Torah This Week
Welcome to Torah This Week, where you will find thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the Torah portion of the week.
MATTOT-MASEI
MATTOT
Numbers (30:2 - 36:13)
Mattot is a disturbing Torah portion. In depicting the early Hebrews' war with the Midianites, it contains a command to the Hebrews to wipe out most of the Midianites.
To place the commandment in context, one must remember that three thousand years ago, this is how wars were fought. "Ancient documents from Mesopotamia to Egypt," a recent book notes, "abound in joyous references to annihilating neighbors."
The main reason these injunctions so disturb us is because the Bible itself has sensitized us to deeply respecting each human life. As the late Princeton philosopher Walter Kaufmann wrote, "The reproach of callousness and insufficient social conscience can hardly be raised. Our social conscience comes largely from the religion of Moses." In large measure, it is only because of other verses in the Bible commanding us to love our neighbors and to love the stranger that the verses commanding total war trouble us. "[But] to find the spirit of the religion of the Old Testament in [these biblical passages]," Kaufmann added, "is like finding the distinctive genius of America in the men who slaughtered the Indians."
The Bible's troubling ethics of warfare can perhaps be best explained in terms of monotheism's struggle to survive. After all, it was long a minority movement with a different theology and ethical system than the rest of the world. It developed and expanded because it had one small corner in the world where it grew undisturbed. Had the Hebrews continued to reside amid the pagan, child sacrificing Canaanites, monotheism itself almost certainly would have died.
(Joseph Telushkin)
MASEI
(Numbers 33:1 - 36:13)
In this parsha, God directs Moses to set aside cities "to serve...as cities of refuge to which a killer who has killed a person unintentionally may flee" (Num. 35:11). The Torah distinguishes between intentional murder and accidental killing. The former is punishable by death and the sentence is carried out by the victim's closest relative. When death is accidental, the killer may seek protection in the city of refuge; if he leaves the city, the deceased's relative may kill him with impunity. The Israelites are told, "You shall not pollute the land in which you live; for blood pollutes the land...in which I Myself abide" (35:33ff.). God cannot dwell in a land defiled.
If blood defiles the land, why distinguish between intentional and accidental homicide? If blood is a pollutant, why allow capital punishment? If one who kills accidentally is spared capital punishment and may flee to a city of refuge, why may the victim's relative kill him if he leaves the city? Why does the Torah forbid monetary compensation in the case of murder, insisting that the killer be executed?
Whether or not we agree with the penalties set here, it is clear that several values are at work. The Torah values human life. To kill intentionally is to deny another's humanness; perhaps the Torah believes that in doing so the murderer has hopelessly compromised his own humanity. Murder is an outrageous crime; to accept monetary compensation would be to place a fixed value on that which is priceless. In the case of accidental death, the community may protect the killer, but the gravity of his act must be recognized through exile.
The Torah cannot prevent human beings from killing each other. It reminds us, however, that each human life has infinite value and that no life can be taken without consequences.
(Dvora Weisberg)
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