Parashat Ki Teitzei begins with a passage that might (should?) trouble us.
The Torah imagines an Israelite soldier who sees a woman among the captives of war and desires her. It then establishes rules governing what happens next: she is brought into his home, given time to mourn, and only afterward may he marry her. If he no longer wants her, he cannot sell her or treat her as property.
None of this makes the passage comfortable. Nor should it.
By our moral standards, the entire situation is built upon a horrifying imbalance of power. She is a captive. He is her captor. Whatever protections the Torah attempts to place around her, we cannot pretend that the relationship itself is one we would ever accept today.
So what are we, as Reform Jews, supposed to do with a Torah that contains passages like this? We wrestle with it.
Reform Judaism does not require us to believe that every law in Torah represents the final word of God for every generation. It asks something harder: that we take the text seriously enough to argue with it. And perhaps that is precisely what Ki Teitzei can teach us about power.
Power systems are often easiest to recognize when they belong to someone else, or to another era. We can look back at the ancient world and immediately see the inequalities built into its assumptions about gender, warfare, captivity, and social status. It is much harder to recognize the systems of power in which we participate. Who has power? Who does not? How is power acquired, protected, restrained, or abused? What responsibilities come with possessing it? And what happens when a system we have inherited no longer reflects the values we believe it should?
Torah does not always give us answers we can endorse. Sometimes it gives us something to wrestle with. And that wrestling matters. Because if we only encounter ideas we already agree with, we are not really learning; we are simply rehearsing and reaffirming ourselves.
Jewish tradition asks more of us. It asks us to encounter difficult texts, difficult arguments, and difficult people with enough confidence to remain in the conversation. In fact, the Talmud teaches that one who blows a shofar in a cistern has not fulfilled hearing the shofar, because they may have heard an echo. Perhaps this is the original perception of the proverbial echo chamber. Perhaps especially when we disagree.
This week, I invite you to join us for Wrestling with the Moment, where we will explore one of the oldest and most complicated human questions: What is power? Who gets it? And what should we do with it once we have it?