This week’s Torah portion consists of Deuteronomy 21:10–25:19. Listen here and here.
* You can take a woman captive and make her your wife, but first you have to let her shave her head and mourn her family for 30 days. This seems like a realistic way of dealing with human nature. According to Talmudic law, a Jew after a battle may rape a woman captive once, but after that, if he still wants to marry her, he has to follow the above.
* Deut. 22:5: A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.”
* 13 If a man takes a wife and, after sleeping with her, dislikes her 14 and slanders her and gives her a bad name, saying, “I married this woman, but when I approached her, I did not find proof of her virginity,” 15 then the young woman’s father and mother shall bring to the town elders at the gate proof that she was a virgin. 16 Her father will say to the elders, “I gave my daughter in marriage to this man, but he dislikes her. 17 Now he has slandered her and said, ‘I did not find your daughter to be a virgin.’ But here is the proof of my daughter’s virginity.” Then her parents shall display the cloth before the elders of the town, 18 and the elders shall take the man and punish him. 19 They shall fine him a hundred shekels[b] of silver and give them to the young woman’s father, because this man has given an Israelite virgin a bad name. She shall continue to be his wife; he must not divorce her as long as he lives.
20 If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the young woman’s virginity can be found, 21 she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done an outrageous thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father’s house. You must purge the evil from among you.
22 If a man is found sleeping with another man’s wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die. You must purge the evil from Israel.
23 If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, 24 you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death—the young woman because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man’s wife. You must purge the evil from among you.
25 But if out in the country a man happens to meet a young woman pledged to be married and rapes her, only the man who has done this shall die. 26 Do nothing to the woman; she has committed no sin deserving death. This case is like that of someone who attacks and murders a neighbor, 27 for the man found the young woman out in the country, and though the betrothed woman screamed, there was no one to rescue her.
28 If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, 29 he shall pay her father fifty shekels[c] of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.
* Exclusion From the Assembly
23 [a]No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord.
2 No one born of a forbidden marriage[b] nor any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord, not even in the tenth generation.
3 No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord, not even in the tenth generation. 4 For they did not come to meet you with bread and water on your way when you came out of Egypt, and they hired Balaam son of Beor from Pethor in Aram Naharaim[c] to pronounce a curse on you. 5 However, the Lord your God would not listen to Balaam but turned the curse into a blessing for you, because the Lord your God loves you. 6 Do not seek a treaty of friendship with them as long as you live.
7 Do not despise an Edomite, for the Edomites are related to you. Do not despise an Egyptian, because you resided as foreigners in their country. 8 The third generation of children born to them may enter the assembly of the Lord.
[In the Jewish tradition, Edom equals the West, it equals whites.]
Uncleanness in the Camp
9 When you are encamped against your enemies, keep away from everything impure. 10 If one of your men is unclean because of a nocturnal emission, he is to go outside the camp and stay there. 11 But as evening approaches he is to wash himself, and at sunset he may return to the camp.
12 Designate a place outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourself. 13 As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement. 14 For the Lord your God moves about in your camp to protect you and to deliver your enemies to you. Your camp must be holy, so that he will not see among you anything indecent and turn away from you.
* Dealing with excrement is related to God walking among you. Judaism is realistic. It is focused on the nitty gritty realities of life.
* Deut. 23:15: ” If a slave has taken refuge with you, do not hand them over to their master.”
If a slave can run away and can’t be forcefully returned, you can’t really have slavery.
* 17 No Israelite man or woman is to become a shrine prostitute. 18 You must not bring the earnings of a female prostitute or of a male prostitute[d] into the house of the Lord your God to pay any vow, because the Lord your God detests them both.
19 Do not charge a fellow Israelite interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest. 20 You may charge a foreigner interest, but not a fellow Israelite, so that the Lord your God may bless you in everything you put your hand to in the land you are entering to possess.
* 24 If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, 2 and if after she leaves his house she becomes the wife of another man, 3 and her second husband dislikes her and writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, or if he dies, 4 then her first husband, who divorced her, is not allowed to marry her again after she has been defiled. That would be detestable in the eyes of the Lord. Do not bring sin upon the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance.
5 If a man has recently married, he must not be sent to war or have any other duty laid on him. For one year he is to be free to stay at home and bring happiness to the wife he has married.
* 17 Remember what the Amalekites did to you along the way when you came out of Egypt. 18 When you were weary and worn out, they met you on your journey and attacked all who were lagging behind; they had no fear of God. 19 When the Lord your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!
Every people is going to have enemies. You can think of your enemy as evil, or you can think of your enemy as an adversary with whom you have conflicting interests. The Bible vs the Carl Schmitt approach.
* What is a Nazi? A neo-Nazi? A National Socialist? We’ll use the relevant Wikipedia entries as our shared text.
* A goy messaged me: “Jewish New Testament scholar rethinks homosexuality. Hello fellow whites, let’s reform your religion together. I don’t like it. The reasoning in that last paragraph is such a girlish attempt at Socratic thinking. Fake dialectic. I’m sure I’d like her as a person, but Jewish women should stay out of Christian theological concerns… I mean, who is the best-known female gentile Talmud scholar?”
Luke: “Perhaps Christine Hayes at Yale, you hater. #LoveWins”
Hayes published 2003’s award-winning Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud.
In the 19th Century, we got the first important gentile scholars of Talmud.
* Amy-Jill Levine writes:
Not Good to be Alone: Rethinking the Bible and Homosexuality
Conservative readers regard Scripture as having authority over their lives, and they attempt to be faithful to texts they see as divinely revealed. They are not reading erroneously when it comes to same-sex relations: the Bible does not condone such relationships.
Further, many of these same conservative readers would also forbid women’s ordination, but they are by no means bigoted against mothers, wives, or daughters. Indeed, they may struggle to follow the divine word over their personal preference regarding women’s ecclesial roles.
Similarly, they may believe that individuals who are not baptized are bound for hell, but that view does not necessarily make them haters of individual Jews, Hindus, Buddhists or Muslims. Rather, they are deeply concerned for their neighbours’ souls. They do not hate gay people, any more than they hate women, or non-Christians. Liberals should at least recognize these individuals as acting according to their convictions in granting certain Scriptures precedence over secular culture.
* Amy-Jill Levine writes:
Holy Week and the Hatred of the Jews: How to Avoid Anti-Judaism this Easter
Jesus of Nazareth, charged by the Roman authorities with the sedition, dies on a Roman cross. But Jews – the collective, all Jews – become known as “Christ-killers.”
Still haunting, the legacy of that charge becomes acute during Holy Week, when pastors and priests who speak about the death of Jesus have to talk about “the Jews.”
Every year, the same difficulty surfaces: how can a gospel of love be proclaimed, if that same gospel is heard to promote hatred of Jesus’s own people?
The charge against “the Jews” permeates the pages of the New Testament.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Pilate literally washes his hands while “all the people” – all the Jewish people – clamour for Jesus’s death: “Let him be crucified … His blood be on us and on our children!” (Matthew 27:23, 27).
John’s Gospel identifies the Jews as “from your father the devil” (John 8:44) and blames them for backing Pilate into a corner and forcing him to kill an innocent man.
In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter charges “the entire house of Israel” (Acts 2:36) with crucifying Jesus and so having “killed the Author of life” (Acts 3:14-15). Paul then bluntly refers to “the Jews, who killed the Lord Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 2:14-15).
Perhaps this vilification was inevitable. Jesus’s followers could not understand how the vast majority of Jews could not accept their belief in him as the Messiah. The majority of Jews, in turn, saw no sign of the Messianic age having dawned: no general resurrection of the dead; no ingathering of the exiles to Zion; no end to death, war, disease, or poverty. What was self-evident to one group was incomprehensible to the other. Incomprehension turned to mistrust, and mistrust, on both sides, turned to vilification…
We come finally to our sixth option: admit to the problem and deal with it. There are many ways congregations can address the difficult texts. Put a note in service bulletins to explain the harm the texts have caused. Read the problematic texts silently, or in a whisper. Have Jews today give testimony about how they have been hurt by the texts.
Those who proclaim the problematic verses from the pulpit might imagine a Jewish child sitting in the front pew and take heed: don’t say anything that would hurt this child, and don’t say anything that would cause a member of the congregation to hurt this child. Better still: educate the next generation, so that when they hear the problematic words proclaimed, they have multiple contexts – theological, historical, ethical – by which to understand them.
Christians, hearing the Gospels during Holy Week, should no more hear a message of hatred of Jews than Jews, reading the Book of Esther on Purim, should hate Persians, or celebrating the seder and reliving the time when “we were slaves in Egypt,” should hate Egyptians.
We choose how to read. After two thousand years of enmity, Jews and Christians today can recover and even celebrate our common past, locate Jesus and his earliest followers within rather than over and against Judaism, and live into the time when, as both synagogue and church proclaim, we can love G-d and our neighbour.
* When a goy gets his FICO score, does he feel that the Jews are ranking him?
* I like much of Southern California’s non-native vegetation. When I see a beautiful flower or tree, I rarely ask, is this native? I am not bothered if the vegetation is not native. Yet, there are non-native forms of vegetation that are pernicious. The same principles apply to people. Just as I want a country to select non-native vegetation carefully, I want them to select their immigrants carefully.
