Ki Tetzé 5775 - English

By Rabbi Gustavo Kraselnik

Kol Sheairh Israel – Panama

Ki Tetzei is the Parashah with the largest number of Mitzvot.  According to the Sefer Hajinuj (Rabbi Aharon Halevi, Barcelona, XIII Century), it contains 74 of the 613 Mitzvot in the Torah.  After reading them, it is clear that the insistence on leading a life inspired by the divine guide spans all aspects of existence.  This same idea appears later in rabbinic literature and in medieval codes that include social, economic, family and civil laws and rituals.

However, nowadays -possibly due to our own responsibility- we have generated a fallacy by associating religiosity only with ritual observance.

In the introduction to his book A Code of Jewish Ethics, Rabbi Joseph Teushkin -one of the most prolific and inspiring writers of our times- claims quite correctly that when two Jews speak about a third person’s religiosity, they refer exclusively to his level of ritual observance (“he’s religious, eats Kosher, and keeps the Sabbath”) excluding any consideration on his ethical conduct, as if it were a secondary issue.  

The main point defended by Telushkin throughout his book is that Jewish tradition is essentially ethical.  And to prove that even the Torah shares this vision, he presents several examples.  One of them is associated with three Mitzvot (two of them in our Parashah) that share a particularity: their observance has a defined reward – a long life.  

Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God has commanded you, that you may long endure, and that you may fare well, in the land that the Lord your God is assigning to you. (Ex. 20:12 and Deut. 5:16)

If, along the road, you chance upon a bird's nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs and the mother sitting over the fledglings or on the eggs, do not take the mother together with her young.  Let the mother go, and take only the young, in order that you may fare well and have a long life. (Deut. 22:6-7)

You must have completely honest weights and completely honest measures, if you are to endure long on the soil that the Lord your God is giving you. (Deut. 25:15)

Besides holding the same reward, these three Mitzvot share a concern for ethical issues.  The first one deals with our family relationships (represented by the bond with our parents).  The second refers to the environment (the Mitvah about leaving the mother symbolizes mercy towards animal suffering, like Maimonides explains in the Guide for the Perplexed 3:48).  And the third Mitzvah deals with commercial relationships (exemplified by the transparency of the transaction).  

What is the meaning of living a long life?  Medieval scholars argued whether it was meant as a reward in this world or in the Olam Habah, in the future world; and also if it was meant as a prize born from the intervention of the divine providence or just a natural consequence of our actions.  

Whichever the conclusion may be, what is absolutely clear is that the way in which we behave at the family, social, and commercial level is what determines if we are worthy of the divine reward.  According to the Torah, our fate is played in those three areas.  

I do not pretend by this to propose an apology of Judaism without rituals, nor is this a calling for a humanism without its own identity.  Faced with the furious advance of a ritualism separated from the values that characterize our people, I do believe in the need to reinstate the central importance of ethics in the religious experience that gives meaning to our practices and traditions.  

As the wise Hilel said when the gentile challenged him to summarize the entire Torah while standing on just one foot: “Do not do unto others what you would not want done to you.  This is the entire Torah, the rest is commentary.” (Talmud, Shabbat 31a)

Shabbat Shalom

Gustavo