Danny Nevins, Ansche Chesed, Minyan Maat

Shabbat Ki Teitzei 5784 /September 14, 2024

During the 330 days that her son Hersh was held captive, Rachel Goldberg-Polin made dozens of speeches that moved people across the world. From the UN to the Vatican to the DNC, she spoke as a mother in agony, an activist demanding action by politicians, and a poetic reader of Jewish texts. Each morning she read the Psalm that matched the number of days in captivity, never expecting that more than two cycles of 150 Psalms would pass before the awful day when she and Jon learned that Hersh had been murdered. 

Back on the first Day 126, Rachel was in a hopeful mood because this is one of the most familiar and optimistic of all the Psalms: Shir HaMaalot b’shuv Adonai et shivat tzion hayinu k’cholmim. It speaks of the return of Am Israel to its homeland (whether in anticipation or commemoration of the Babylonian captivity).¹ Rachel’s interpretation of Psalm 126 sparked my curiosity. She translated the familiar words בשוב ה׳ את שיבת ציון  as “when God returned the captives of Zion.” I had always understood the word שיבת as the return of exiles, not specifically return of  captives, so this reading was surprising. 

Forgive a brief grammatical excursus, but there are two similar Hebrew roots, שוב/שבה at play in this verse. Shin-vav-vet refers to returning, as in teshuvah, Shin-vet-heh to captivity, as in shEvi and shevuim. Either could be meant by שיבת ציון, and in fact there are manuscript variants that support each reading בשוב ה’ את שבות/שבית ציון, for example. A similar verse in Deuteronomy 30 strengthens the sense of return from exile, not captivity. ²

Who are these people, the shivat tzion–captives of Zion, or those returning to Zion from exile? Among traditional Jewish commentators, Rabbi David Kimhi (Radak) goes with the sense of returning, while Rabbi David Altschuler (Metzudat Zion) goes with captives. ³ English translations are also split. From King James to Artscroll, the verse is rendered as the captives or captivity of Zion. Others read it as those returning from exile, and some such as NRSV and NJPS take a less literal route, saying that בשוב ה’ את שיבת ציון means when the Lord will restore the fortunes of Zion. This reading is supported by a parallel text in Job 42:10, וַֽה֗’ שָׁ֚ב אֶת־שבית שְׁב֣וּת אִיּ֔וֹב , where Job’s many misfortunes are reversed by divine grace. 

Maybe the precise meaning of בשוב ה׳ את שיבת ציון doesn’t matter–after all, the Psalm celebrates the freedom of the captives, and/or the return of the exiles. Their tragedy is over, and the national restoration is in full flower. Why dwell on past tragedies? 

If only it were so simple to put war and captivity in the past. People returning home from captivity often occupy both positions at once–they are freed, redeemed, returning–and yet they are still in a sense captive, marked and maimed by their trauma. 

It is too easy to think of wars as events that leave winners and losers. We know that outcomes are seldom so clear. Soldiers are changed by their experiences, whether by physical, psychological, or moral injury, or simply by the experience of combat, when life becomes contingent, when human frailty and mortality switch from distant possibility to clear and present danger. The contingency of freedom, of life itself, becomes apparent for the victors and the vanquished, revealing the sense of safety that we normally enjoy to be an illusion.

In the summer of 1939, the philosopher, activist and mystic Simone Weil composed an essay called, “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force.” She had fled Paris with her family and taken shelter in Marseilles. Weil (a made up name that transposed the letters LEVI) wrote that, “Force makes a thing of anyone who comes under its sway. And as pitilessly as force crushes, so pitilessly it maddens whoever possesses, or believes he possesses it.” In other words, force is not a tool, but a master. ⁴

Later in that essay she added, “Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it. The human race is not divided up, in the Iliad, into conquered persons, slaves, supplicants, on the one hand, and conquerors and chiefs on the other. In this poem there is not a single man who does not at one time or another have to bow his neck to force.” 

With this in mind, let’s turn to Deuteronomy’s extended discussion of force in its most terrifying form, warfare. Our parashah opens, Ki teitzei lamilchama, “when you go out to war.” We encountered this phrase twice last week in Parashat Shoftim, and I take it literally. One “goes out” to war. It is a departure from normal life, even if war literally comes to your home, as it did last October 7 to the people of Nir Oz, Nirim, Kfar Azza, Alumim, Beeri, Re’im–all told, 21 communities, in addition to military bases struck that day. 

In April I walked the streets of Ofakim with a group of Jewish educators. Elderly couples sitting on park benches early that Saturday morning were startled to see Hamas terrorists pull into their sleepy town and start firing. They were the first people killed. We witnessed where people fell, and we heard courageous stories–of Rachel Edri and her husband serving coffee and cookies to the five Hamas terrorists in their house before the police finally broke in, rescuing the Edris, and killing the terrorists. I looked at their ruined house, punctured still with bullet holes, and felt the violence lingering in the air. 

An hour later, I wandered the site of the Nova music festival in Re’im, weeping as I gazed at the photographs of these young, beautiful people, transformed suddenly into victims, casualties. Simone Weil would say that the violent force that day turned both them and their killers into things. But their faces looked so vibrant, I could feel their lifeforce. Even as I wandered and witnessed that massacre, I heard explosions thundering just a few miles away, and I knew that at that very moment, Palestinians, young and old, were cowering, struggling to survive the fearsome application of force. Like a whirlwind, war unsettles everyone in its path. Whether active fighters or passive civilians, all are subjugated by its ruinous power.

Last week in Parashat Shoftim we read about the separation of fighters from normal attachments–to their spouse, their house, their farm, their fear. None of these normal-life attachments can be allowed in battle, because the soldiers will be called to do terrible things, to sacrifice themselves if necessary, and to kill. 

Last week we also read about cherem, the annihilation of enemy populations, a form of ethnic cleansing. While it is difficult at a remove of millennia to judge or explain this command, we cannot avoid being troubled. Normal ethics have been set aside. Today we speak about military ethics, a complicated topic, especially in asymmetric wars where one side uses its civilians as a shield. But on a fundamental level, these discussions of war do confirm Simone Weil’s perspective that something profound is lost when humans go to war. 

This week, we resume the discussion of war with a captive woman–not an Israelite taken captive, no, a captive Canaanite held by the army of Israel. She was not meant to survive, but here she is. Now what? The problem the Torah addresses is how to remove this captive from the category of thing and return her to the category of human. She is given time to mourn. And at the same time, her captor is guided to try to change himself from a fighter, a killer, back into a person. The rabbis took this as a cooling down period, for the Israelite soldier to come to his senses, to leave her alone.⁵

Perhaps. But, Simone Weil summarized the problem. Force has turned flesh into stone. Is there a way back? We read this text with revulsion–surely there is no way to redeem this situation, to integrate this woman into the community, to avoid moral injury. The one honorable place for a young captive woman in the social structure described here is as a wife. Could a true marriage possibly be created from this violent and wholly imbalanced  situation? Surely, the captive wife will always remain a captive, and the husband, no matter how kind, will always remain her captor.

The Torah is not teaching us here to become pacifists. By the end of the portion we have encountered Amalek, a genocidal opponent who will pursue Israel down the centuries, reminding us never to drop our guard. Still, the Torah seems concerned about the effect of these battles on the soul of its nation, intent on salvaging their humanity, even in the most dehumanizing settings. Weil, reading Homer as she fled the Nazis with her family, understood the impact of war. She found meaning and comfort in her new Catholic faith. But she might also have looked again to the Torah. Rather than accepting the inevitability of the objectification of humans, it offers strategies to rehabilitate, to rehumanize a society marred by war.

Between the discussion of war at the end of Shoftim and the resumption of this discussion at the start of Ki Teitzei, there is a brief and odd interlude, parashat eglah arufa. It begins with a person found killed in a ravine, with no information about the victim or their killer. Dam naki–innocent blood has been spilled, and the land has been polluted. This solitary death is depicted as a national crisis–requiring an ornate expiation ceremony with the elders expected to show up in that lonely ravine to make pronouncements over a broken-necked calf. Why? It was just a random dead person, arguably inconsequential in the context of war described just before and after.

Its methods may seem bizarre from our current point of view, but with the instances of the captive wife and the eglah arufah Torah is teaching us that life must be reconsecrated, that force and war must not succeed in turning people into objects forever. The evil cannot be undone, but the survivors –victors and victims –are called to reassert the divine image discernible in the face of every person. 

There is a long tradition of reading the opening lines of Parashat Ki Tetzei as an allegory for the internal struggle with our evil intention. For example, here is how Rabbi Moshe Chaim Efraim, grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, reads it in Degel Machaneh Efraim: When you go to war with your enemy–with your own evil impulse–God will place him in your hand–giving you self control. And you will see a beautiful woman–this refers to the Shekhinah, imprisoned as a consequence of our sin, and waiting for us to reform ourselves, and thereby to redeem her. 

The two readings of going out to war, literal and allegorical, are linked by the interiority of conflict. External circumstances may change, but the mark of violence, of evil, remains within. This is the truth of Psalm 126, that those returning to Zion remain in a sense still captive, b’shuv Adonai et shivyat Zion. And yet their journey continues, dream-like, until the joy of human endeavor, of sowing and reaping in the field, allows a spiritual return from the dehumanizing experience of war to the redemptive labors of life. 

We have experienced terrible things this past year, mostly from afar, but we have not escaped the effects of war. We are grieving the suffering of our family and friends in Israel, and have mostly turned away from the suffering of their neighbors in Gaza. It has been, perhaps, too much to bear, but the burden is being borne nonetheless. 100 or so Israelis remain in captivity. Tens of thousands remain exiled from their homes in northern Israel. And hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese are likewise displaced, living in dread. The evil unleashed by Hamas remains uncontained, even if their fighting forces have been degraded. The divine image is also damaged and degraded. As the Degel Machaneh Efraim taught, the Shekhinah is captive, suffering together with all the people who have been crushed by this conflict. 

As we approach the Day of Judgment, let us consider how we too may be held captive–by fear, anger, yearning for absolute victory, for revenge. Instead, our spiritual, moral, and political imperative is to pursue life, whatever life may yet be salvaged. זכרנו לחיים– May we remember to pursue wholeness and vitality in the new year with courage and conviction. May we as people, and as A People, be redeemed from captivity and restored to life. And may the divine presence emerge from captivity, and bless us again with peace.

Notes

1  רש”י תהילים פרק קכו פסוק א. בשוב ה’ את שיבת ציון – מגלות בבל היינו כחולמים: 
2 Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, p.1211. Compare Deut. 30:3, and Job 42:10 with variants. It’s also arguable whether these verbs are hifil or qal, transitive or intransitive. 

דברים פרשת ניצבים פרק ל פסוק ג. וְשָׁ֨ב ה֧’ אֱלֹהֶ֛יךָ אֶת־שְׁבוּתְךָ֖ וְרִחֲמֶ֑ךָ וְשָׁ֗ב וְקִבֶּצְךָ֙ מִכָּל־הָ֣עַמִּ֔ים אֲשֶׁ֧ר הֱפִֽיצְךָ֛ ה֥’ אֱלֹהֶ֖יךָ שָֽׁמָּה: איוב פרק מב פסוק י. וַֽה֗’ שָׁ֚ב אֶת־שבית שְׁב֣וּת אִיּ֔וֹב בְּהִֽתְפַּֽלְל֖וֹ בְּעַ֣ד רֵעֵ֑הוּ וַיֹּ֧סֶף ה֛’ אֶת־כָּל־אֲשֶׁ֥ר לְאִיּ֖וֹב לְמִשְׁנֶֽה:
3  רד”ק תהלים פרק קכו פסוק א. שיבת, ענין תשובה, שישובו בני ציון לה’. מצודת ציון שם. שיבת – מלשון שבי: 
4 Cited from Judith Thurman, “Desperately Seeking: The Supreme Contradictions of Simone Weil” in The New Yorker, Sep. 9, 2024, p.60. Remaining Weil quotes from her full essay.
5 Because most of Israel’s fighting force remains male, the conflict has played out differently for women and men. Organizations like פורום נשות המילואימניקים have started to address some of these issues, but gender imbalances in peacetime are only exacerbated in war. See the Israel Story feature, Wartime Diaries: Sapir Bluzer, September 9, 2024.