This week’s alumni Dvar Torah is by Benzion Chinn
This week’s portion begins and ends with two of the most morally disturbing commandments in the entire Bible. We begin with the Yifat Toar, the beautiful captive gentile woman that you can apparently legally rape if you follow certain legal procedures, and end with the apparently genocidal commandment to wipe out Amalek.
These commandments exemplify how the Bible allows, and sometimes even appears to encourage, practices that are morally reprehensible, while at the same time subtly undermining these very practices. Understanding the Bible in this way does not come cheap. For such a moral stance to be meaningful, and more than an exercise in apologetics, one must be prepared to pay a price. Specifically, one must acknowledge that Biblical morality cannot be derived solely from Biblical law, with no moral preconceptions.
Take for example slavery. The Bible clearly allows for slavery, even of Israelites in cases of theft and dire poverty. Why? One might be tempted to say that biblical slavery was so “wonderful” that slaves did not want to be free. Yet the Bible punishes the slave for wanting to stay a slave, by having his ear pierced. The reason for this is that by desiring a human master, he is ignoring the commandment of “I am the Lord your God” (Exodus 20:2). This idea is made explicit in Leviticus: “for the Children of Israel are my slaves” (25:55). Furthermore, when this law is repeated in Deuteronomy, we are admonished to remember that we were slaves in Egypt (15:15). Remembering the Exodus from Egypt, the central act of Biblical faith, is placed in tension with slave ownership. Yes, it is legal to own slaves – just as God allowed the Egyptians to enslave the Israelites. Thus, any slaveowner, even as he acts within his legal right, faces the same judgment as Pharaoh.
What you have is a kind of Shylock dilemma. Yes, Shylock’s argument for his being allowed to cut a pound of flesh from Antonio’s body is legally airtight. But his attempt to exercise such a claim requires suicidal recklessness, as Shylock has to ignore the fact that has made himself vulnerable to a Christian legal establishment that will now seek to hoist him on his own legal petard. So too with slavery. Yes, the master may have a legal claim, but to exercise that claim is to make himself vulnerable to the full wrath of the G-d Who made that law.
Nonetheless, denouncing biblical slavery has its own consequence. One must concede that Biblical morality cannot be contained within halakhah, but rather must transcend it. Halakhah will not stop you from owning a slave. Therefore, anyone who claims that halakhah is complete and the only necessary moral authority is implicitly endorsing slavery. Anyone who opposes slavery honestly must recognize this.
The law of the captive woman functions similarly. Rashi, basing himself on the Midrash Tanchuma, argued that the Bible only allowed the practice out of a fear that people would otherwise simply give in to their Evil Inclination. Lest anyone be under the delusion that anything good might come out of legalized rape, the text hints that eventually the man is going to hate this woman, and that such a union will produce rebellious children (another moral monstrosity).
That being said, honestly facing the monster of biblically sanctioned rape requires more than denunciation. We risk the very notion of chosenness in order to make this denunciation.
The Bible forbids selling the beautiful captive into slavery “as compensation for your having afflicted her” (21:14). The extra-legal lesson of slavery is once again relevant here. If you cannot “even” sell her into slavery after raping her, how much more so will you be held accountable for having raped her in the first place, however legally?
There is something more going on here, though, as this acknowledgment of the woman’s feelings flips the moral script. The Bible tempts us with a narrative of “You are God’s special chosen people and, therefore, it is only right that you plunder, kill, and even rape gentiles”. But we learn from “as compensation” that this narrative is false. Instead of the good guy Israelites who have defeated the evil “goyim,” it is the “shiksa” that God cares about, and it is you the Israelite who is the oppressor. The very act of assuming chosenness becomes its own refutation.
This brings us to the commandment to wipe out Amalek. As with slavery and the captive woman, we are baited into a Shylockian legal trap that makes it impossible to follow through on the law. Consider the example of King Saul, who was punished for not killing Agag, the Amalekite king, and for sparing the Amalekite cattle. One way to view Saul’s crime is that he was willing to kill all the other Amalekites. If he had refused to go mass murder Amalekites, his sparing of Agag and the cattle would have been understandable. The fact that he spared only them showed that he was never really motivated by a desire to listen to God, the only conceivable justification for such an action. So not only did Saul disobey God, but he was a murderer too.
The apologetic temptation is to spiritualize the commandment of wiping out Amalek, so that it refers to the defeat of the Evil Inclination rather than to murdering innocent women and children. This sounds like an easy way out until you recognize the full price to be paid for acknowledging, at least in principle, the possibility of spiritualizing commandments. This makes it possible for a person eating a ham sandwich to “spiritually” keep kosher, and for such kashrut, at least hypothetically, to be superior to many conventional acts of keeping kosher.
To find wiping out Amalek to be morally objectionable therefore means that you are willing to risk the destruction of the entire halakhic system over something that is purely hypothetical. Even though there are no actual Amalekites today, you must prefer to risk putting a kosher symbol on very real ham sandwiches rather than admit that, if there were actual Amalekites, we should kill them. (There are implications here for how we respond to rabbis who proudly make a point of saying “politically incorrect” things about gentiles in the name of demonstrating their allegiance to “authentic Torah Judaism.”)
When dealing with the Torah, it is important to face problematic texts head on. This enables us to see how Torah morality undercuts the apparent morality of its own legal structure. Slavery, rape of captive women, and genocide are horrific doctrines. Challenging them risks the very notion of halakhah and of our being a chosen nation. Taking a moral stance against the Torah’s moral monsters requires making one’s peace with this. But it also means being true to the Torah’s carefully and subtly expressed morality.
Benzion N. Chinn (SBM 2003) lives in Pasadena, CA with his wife, Miriam, and his two children, Kalman and Moshe Eli. He works as an academic and special needs tutor. In his spare time, he pontificates on religion, politics, and sci-fi/fantasy (everything he is not supposed to talk about at the dinner table) over at izgad.blogspot.com.
moderntoraleadership 