Edited and Adapted from Ari’s Grill & Torah on Sept. 1, 2017
This week’s parsha, Ki Teitzei, has the most commandments of all the parshiot in the Torah. But it’s a little bit of a strange parsha, because it mixes things that look like kindness with cruelty, and things that today would seem to be racist and chauvinistic, while at the same time talking about having appreciation even for inanimate objects and for animals.
So the question is: Where does this all fit?
The parsha opens up, “Ki teitzei lamilchama al oyvecha” — “When you go out to war against your enemy.” The pasuk goes on, “Unetano Hashem Elokecha beyadecha” — God will give your enemies into your hands. He’ll give you victory. And then it says, “Veshavita shivyo” — and you will take captives.
First of all, let’s ask a question about this first pasuk. It says, “Ki teitzei lamilchama” — when we go out to war. Then it says that God will give our enemies into our hands. They will basically lose the war.
The question is: If God is giving the enemies into our hands, what do I have to go out for? Just snap Your fingers, God. Make a miracle. I don’t have to go to war, right?
During Hanukkah, we know that the few defeated the many and the weak defeated the strong. So what do we need to fight for? God can just snap His fingers and let the war be over.
No. There’s a matter of effort that we have to make in this world. It’s not, “God, save me,” in the sense that we do nothing. It’s not, “It won’t work, but hopefully God will help me.” That’s not the way it works in Judaism.
We go out to war. We fight our enemies. And God gives our enemies into our hands.
But if the parsha starts off with war, you would think the whole parsha would be dealing with enemies, war, and the rules surrounding war. You wouldn’t expect it to suddenly be talking about civil matters—how you behave with your wife, how a wife behaves with her husband, paying people, returning property.
If you’re watching an action movie, you don’t expect it to suddenly turn into a romance. If you’re watching Rambo or some other action movie, you don’t expect to suddenly get “and the princess lived happily ever after.” If I wanted to see that, I would have gone to another movie.
So in a parsha that begins with war, you would expect the whole parsha to deal with war: how to behave during war, not cutting down trees—which is actually a commandment in Judaism—what to do with POWs, and things like that.
And the truth is, the parsha does start off that way.
But then it goes into some really wild stuff.
It goes into the relationship between husband and wife. How should people behave toward each other? What happens when there is suspicion between them?
What does that have to do with war?
Then it goes into capital punishment, the death penalty in Judaism. We know there is such a thing, although it was extraordinarily difficult to carry out. The Sanhedrin in Yerushalayim—the high court, the real Supreme Court, not what we have today in Israel—could impose a death penalty under very strict conditions.
But even if a person deserved the death penalty and was executed, the Torah says you have to take the body down right away.
“Ki kilelat Elokim talui” — “For a hanging human body is a curse of God.”
What does that mean?
Man was created in tzelem Elokim, in the image of God, if you want a bad translation. Therefore, even when someone did evil things and deserved the punishment, you take the body down and bury it.
Now, what does that have to do with our lives?
For example, if a terrorist comes to murder Jews and we kill the terrorist, I’m not talking here about Israeli law. I’m talking about morality according to the Torah. There is no compassion for terrorists according to the Torah. Zero.
I personally believe that compassion for terrorists is misplaced compassion. In Judaism we say that someone who is compassionate to the cruel will, at the end of the day, be cruel to those who deserve compassion.
So the Torah says yes: If capital punishment is deserved, it is carried out.
But afterward, you take the body down. You bury it with respect.
Why? Because as long as that body is hanging there, it is like a curse of God. Human beings are created b’tzelem Elokim, with something of the spirit of HaKadosh Baruch Hu.
So first the parsha talks about how a husband and wife behave toward one another. Then it talks about the death penalty. Again, these are civil matters. We are no longer talking about war with enemies.
Then it talks about something completely different.
If you’re walking down the street and you see your friend’s ox or donkey wandering around lost, or you find his shirt or jacket, you have a commandment to pick it up, keep it safe, and give it back to the rightful owner.
Again, that’s awesome. That’s great.
But what does it have to do with war?
We’re talking about fighting external enemies, and suddenly the Torah tells me that if I find someone’s lost belongings, I have to take care of them and return them.
This is not the place!
Again, if I went into the movie theater to see an action movie and suddenly got a romance movie, I’d walk out.
So what does returning someone’s belongings have to do with war?
But it gets better.
If you’re walking down the street and you see your neighbor’s or friend’s animal fall, and everything it is carrying falls off its back, you are not allowed to ignore it. You have to stop and help the person put everything back onto the animal.
Mamash last night, at four o’clock in the morning, I was coming back from Hevron and a car in front of me spun out of control and smashed into the divider. I saw that it had an Israeli license plate and I stopped at the side of the road.
There was oil all over the road. Intentional or not by the Arabs, I don’t know, but it was all over the road.
And in my mind I’m thinking: This week’s parsha. This week’s Torah portion.
You see someone in trouble, you have to stop and help him.
Of course that’s the right thing to do. But again, what does that have to do with war? What does it have to do with the rules of engagement?
Nothing.
We’re talking about being kind, and on the other hand we’re talking about going to war. You can imagine the social justice warriors saying, “You’re kind to people, but you want to kill people?”
Then the Torah moves into a completely different area.
It says that a man should not wear a woman’s clothing or a woman wear a man’s clothing.
Cross-dressing.
What does this have to do with war?
There’s no question, by the way, that the Torah considers this an abomination. But again, abomination or not, what does it have to do with war? I’m not going into the whole subject of cross-dressing. I’m not going there.
Then the Torah goes further.
The next commandment is shiluach haken. If you find a bird’s nest, you have to shoo away the mother bird before taking the young.
One of the reasons discussed is compassion.
Again, wonderful.
And by the way, this is one of the only commandments in the Torah for which long life is explicitly given as a reward. I’m not going into the commandment itself.
But what does that kind of compassion have to do with war?
Then it really goes off the chart.
The Torah talks about kilayim. You can’t plant two different kinds together. You can’t have an ox and a donkey pull a plow together. Again, there is an element of compassion there, because one is stronger or moves differently and the other will suffer.
Wonderful.
But again, what does this have to do with war?
And toward the end of the parsha, it tells us that we have to pay our workers on time.
Again, wonderful.
What does that have to do with war?
You might answer: Maybe the Torah is teaching that one must have compassion during war.
That sounds like a great answer, but factually, according to Judaism, that is not the answer. We know the rules of engagement according to Judaism. We know how the kings fought wars. There was no compassion for an enemy who had to be fought.
David HaMelech, King David, fought many wars and was victorious. Yet he was not allowed to build the Temple because he had blood on his hands.
Blood on his hands.
He was killing the enemies of Israel.
So what is going on here?
Let’s go back to the original statement:
“Ki teitzei lamilchama” — when you go out to war.
“Al oyvecha” — against your enemies.
“Unetana Hashem Elokecha beyadecha” — and God will give them into your hands.
There seems to be almost a guarantee that God will allow us to win.
But we’ve lost wars before.
So what does that mean?
We don’t even have to go back very far in Jewish history. People ask all the time, “Where was God in the Holocaust?” The enemies came against us and tried to destroy us, to annihilate us.
So what does this pasuk mean when it says that when we go out to war, God will give our enemies into our hands?
The connection is simple.
For people who believe that there is never any reason for war—we’ll call them leftists for argument’s sake—there is no connection between these subjects. There is no connection between going out and having to kill people in war and acting like a basic human being in your everyday life.
But to someone who has morals, and whose morals are not dependent on his own opinion, they are completely intertwined.
Because although I go out to war, I have to keep morals.
The issue is: Who decides morality?
Only God decides the morals.
At any point in time, if I decide that A, B and C are moral when according to God they are not, I have become immoral.
Now what does that have to do with war?
The issue is the following.
We, Bnei Yisrael, the nation of Israel, the State of Israel today, have hundreds of millions of Muslims around us. None of these countries really want us to exist, including countries with which we have made peace, quote-unquote. They would love to see us disappear tomorrow.
We are only a few million Jews in Israel.
If anyone thinks we are surviving here only because of the might of the IDF—and you’re looking at a guy who is in the IDF, deals with them, and supports them at every turn—I’m not bashing the IDF.
IDF soldiers are courageous. The men and women are courageous beyond belief. I’m there. I’ve seen it.
But if we think our victories depend only upon how courageous they are, that’s a little bit crazy.
You can say, “We have an army today.”
That’s true.
But the point is that we are not surviving because of that alone.
The army is the tool.
And thank God, we have the courageous men and women of the IDF.
But the pasuk says, “Unetana Hashem beyadecha” — Hashem will give your enemies into your hands.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have to work.
Yes, we have to go out with the army. We have to fight, and we have to fight hard.
But at the end of the day, every victory is a miracle.
We see that today for sure. Every victory Israel has had is a miracle beyond belief.
Look at the 1948 War. We came out of the camps. Sephardi Jews came from Arab countries. Jews had had no real knowledge of warfare for 2,000 years. Zero. No training.
In 1948, five or six Arab countries came against a two-week-old Israel.
We’re smaller than the size of New Jersey, and the Arab countries around us are enormously larger than the State of Israel. They outnumbered us by I don’t know how many to one.
And we won that war.
Totally miraculous.
Then 1967. Again, Arab countries were calling for our destruction and annihilation.
And in six days—six days—we completely defeated the Arab armies facing us and liberated areas we had not controlled in 2,000 years.
Miraculous.
Miraculous.
I’ve seen miracles in war myself, but I’m not going to go into that right now.
That’s what we are dependent on.
Yes, we need brave soldiers who fight.
But without those miracles, without God on our side, it ain’t going to work.
So when is God on our side?
Having brave soldiers is very, very important. It’s one of the commandments in the Torah. If you are fearful to go out to war, you are not allowed to go out to war. That was in last week’s parsha. Why? Because you can make everyone else fearful and cause the nation to lose the war.
So yes, being brave is very important in war.
However, when the Torah says Hashem is going to give our enemies into our hands, when does that happen?
That’s where all the other issues in this parsha come in.
How do you relate to your husband or wife?
Do you pay your workers on time?
Do you return someone’s property?
Do you behave with compassion where compassion is required?
Do you keep morality in the way the Torah defines morality?
Then God will give your enemies into your hands.
We’re fighting for the Land of Israel, which is the Holy Land of Israel. We are indigenous to this land as a Jewish religion and nation.
There is only one purpose for us being here, and that is to fulfill our potential as the Jewish nation.
If we’re not fulfilling that potential, there’s no reason for us to be here.
Not in terms of me. In terms of God.
There is absolutely none.
Imagine someone wants to go to an Olympic training camp. He goes to the Olympic camp, but he’s sitting around, rusting away and eating like a pig all day. He isn’t training.
They’ll kick him out.
There is no point in him being there.
The whole point of being in an Olympic camp is to work hard to win an Olympic medal.
The whole point of the nation of Israel being in the Land of Israel is to reach our potential as the Jewish people in the Land of Israel.
If we’re not reaching that potential, then there is no point in us being here.
Therefore, the parsha begins by saying that God will give our enemies into our hands, but then it moves into an entire code of ethics covering everything in life.
It’s not that all these commandments have to do with war.
They have to do with our victory.
They have to do with the last part of the pasuk: God will give your enemies into your hands if the rest of the parsha is carried out.
And maybe that is why this week’s parsha has the most commandments of all the parshiot in the Torah.
Because if we’re talking about war, and we’re talking about victory, there’s a big “if” there.
Capital I. Capital F.
You will win the wars—if.
If you keep the moral code.
And that moral code has to do with everything in life.
So it’s not about the war.
It’s about the victory.
That is why a parsha that begins by talking about victory in war gives us a moral code covering virtually every area of life.
Because the secret to victory is keeping that moral code.
The Torah tells us that a Moabite cannot enter the nation of Israel. It tells us not to cross-dress. It gives us rules that sometimes appear compassionate and rules that sometimes appear cruel.
It is not because someone looks like a good person or a bad person to us at a particular moment.
It is because this is the moral code.
You want to ignore that moral code? That’s fine.
But then you have no purpose in the Land of Israel as a Jewish nation.
That is also why some things in this parsha seem cruel.
They seem cruel.
On the one hand, the Torah tells you that you can’t put two different animals together to pull a plow because they are not of the same strength and one will suffer.
On the other hand, it says that somebody from a particular nation cannot enter the nation of Israel.
Well, where’s the compassion?
The answer is that Judaism isn’t about total compassion, and it isn’t about total cruelty.
There are times to be compassionate, and there are times to be cruel.
When you are compassionate to a terrorist, you are actually being cruel.
When you are cruel to someone who deserves compassion, you’re doing a horrible thing.
Literally a horrible thing.
So there is no coincidence here that the parsha begins by talking about war and then spends so much time talking about a moral code.
I’ll leave you with a joke.
The nations of the world come to God and say, “God, it’s not fair. You chose this Jewish nation and You favor them. It’s just not fair.”
God says, “What are you talking about?”
They say, “You gave them this beautiful land. They can go north for a couple of hours and go skiing. They can go south and go scuba diving. You gave them this beautiful country. It’s not fair. You favor the Jews.”
So God looks at them and says:
“Wait till you see the neighbors I gave them.”
Wishing everyone a wonderful, wonderful weekend. Shabbat shalom from the stunning, beautiful rolling hills of Judea, Israel.
Shut things off on the weekend. Even if you’re not Jewish, shut everything off. Spend time with the family. Spend time with friends.
Take care, everyone. God bless.