by her new husband; (3) as a virgin, being raped or even just having sex, with someone else while engaged or even not engaged; (4) being married to a man who divorces her and marrying another man who either dies or divorces her, after which her first husband is forbidden from remarrying her; (5) not being allowed to marry her step-son after her husband, his father, dies; (6) and finally, seeking to disarm a man who attacks her husband by seizing the antagonist’s genitals.
In at least three situations rooted in Parshat Ki Teitzei, women’s scope of action is still affected today within some Orthodox settings: (1) in its being unacceptable for her to dress in what’s seen as male apparel, (2) in her being pressed to marry her late husband’s brother after becoming a widow if she is thus-far childless; and (3) in her power to initiate divorce.
However, the position of the widow as envisioned in this and many other Torah portions is more protected than it might have been. At a time when women were largely at men’s mercy, the Torah persistently urges special, attentive support to widows, along with orphans and strangers. As Adele Berlin puts this in the Women’s Torah Commentary, “Deuteronomy seeks to ensure that women marry, for ancient Israelite society offered no good place for an adult unmarried woman.” Thus a childless widow whose brother-in-law rejects a levirate marriage is not envisioned as an independent agent who might have rejected it herself. In all this, Parshat Ki Tetzei is realistically humane, even if not revolutionary or idealistic or romantic.
Yet we do encounter a truly romantic scenario in Ki Tezei. It stipulates: “When a man has taken a new wife, he shall not go out with the army or be assigned to it for any purpose; he shall be exempt one year for the sake of his household, to give happiness to the woman he has married.” Naki yehiyeh l’vayto: he shall be clean (that is, free from) obligations for the sake of his household. Mostly simach et ishto: he shall make the woman he has married happy.
Rabbi Hirsch offers another insightful commentary here: “This regulation manifests the great value which the Law places upon the wife and her husband’s duty to make her happy. Let her husband consider his most important task in marriage to work for the happiness of the woman who has become his wife. In the eyes of the Law, this husbandly duty is of crucial significance not only for individual domestic happiness but also for the welfare of the nation.”
Today we understand that every person, however gendered, is responsible for their own happiness. We understand that sexual fulfillment is a layered, delicate phenomenon, for which individuals bear responsibility along with their partners. And yet, the basic situation of bodily & emotional pleasure experienced within mutuality continues to play an important role in many close relationships including, probably especially, potentially lifetime relationships like marriages.
Sefer HaHinuch, the anonymous 16th century work that lists and elaborates on the commandments in each parsha, includes two separate mitzvot arising from the scenario in Deuteronomy 24:5 : (1) that a bridegroom is not to be taken from home during the entire first year of marriage, and (2) that the bridegroom should rejoice with his wife during that year. The following explanation of the second of these is certainly male-oriented but it also seem to understand the way in which sexual pleasure at a crucial point in a relationship can cement loyal devotion: “God decreed upon us, the people chosen to be called by God’s name, that we should live continuously with the woman who is made specifically ours for raising up progeny, for an entire year from the time we wed her, in order to attach desire around her, let our good will adhere to her, and introject her image and all her activities into our heart, until every act of another woman will become something alien. As a result, a man will remove his way far from a strange woman and turn his thoughts to the woman who is fit for him. Then the children she bears him will be worthy, and the world will find favor before its Creator.”
Is that not what we want, as did our forebears — that our world finds favor before its Creator? That our domestic and social arrangements be harmonious and benevolent, healthy and happy? Modern marriages are under great pressure. One wonders if divorce rates might not decline were newly married couples eligible for an extended, paid honeymoon period that facilitated their introjecting one another’s images and activities into their hearts.
Thankfully, neither Russell nor Rachel will be going off to war following their November wedding. In December, they will honeymoon in Thailand. And so we wish them the mutualized joy that builds a good marriage and a strong family — and that ripples out benefits to congregation and community; to our nation, the Jewish People, and indeed the human race. Mazal Tov to Rachel, Russell, their families, and all of us!
And Shabbat shalom.