Sermonette: Arguing with, and Appreciating, Deuteronomy 21.10-25.19 ("Ki Teitzei")

Sermonette

28 August 2015

Temple Ner Ami, Camarillo, CA

(1650 words, ca. 12 and a half minutes)

            So the child says to the rabbi, "Rabbi, why did the Holy One set the minyan at ten?" And the rabbi replies, "That is simple, my child. A minyan of ten guarantees that for every issue of importance to the congregation — and {shuddering to recall} many, many issues of no importance whatever! — there should be at least a dozen opinions."

            Okay, a lot of Jews, it is said, like to argue, and I grew up in Chicago: among another group of people who definitely like to argue.

            And not argue just with each other, at least not among Jews.

            One image of Israel's relationship with God is a loving betrothal, as in the final prayer when putting on tefillin, or in a mystic reading of the Song of Songs — or with greeting the Sabbath bride as we did with L'Cha Dodi. But marriages, especially after the first six hundred years or so, can get stormy, and another image of the Jewish relationship with God is the wrestling match: Jacob wrestles with the angel and is renamed "Israel": "He who struggles with God." Abraham dickers with God over the destruction of Sodom, and Job in the poem of Job is far from patient with God. In the long poem in the center of the book of Job, Job is ticked and accuses God of injustice. Ultimately vehemently, Job presents his indictment to a silent God — or silent to the climax of the poem — and the Book of Job as a whole suggests that without such an argument there may be no true encounter with God.

            Which brings me to the Torah reading for this Shabbat, Ki Teitzei — a substantial hunk of Deuteronomy — where most of us nowadays would have some questions — and one or two places where we should have objections. And it brings me, as someone ignorant of Hebrew, to what I can recite and talk about. Baruch ata Adonai natein haTorah: The often-repeated and expanded upon, "Blessed are You, Eternal, who gives the Torah."

            We bless God for giving us Torah, the Teaching: God's teachings, commandments, injunctions, laws.

            And I got thinking about that blessing for Torah.

            I don't think I'd bless the California State Assembly for giving us the California Revised Statutes, and I know I cursed them (quietly) for allowing photo-enforced traffic lights with two-second yellows. Still, even when being welcomed to Ventura County with $600 in fines and fees for my first moving violation since I was 18 — even then, I don't think I would have found anything in California law as, let's say, problematic as the "Rules for waging holy war" in Deuteronomy. Most of those rules are in last week's reading, but Ki Teitzei starts out with the rules for a victorious Israelite soldier seizing from "among the captives a beautiful woman" and appropriating her — seizing her — for a wife.

            Also, well … for 35 years I lived in a college town around the corner from a consolidated high school and occasionally fantasized dire punishments for teens who are "stubborn and rebellious" (and noisy) and for any over-age kid who's "a glutton and," way more so, "a drunkard." Still, having them stoned to death as Deuteronomy commands (21.21) seems excessive — and "a little bordering upon cruelty."

            When we bless God for "Torah and mitzvot," what should we be blessing God for?

            First off we should be thankful for the arguments within our Scriptures and beyond where it's a question of whether swords should be beaten into plowshares, as Isaiah says, and we "learn war no more," or the other way around. The prophet Joel tells us to "Hammer your plowshares into swords and your pruning hooks into spears" and rather than ceasing to learn war anymore, to "Train even your weaklings to be warriors" (3.10).

            Also there are — always — historical contexts and the need to be not so open-minded that our brains fall out, but humble not just before God but also with our ancestors, and honor their progress in compassion.

            For a famous example, Christians criticize the Law of "an eye for an eye." Well, back in the day of Hammurabi and Moses, that law served to limit violence. Somebody knocks out the eye of a guy in the ancient world (or our world), and he'd want to kill the offender. And American Christians might keep in mind that if the US had stuck to "an eye for an eye," we would have paused after killing four or five thousand Afghans in revenge for 9/11 — and see what, if anything could be done against al-Qaeda by law. "An eye for an eye" can be idealistic even today.

            More specific to today's reading, Ki Teitzei commands, "You shall not give up to his master a slave who has escaped […]; he shall dwell with you [… and]; you shall not oppress him" (23.15). The Code of Hammurabi, nearly four thousand years ago "decreed death as the penalty for sheltering a fugitive slave" (RSV 244 n.); and the laws of the American colonies and the United States required returning fugitive slaves until 1864.

            More generally, we have to use our imaginations and think about what evolving Torah meant to our ancestors.

            A nice Jewish boy, if secular, Steven Pinker, wrote in 2011 a long and fascinating and controversial book called The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. "What? — Violence declined?!?", you will say — which is why Pinker needed to write a big book. "Don't we live in peculiarly violent times of existential threat!?"

            Well, no, not really. There are existential threats to the human species from asteroids and comets and thermonuclear war. And the last period of global warming back in the Middle Ages was great for the Vikings but horrible for people living in hot, dry places like, well, like around here, and our current round of global warming will produce, in many places, like around here, very tough times.

            Still, nothing going on nowadays compares with the bloodbaths of the two world wars of the 20^th century, and my students in a course called just "Massacres" came up with the scary statistic that those two world wars and some 80 million dead were barely a blip on the graph in the increase in human population. World War II was an existential threat to Jews and Roma and did (thank God) destroy the Third Reich; but the 20^th-century World Wars were a spasmodic exception to a general trend of improvement.

            "Genocide" is a modern word, but large-scale massacres are ancient, and we find it hard to believe that Violence Has Declined because we can barely imagine how violent a world our ancestors lived in during the anarchy that preceded civilization and the violence and oppression under early kings and empires.

            Scribes in really ancient, ancient Mesopotamia wrote of kingship coming down from heaven as a gift from the gods. Well, yeah; having a king meant that now all you had to fear in the lethal violence category was the king and his thugs from the capital and not the local free-lance thugs. Early civilization was less violent and brutal than what preceded it, but that still leaves a lot of room for violence and brutality. Our ancestors got a taste of civilized life in Egypt, and my ancient history book says the Hebrews weren't treated much differently from Pharaoh's other subjects — and our ancestors in Egypt thought they were treated like slaves. And when our later ancestors demanded a king, the Prophet Samuel described in gory detail how even an Israelite king will tax them and draft them "and you shall be his slaves" (1 Samuel 8.10-18). Oppressive kings were better than constant clan warfare and small-group violence, but they were bad and could be very bad. So, Blessed be the Eternal, who gave the yoke of the law to restrain and guide individuals and (on balance, eventually) curb violence and oppression.

            And blessed be the Eternal for Torah not just as Law but as Teaching and a Way of life: for giving us a creation myth where God looks upon all the work of of Creation on the 6^th Day and finds in "very good" (Genesis 1.31) — a phrase a great teacher of comparative religion says "gives a lilt to the whole attitude toward nature" and life in Torah, and makes Torah the ground of "This beautiful tree, the tree of life." <http://billmoyers.com/content/wisdom-faith-christianity-judaism/>

            And, indeed, the weirder rules in Deuteronomy in the reading for today repeat the kind of Rule of Separations in the Book of Leviticus — and these also make sense.

            Torah teaches that in the beginning God brought order out of chaos; and the rules to keep fabrics all of one material and farm fields of one crop, the rigid rules on sex and gender and age status — these are bad ideas today but long served as walls against chaos.

            We need "New Rules!" about now, and Reform Judaism helps provide them, but the impulse behind the old rules was necessary. Back when humans were beginning to get the world organized in our minds and cultures, we needed strong categories for animals and crops and fabrics, even for men's clothing and women's clothing; we needed at least regulation of the violence of frequent wars and constant slavery — and rules to keep in check royal egomaniacs.

            And many of the rules really are good ideas: expanding our circles of empathy, sympathy, of feeling and concern. In the Torah reading for today, in the midst of a bunch of rigid regulations on punishments and inheritance and "Levirate" marriage. In the midst of lawyerly details comes the rule, "You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain" (25.4). Even an ox deserves reward for his labor, a standard of justice and compassion that we have not met today.

            Blessed is the Eternal, who's given the Torah to Israel.

Dysphemism: Sodomites and Breeders (and Gay Marriage in America)

            If "eutopia" is a good place, a dystopia is a bad one. If "euphemism" is saying things way too delicately — "fallen warrior" as opposed to "dead soldier," "collateral damage" for "killed, wounded, maimed civilians" — dysphemism is saying something overly crudely.

            So in direct language, people die; in euphemism they pass on or, frequently nowadays, just pass; and in dysphemism they might croak. In my years and decades teaching writing, I advised sticking with direct forms most of the time and (usually) to avoid both euphemism and vulgarity — and just about always to avoid derogatives for ethnicities and other human groups. I'll stick with that position, but discuss here an exception.

            As we move from gay marriage into disputing broader issues, it would be well for a few impolite folk to throw into the debate the derogatory term "sodomite" for homosexual and "breeder" for (married, reproducing) hetero. Such words will stop intelligent discussion in its figurative tracks for a bit, but in the long run getting the nasty terms out into the argument would be useful.

            It'll start some fights, but "Sodomites" and "breeders" will aid keeping the conflict clear.

            "Sodomite" comes from the story in the Biblical Book of Genesis of the destruction of the Cities of the Plain of Sodom and Gomorrah (18.17-19.29): by fire and brimstone — directly sent by the Lord — because "the outcry against" them "is great, and their sin is very grave" (18.20). Now what the sin of Sodom (and Gomorrah) is, or sins are, has long been a matter for debate and, in LitCrit terms, narrative elaboration by the early rabbis on down. Still, in moral and political Christian usage — and in old legal statutes — "sodomy" means sexual "sins against nature," excluding masturbation but capable of applying to all non-reproductive sex, but centrally sex acts of a homosexual variety.

            One probable sin of Sodom in the Biblical story is demanding a violation of the laws of courtesy to guests by demand two of them to be gang-raped by "the men of Sodom, young and old — all the people to the last man" (19.4). Now, the guests were angels, but they were gendered male and thought to be men by their host, the Hebrew Lot, and the mob of (male) Sodomites. Also, Lot offers instead his two virgin daughters as preferable to surrendering his male-gendered guests, so, especially in ages that don't rank the obligation of hospitality up there with "Honor father and mother" — and the Jewish morning prayers do so rank it — especially in later ages, the issue here was less rape than indeed, homosexuality.

            And this makes sense since Hebrew Scriptures are important in the great tradition of pronatalism — "Be fruitful and multiply" and all that — and in keeping the classifications of the world in order: emphatically including the binary oppositions (and sometimes complements) of male/female and Israelites/gentiles.

            One way to encourage fruitfulness, strongly, is to forbid all sex except the reproductive, and the Mosaic Torah pretty well does that. And, indeed, later interpreters even got around to including masturbation by tweaking a bit the story of Onan (Genesis 38.8-11), and the Roman Catholic Church came to forbid even heterosexual vaginal sex between a married couple — if they used contraception.

            Homosexual sex was among "The Abominations of Leviticus" because it undermined what were considered proper male/female roles, thereby undermining patriarchy in Israelite society — and because it was seen, with some justice, as popular among the gentiles — and because it wasn't reproductive.

            "Sex is a great mana," as Ursula K. Le Guin says in a major essay, and therefore "there is always a code" for sex in any society. An "immature society" or immature individual psyche will set "great taboos about it. The maturer culture, or psyche, can integrate these taboos or laws into an internal ethical code," with true maturity allowing "great freedom" but forbidding "the treatment of another person as an object" ("Is Gender Necessary?" Language of the Night [1979]: 166).

            Sex is controlled by strong taboos in the Mosaic Torah, and in some ways got even stronger taboos in the more puritanical of the sects that evolved from it. Throwing in a body/soul opposition that would've seemed an Egyptian hang-up to Moses, later sects got sex associated with the corruptible and corrupted mortal body as opposed to the soul: indeed, the body was the prison of the soul and temptress. Sex became something not only to be regulated by taboo but in dire need of justification and redemption.

            "Be fruitful and multiply" — okay. Sex within marriage for reproductive purposes … redeemable (if barely in some views); any other sex was either natural in the sense of brutish or an unnatural act: sodomy.

            "Breeders!" was never thrown about to the extent of "sodomites!" and never got backed up with threats of execution or jail. But if you listened carefully in the right conversations, it was a possible epithet, and, as should now be clear, a kind of complement to "sodomites."

            Gay marriage in the US is more settled as a legal issue than abortion and more settled as a cultural issue than, say, the significance of the US Civil War. The continuing fights over sexuality will be over the larger issues the gay marriage debate has raised.

            Paul the Apostle and much of Christian doctrine following him stressed Christian freedom from Torah, with Torah a word Christians consistently translated "Law." But — but there were a lot of "but's." The ancient equivalent of shrimp wrapped in bacon (Leviticus 11.7-11) coming from a pagan sacrifice, would be okay for a Christian to eat at a baptism feast for a son emphatically left uncircumcised. Or you might be offered to eat blood pudding at an Anglican Church breakfast, even though God forbids blood-eating not just to the children of Abraham but also to all the descendants of Noah — i.e., in Biblical terms, everybody. But homosexuality … maybe not. For some of Paul's long-range spiritual descendants, definitely not.

            A rigorous Calvinist nowadays can learn that homosexual orientation has a large genetic component and find that appropriate: some of the damned majority of humankind can be justly damned for homosexuality programmed into their bodily genes.

            Well, etc.

            In a world of competing tribes and nationalisms, in which "People are the riches of a nation" and numerous people are the strength of a nation, pronatalist policies can make secular, national-interest/national-security sense. In our world of competing tribes and nationalism and over seven billion people, encouraging "breeding" is some place between "problematic" and just a horrible idea — and taboos on homosexuality can be defended only as taboos, only on religious grounds.

            So the first question in the US is the First Amendment one of what extent, if at all, religious taboos are to be incorporated into American law and custom and enforced by the power of the State, and the second question is the other half of the First Amendment as to what accommodations are to be made to people's strongly-held taboos.

            The third question is, if marriage is to be open to all US adults and not centered on "breeders," what options do we want to make for marriage as a society and how much should we continue to bring in the State (and tax codes) in the process?

            Like, okay, some county clerks don't want to grant marriage licenses to sodomites (including female ones). Beyond asking "Should they be required to?" we should start asking whether marriages should be licensed by the State at all or just registered with the State, or maybe something different.

            Perhaps we should go for a situation where some Americans see gays as sodomites and state that outright — and then mind their business and let their sinning fellow citizens of all varieties quietly go to Hell in our own ways (as long as we at worst only annoy, not harm, the neighbors). And given environmental and resources issues to come, the breeders out there should be happy with their life choices but have to start defending all claims to tax breaks and other privileges.

            In those cultural battles, "sodomite!" and "breeder!" may be among the milder terms thrown around.