The specifics continue, and I remind myself not to lose my place in the narrative amidst all the policy. There is a reason Mosheh is laying down all this law in such detail. He is instructing his second generation of Israelites about their contract with God, and he knows this is his last chance. When he’s finished, off they go into the promised land, and he will not be coming along. If he doesn’t get the Torah across to them now, the whole project is doomed. And yes, it’s about the specifics; the Torah is full of demonstrations that they have to get the details exactly right. But that’s not all it’s about. It’s about getting the form and function of God’s law across. Every law is also an example, and the examples add up to a demonstration of how to live in a holy way at all times, even between examples.

This parashah’s specifics begin in a rather touchy place: the laws of treatment of women captured in war. The topic of ethical conduct in war was opened in the previous parashah, and the relevance is clear enough; with the conquest of the promised land next on the agenda, these are among the laws the people will use first.

This section, though, is clearly about more than just war. It zeroes right in on the moral problems of male sexual desire, amplified as it can be by the hormonal rushes of warfare, and if you can hold back on the blanket condemnations from the modern perspective (I know it’s hard), the underlying spiritual principle I am always searching for is right there: One must not be a slave to selfish desires and thereby harm someone else.

When an Israelite warrior sees a captive woman he finds beautiful and wants to wed, he must bring her into his house and allow her to mourn. She shall trim her hair and nails, be given normal clothes rather than those of a captive, and given a month to mourn her lost family. Only after this term he may marry her, and if his lust has subsided, and he no longer wants her, she must be released outright as a free person; she may not be sold.

This is followed by more discourses on male householder conduct, all on similarly emotional subjects. The level of toxic masculinity is… variable. If a householder has two wives, and his firstborn is with the wife he loves less, he may not withhold his firstborn’s birthright and give it to the child of the wife he loves more. That seems fine. On the other hand, if a householder has a wayward and defiant child son who does not respond to parental discipline, his parents must bring him before the council of elders and condemn him, and then the council shall stone him to death. Mosheh’s explanation is that this will sweep out evil from the community and strike fear in everyone’s hearts. Which is good, apparently. And it’s parents’ responsibility to make sure their evil children are executed.

When I was younger, and I read a passage like this, and my moral objection hackles were raised, I would automatically switch into oppositional defiance mode and assume the worst possible motives were behind it. But what if they aren’t? What if it should be obvious that the Torah here is talking about a person who does really bad things? Yes, there are some categories of transgression the Torah considers really bad that cannot be reconciled with modern sensibilities, but this part isn’t very specific about what the misdeeds are, only about what criminal’s parents think of them. Shouldn’t we assume that parents would only do this under extremely serious circumstances? Can’t we think of examples from contemporary news reports of cases in which children commit acts of monstrous cruelty that only their parents could have prevented, and they didn’t, whether out of apathy, denial, ideology, or some combination thereof?

I’m sorry to go there, I’m just saying, I see something of value in this point about parents placing the community above all else in the interest of justice.

Fortunately, the history of this rebellious child section is also probably the best possible demonstration that the kinds of moral updates you’ve been seeing me make to various objectionable Torah laws are a central part of Jewish tradition. In the Talmud (Sanhedrin 71a), the rabbis argue that such extreme laws are only here for us to wrestle with, and that this specific situation of the child so rebellious the parents have them executed could never have happened in reality! So don’t just take it from me that Jewish people are allowed to push back against the Torah. Take it from the Talmud. You know, the “Oral Torah.” The core of Judaism.

Another law is tacked on at the end of this section about capital punishment itself, the gist of which is that even the corpse of someone executed for a crime must be treated with human dignity and given a proper burial. Their humanity cannot be revoked.

Chapter 22 begins with more statements of communal responsibility across family lines. If someone’s ox or sheep has wandered off, one must get off one’s ass (heheh) and bring it back to them. Ignoring it and saying “that’s their problem” is unacceptable. If you don’t know whose it is, keep it and take care of it until someone comes to claim it. Same goes for an ass (heheh), an article of clothing, or any other possession one finds around. “You must not remain indifferent.” That’s the crime.

The same principle applies on the road, too, not just in front of your house. And there are more interesting cases about happening upon animals in various situations along the road coming in a second, but for some reason, the Torah interjects Dvarim 22:5 here, which in the plain reading is a prohibition of cross-dressing, calling it abhorrent to God in much the same manner as other pesukim condemning queer behaviors. My question is, what the hell is this pasuk doing here sandwiched in between laws about the treatment of animals on the road, and why do I suspect that would complicate what it means in context? The commentators are only slightly helpful, but what they have in common is that they understood the problem here to be about deception, about disguising oneself as another gender in order to go out and do something wrong. Yes, they were mostly talking about sexual immorality, but the reason this law is placed here — amongst rules of the road — is that it’s about not sneaking around to do untoward things in places where one is an unknown quantity.

No, it’s not very satisfying, and nor does it do anything whatsoever to address the super strict gender roles and divisions in this culture, but what’s definitely clear from the way this law gets understood over the centuries is that this behavior means almost unrecognizably different things in different cultural contexts, so it’s hard — for me, at least — to feel too concerned about its plain reading, given how irrelevant the concerns of the commentators are to the gendered experiences we have nowadays.

Anyway, back to how humans behave on the side of the road. If you find a bird’s nest along the road that has fledglings or eggs in it, and the mother is there, let her go and take only the young. This seems to me like it’s generally awkwardly translated, and what it’s really saying (and many commentators agree) is that you shouldn’t take a mother bird’s babies or eggs in front her, because that’s inhumane. There’s also a precept cited in commentaries of preserving the species by not taking two generations at once. What I’ll say is, at our house, if one of the chickens is sitting on some eggs, we don’t reach under her and take them. We come back later when she’s gone. It seems like the obviously right thing to do.

When you build a house, you must put a railing on the roof, so that you don’t bring bloodguilt upon your house by letting someone fall from it. This is one of those Torah mitzvot that gets cited all the time by traditionalists as a perfect example of Jewish ethics. I find that pretty funny, but also I get it.

Next come a few laws against mixing things of unlike kind, and I can’t help but wonder if this is connected metaphysically to the cross-dressing part. You can’t mix a second kind of seed in with the grapes of your vineyard, you can’t plow a field with an ox and an ass together, and you can’t wear fabric that combines wool and linen.

My sense is that there’s something mystical going on here. The first one, the one about the seeds, uses the word “תקדש” to mean “fullness” or “expression,” i.e. the yield of the mixed crop, in order to say it can’t be used. The commentators pick up on how this is clearly etymologically related to קודש, “holy,” suggesting that the mixture isn’t unclean or improper but rather too holy to touch. Another clue to this is that the last one, about mixing wool and linen, is followed by the commandment to put tassels on the corners of a four-cornered garment, connected to the mitzvah of tzitzit as reminders of God’s commandments (which, tantalizingly, also came later in a parashah that made a big deal about picking grapes).

Clearly, you wouldn’t want to break God’s law by putting on a garment of mixed fibers in order to fulfill another one of putting tassels on your garment, so that connection is clear. But I’m just left to wonder if perhaps the reason we are not to mix certain spiritually powerful ingredients together — like, including human gender and its clothing — is because only God is holy enough to make certain mixtures. I don’t think I can fill in the gaps here myself, but somehow it gets me to, “God creates trans people the way they are; it’s not a choice, as humans who condemn them often say it is.”

Now we go back to male humans and their fraught sexual moralities, which clearly is about choices. A man who takes a wife, falls out of desire for her, and then makes up charges against her in order to get a divorce is to be taken to the elders of the town, flogged, and fined a hundred shekels to be paid out to the woman’s family for defamation, and he must stay married to her and continue to provide for her. If, though, his charges are proven true, she is to be executed, so, let’s just try to avoid this situation altogether, shall we? And just to be clear, both adulterers in an adultery situation are culpable. This also applies to a woman who is engaged but not yet married, and this part feels kind of strict, but it clearly leads into a declaration that a man who lies with an engaged woman by force is to be executed, and she has done nothing wrong. Though the penalty is lessened for raping a woman who is not engaged, it’s still a crime with a punishment, and the rapist must marry her. Now, yes, that is far from ideal for many reasons, but the point is that this act makes him financially and otherwise materially responsible for her for the rest of their lives.

Now come more laws about sexual and familial boundaries. You can’t marry your parent’s ex because that brings shame to your parent. No man whose genitalia are damaged may be admitted into the “congregation of יהוה,” which commentators take to mean they can marry within the people, as clearly they can’t fulfill the mitzvah to have children. Pretty harsh, but I would argue we really have no idea what this means at this point. Adding onto that, no one who is born from adultery between Jews and non-Jews shall be admitted into the “congregation of יהוה,” nor shall their descendants down 10 generations. The reasoning for this is connected to the inhospitality of the other surrounding nations on the journey through the desert, namely those who hired Bil’am, son of Be’or, to curse the children of Yisra’el.

Interestingly, two nations are exempted. The people of Edom — who are the descendants of ’Esav, Yisra’el’s kin — and the people of Mitzrayim, Egypt, as the children of Yisra’el lived there for so long. Offspring of relations between Jews and those peoples may be admitted in the third generation.

Next we meander back into laws of war, also concerning how yucky boys stay ritually pure under those conditions so as not to weaken the army and be defeated. A soldier who has a nocturnal emission must leave the camp until evening, at which point he shall bathe in water, and at sundown he may reenter the camp. All soldiers are to poop outside the camp and carry with them a spike to dig a hole for it and then bury it. Since God moves about the camp to protect the army, it must be treated as a holy place.

Now a grab bag: If a slave seeks refuge with you from their master’s cruelty, you shall not turn them in; they must be allowed to settle among you. Once again we must withstand the cognitive dissonance of reading about the emergence of the concept of human rights in a civilization that still practices slavery.

Dvarim 23:18–19 are probably frequently cited by ignorant people the world over as simple prohibition of sex work in the Torah, which would be a little easier of a case to make if there weren’t a Torah story in which Tamar commits an act of sex work as the heroine — seducing Yehudah, the ancestor after whom Jews are named — and also if the Hebrew language and basic reading comprehension didn’t exist. The verse prohibits both female and male “prostitution,” but the word it uses for both is קדש/ה, which could not possibly refer more clearly to some form of temple prostitution, one who is consecrated to this work (קודש, “holy”). Verse 19 explains that “you shall not bring the fee of a whore or the pay of a dog into the house of your God in fulfillment of any vow, for both of those things are abhorrent to God.” So, translators, please don’t fail everyone by turning what is clearly a specific religious prohibition into a contemporary Handmaid’s Tale situation.

Next comes a restatement of the famous prohibition against charging other Israelites interest on loans while allowing it on loans to foreigners. That’s one of those classics that made Jews extremely useful to various host overcultures over the millennia as indispensable financiers and scapegoats for everything evil in society, simultaneously.

It is declared very clearly that children of Yisra’el are to take vows very seriously, not to break them or delay fulfilling them. The Torah even suggests simply not making vows instead, which many Orthodox people take very seriously by appending “Bli neder,” (“Without a vow,”) to the beginning of ordinary conversational sentences when offering or proposing to do something.

Then a nice moment of agricultural communalism caps off the chapter. An Israelite wandering through another’s vineyard may eat as many grapes as they please, but they may not put any in their vessel. When wandering in another Israelite’s field of grain, one may pluck ears by hand but may not put a sickle to it. The principle here draws a nice distinction between stealing and having a little nibble.

Man, I won’t lie, I am getting really tired of all this jumping around, but we’re in the home stretch.

Here come some more marriage rules. You can’t remarry someone you divorced who has remarried (and then redivorced), because their magical sexual purity has been defiled by someone else. I feel like I could find some usable underlying spiritual principle here if I dug into it, but I don’t feel like it. One who has just married is exempt from military service for a year in order to be with their family — no objection there.

You can’t accept someone’s request to pawn a handmill or a millstone to you, because that would basically be taking their life in your hands. This one may seem obscure to moderns, but think about the principle: If someone is in such deep trouble that they’re willing to pawn to you the expensive object by which inedible plant matter is turned into food, they’re in dire straits, and accepting the deal would make them much more liable to starve to death.

Kidnapping someone and selling them into slavery is a capital crime.

Oh boy, צרעת is back. Remember our old pal usually translated as “leprosy?” Don’t worry, the whole thing isn’t recapped again, it just says to take care to follow the priests’ instructions if you get it, and it reminds us of how even Miryam was stricken by it for failing to stick with the program.

Now back to loans. It almost feels like this parashah got shuffled up somehow. Like literally it was in an order that made sense, and someone dropped the pages all over the floor and hurriedly picked them back up and handed them to the scribe, and they got transmitted in shuffle order as the Bible.

Anyway, if you loan someone money, you may not enter their house to take your pledge; you must wait outside for them to bring it out to you. No intimidation. If you reclaim your pledge from a person who is needy, you can use it during the day, but bring it back to them at night, so they aren’t deprived of the comfort of whatever it is you lent them in their moment of need. This is sort of a weird scenario to imagine, but it sounds like it’s envisioning a scenario where they can’t give your money back yet, so you take a blanket or garment or something like that as a pledge that they will. Yet another sign that we can’t readily just plop ourselves into this civilization and imagine we know what life was like or what these people would do.

Next come some good labor laws: an injunction not to abuse needy or destitute laborers, Jewish or otherwise, and a requirement to pay wages before sunset on the day they are due.

For capital crimes, parents are not to be held responsible (i.e. executed) for the crimes of their children, and vice versa.

A nonspecific protection of the rights of the stranger and the orphan is stated, followed by a specific one that you shall not take a widow’s garment in pawn. This seems to just support some of the themes in this section of imposing undue hardship on people while adding some specific categories of people to have extra compassion towards. It is tied, as it often is, to the hardships and rootlessness the children of Yisra’el underwent in Mitzrayim, and that should be remembered when encountering people who are hard up.

The last four verses of chapter 24 make a nice parallel with that part from earlier about taking a little but not too much when you’re walking through another person’s field. If you overlook a little of the produce while harvesting your own field, don’t go back and get it. Give it to the stranger, the orphan, and the widow instead. Same with the fruit of your olive trees or the grapes of your vineyard. It’s like they were left behind for a little reason, a little chance to do a good thing.

Somehow, there is still a little bit more property law to go, though it’s less than a full chapter. Corporal punishment, while allowed in this judicial system, is to be regulated and supervised; it cannot get out of hand and be allowed to degrade and dehumanize the convicted person.

Work animals are not to be prevented from eating while working.

Now, okay, I promise I didn’t plan this. Remember that story about sex work I mentioned earlier? The law that defines that entire story — that a brother is obligated to take over his brother’s household and family in the event of his death — is given now in this parashah. A procedure for what to do if he does not want to perform that duty is also given here: The widow is to go before the council of elders and tell them her brother-in-law refuses to perform the levir’s duty. The council then summons him for questioning. If he refuses, the widow shall approach him in the presence of the elders, take of his shoe, spit in his face, and declare, “Thus shall be done to the man who will not build up his brother’s house!” And from then on, he shall be known as “the family of the unsandaled one.” I love this part. Reminds me of the ritual of the sotah, the suspected adultress, but it’s less uncomfortable to read.

If two guys are fighting, and one’s wife comes to save her husband by punching the other guy in the balls, she shall have her hand cut off. Remember: “Be fruitful and multiply” is the first commandment in the Torah.

Somehow, that segues into a requirement for honest weights and measures in commerce. And then, to close it out, we are reminded of the evil ’Amalek, who attacked the children of Yisra’el in their weakest moment in the desert, and God commands the people to blot out their memory from under Heaven.

Yeah, it gets to be pretty rough going here at the end, but here’s the thing: We read the entire Torah every year, and what I’ve found is, you never know which random, oddly specific thing — even a morally or aesthetically repulsive thing! — is going to strike you as containing the secret key to the entire universe. By now I am convinced that the way to go is to read the whole thing, just to be sure.

🩴