לֹֽא־תִרְאֶה אֶת־חֲמוֹר אָחִיךָ אוֹ שׁוֹרוֹ נֹֽפְלִים בַּדֶּרֶךְ וְהִתְעַלַּמְתָּ מֵהֶם הָקֵם תָּקִים עִמּֽוֹ
Lo tir’eh et hamor akhikha o shoro noflim ba’derekh v’hitalamta mei’hem; hakeim takim imo.
If you see your fellow’s ox or ass fallen on the road, do not ignore it; you must raise it together (Deuteronomy 22:4).
Ki Teitzei contains more mitzvot — more commandments — than any other portion in the Torah. In fact, there are no stories in Ki Teitzei, only laws. Maimonides counts 72 discrete commandments that originate in this parashah.
The laws in Ki Teitzei describe the needs and conditions of an ancient agrarian society, radically different from our own. We read about the proper treatment of women captured as spoils of war; harsh punishment for rebellious sons; what to do with a lost ox or sheep. The novice student of Torah will wonder what relevance these instructions could possibly have to contemporary life. Many a bar mitzvah boy and bat mitzvah girl have despaired upon reading this as their assigned portion, knowing that they were somehow supposed to find a message in it.
But the novice does not yet understand that in Judaism, Torah is not a static document locked in time, but rather, a living tradition. The laws of the Torah are the basis of a 3,000-years-and-counting exploration of the deepest meaning and best application of the commandments. “Jewish Law” is not contained in the Torah; “Jewish Law” is the ever-evolving debate and interpretation of the Torah by Jewish scholars. Some of the commandments in Ki Teitzei become the foundation for entire areas of Jewish law and ethics, and occupy entire tractates of the Talmud. Some that are found too harsh or offensive are marginalized and shunted aside by Jewish tradition. Others remain the object of fierce debate to this day.
When read and studied in this light, the significance of portions like Ki Teitzei as the basis of Jewish law becomes apparent. Some examples:
If you see your fellow’s ox or ass fallen on the road, do not ignore it; you must raise it together (Deuteronomy 22:4).
If you chance upon a bird’s nest … do not take the mother together with her young. Send the mother off before you take the young for food … (Deuteronomy 22:7).
You shall not muzzle an ox while it is threshing (Deuteronomy 25:4).
These laws, scattered through the text, become the proof texts in the Talmud for an entire category of Jewish law that the rabbis name צַעַר בַּעֲלֵי חַיִּים Tza’ar Ba’alei Hayim, “the suffering of living things,” better translated as “the ethical treatment of animals.” The rabbis endeavor to create a “balance between simultaneously permitting the use of animals for human need and prohibiting unnecessary cruelty to animals.”[1] The ethical imperative to minimize suffering to animals extends to the laws of kosher slaughter; to rules that limit the overworking of animals (the fourth of the Ten Commandments insists that domesticated animals, as well as humans, must receive a Sabbath); and to showing compassion for all creatures, such as the mother bird cited above.
In contemporary Jewish thought, the evolution of Jewish law regarding ethical treatment of animals continues: Is factory farming kosher? Is vegetarianism or even veganism the logical next step in our acknowledgment that animals are sentient and have feelings?
You shall not abuse a needy and destitute laborer … You must pay the wages due [the laborer] on the same day, before the sun sets (Deuteronomy 24:14–15).
You must have completely honest weights, and completely honest measures (Deuteronomy 25:15).
These commandments form the foundation of Jewish business ethics, an enormous focus of Jewish law. The Jewish legal tradition pays at least as much attention to the kashrut (acceptability) of what we may or may not do in economic practices as it does to the kashrut of what we may or may not eat. As one teacher of mine put it, as Jews we should be more concerned about what comes out of our mouths than we are about what goes into our mouths! For those of us concerned with ethical labor and business laws, we can trace a direct line back to the Torah.
If you see your fellow’s ox or sheep gone astray, do not ignore it; you must take it back to them … If you do not know who the owner is, you shall bring it home until the owner claims it; then you shall give it back … you shall do the same with anything that someone loses and that you find: you must not remain indifferent (Deuteronomy 22:1–3).
Respecting others’ property is critical to maintaining the trust that allows a society to thrive. Here again, the Talmud takes these general principles in the Torah and explores every possible nuance of what is considered “lost property,” and what our responsibilities are to those who have lost it. When can we claim something that we found as our own? When is keeping something we’ve found theft? To what lengths should we go to locate the owner? The plethora of detailed debate in the Talmud can make your head spin, but without clear property laws, only the law of the jungle will prevail. In our digital age, these questions remain urgent: If we glean someone else’s intellectual property or creative work from the Internet, what do we owe them? We will find that Judaism has much to teach us in this regard.
When you build a new house, you shall construct a railing around your roof, for if someone fell from your roof you would bear guilt (Deuteronomy 22:8).
To this day around the Mediterranean, many homes have flat roofs. In biblical times, the rooftop was part of the living space, and much activity took place on the roof. Thus, a railing was a practical safety measure. This specific law from our portion becomes the foundation for another basic Jewish ethical principle: We are each responsible for public safety. For I can easily imagine the homeowner’s complaint: “How can the law require me to put up a railing? It’s my home!” Judaism is non-negotiable: We must consider the well-being of others.
Again, Jewish tradition offers valuable guidance for contemporary issues. I was approached by a Jewish family that did want to vaccinate their children because they believed that the vaccinations were harmful. In order to satisfy their children’s school, they needed to prove that their religious beliefs would prevent them from vaccinating. I could not write such a letter. After studying the issue, I concluded that even if there was a marginal risk that the vaccines might injure the children, the Jewish imperative to protect public health vastly outweighed the potential risk to the individual. The commandment to put a railing around one’s roof becomes both the formative precedent and the metaphor for our responsibility to the greater community. We are all in this together.
A well-known rabbinic parable humorously captures Judaism’s emphasis on public safety: Some people were sitting in a boat, when one of them took a drill and began to bore under his seat. The other passengers protested to him, “What are you doing?” He said to them, “What has this to do with you? Am I not boring the hole under my own seat?” They retorted, “But the water will come in and drown us all!” (Vayikra Rabbah 4:6, fifth century C.E.).
Finally, here is an example of the Jewish legal tradition marginalizing a law that was deemed too harsh:
If a parent has a rebellious and defiant son, who does not heed his father or mother and does not obey them even after they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the public square … They shall say to the town elders, this son of ours is disloyal and defiant, he does not heed us, he is a glutton and a drunkard. Thereupon the townspeople shall stone him to death (Deuteronomy 21:18–21).
Now, I know many of us parents have had the urge to drag our rebellious adolescent into the town square and do something similar, but even though the Torah regularly invokes capital punishment for crimes, later Jewish legal authorities held a profoundly negative opinion of the death penalty. So, even though the law was already “on the books,” so to speak, Rabbinic Judaism interpreted every word of the law so restrictively as to make it impossible to prosecute. They declared that this law could only apply when the son was between the age of 13 and 13¼, that the mother and father’s testimony must exactly corroborate, that the son must be proven a repeated glutton and drunkard, and much more, reducing the commandment to an absurdity.[2]2 Further, the rabbis (with no actual proof) stated that even in the time of the Torah the law had never been invoked, as a way of further delegitimizing the text without contradicting it outright.
Thus, we see that Torah — rather than being the immutable “truth” as some depict it — has always, in fact, been a malleable living document. While the Torah’s elevated principles grew into the fabric of Jewish law and life, aspects of Torah that future generations found unpalatable were actively sidelined. Judaism is still evolving today, but the ongoing humane and progressive interpretation of Torah is never a given. It is truly up to each generation to study the chain of tradition and carry the values of Judaism into the future. Ki Teitzei offers a rich resource from which to begin.
[1] See this article for a great summary of Tza’ar Ba’alei Hayim: myjewishlearning.com/article/ethical-treatment-of-animals-in-judaism.
[2] See this article for a great summary of the treatment of the rebellious son: jewishvirtuallibrary.org/rebellious-son.