Bidirectional Ethics in Parashat Ki Teitzei

 Bidirectional Ethics in Parashat Ki Teitzei

Rabbi Ari Kahn

 

The opening of Parashat Ki Teitzei is morally difficult. A man goes out to war, sees a woman among the captives, and the Torah records his desire:

 

         וְרָאִיתָ בַּשִּׁבְיָה אֵשֶׁת יְפַת־תֹּאַר וְחָשַׁקְתָּ בָהּ וְלָקַחְתָּ לְךָ לְאִשָּׁה  

 

And you see among the captives a woman of beautiful form, and you desire her, and you would take her for yourself as a wife. (Devarim 21:11)

 

Rashi explains that the Torah is speaking here against the yetzer hara. Had the relationship been forbidden outright, the man would have taken her in prohibition. The Torah therefore makes room for a concession that would otherwise have no place in its legal system.

 

The difficulty is not incidental. Later in the same passage the Torah itself describes the woman’s experience with the language of affliction:

 

וְהָיָה אִם־לֹא חָפַצְתָּ בָּהּ וְשִׁלַּחְתָּהּ לְנַפְשָׁהּ וּמָכֹר לֹא־תִמְכְּרֶנָּה בַּכֶּסֶף לֹא־תִתְעַמֵּר בָּהּ תַּחַת אֲשֶׁר עִנִּיתָהּ      

 

And it shall be, if you do not desire her, that you shall send her away for yourself; you shall not sell her for money, you shall not mistreat her, because you have afflicted her. (Devarim 21:14)

 

She is not treated as property. Once the process is complete she becomes a wife, with the legal standing the Torah grants a wife. That elevation is itself a form of restraint built into the concession. Yet the starting point remains difficult.

 

What Rashi develops from the sequence is less a legal justification than a theory of moral psychology. Immediately after the laws of the captive woman comes the case of the man with two wives, one loved and one hated. Rashi reads the juxtaposition as causal:

 

ולקחת לך לאשה – לא דברה תורה אלא כנגד יצר הרע... אבל אם נשאה סופו להיות שונאה... וסופו להוליד ממנה בן סורר ומורה, לכך נסמכו פרשיות הללו  

 

“And you would take her for yourself as a wife” – the Torah spoke only against the evil inclination... but if he marries her, in the end he will hate her... and in the end he will beget from her a stubborn and rebellious son; therefore these sections were juxtaposed. (Rashi, Devarim 21:11)

 

The repeated use of the word sofo (in the end or eventually) marks the logic with precision. The Torah has already seen where the trajectory ends and intervenes while there is still time. The same pressure appears in the laws of the ben sorer umoreh itself. The young man has not yet committed capital crimes, yet the Torah judges him according to his end:

 

 בן סורר ומורה נהרג על שם סופו... אמרה תורה ימות זכאי ואל ימות חייב  

 

The stubborn and rebellious son is put to death on account of his end... the Torah said, Let him die while still innocent, and let him not die guilty. (Rashi, Devarim 21:18)

 

Here the Torah confronts the yetzer not with abstract prohibition alone, but with the concrete future generated by present desire. An act is never only what it is at the moment it occurs; it already contains the direction in which it is moving.

 

The law of the mamzer introduces a different, and more troubling, form of intergenerational consequence. Here the future generation does not represent a predicted danger; it bears a status produced by the prior generation’s transgression. The two cases belong in the same discussion of how present action reaches beyond itself, yet they are not simply parallel forms of preventive judgment.

 

The same forward-looking perspective appears in the positive sequence that begins with the commandment of sending away the mother bird. Rashi reads the commandments that follow as progressive opportunities:

 

כי תבנה בית חדש – אם קיימת מצות שלוח הקן סופך לבנות בית חדש ותקיים מצות מעקה, שמצוה גוררת מצוה  

 

“When you build a new house” – if you have fulfilled the commandment of sending away the mother bird, you will in the end build a new house and fulfill the commandment of the railing, for one commandment leads to another. (Rashi, Devarim 22:8)

 

The repeated sofo does more than describe what will happen. It changes the way the Torah asks us to read the present.

 

A different claim appears a few verses later, in the laws concerning the hanged body. The Torah requires that the body not remain overnight, for a hanged person is a curse of God. Rashi cites the baraita:

 

משל לשני אחים תאומים... אחד נעשה מלך ואחד יצא לליסטיות ונתלה, כל הרואה אותו אומר המלך תלוי  

 

It is comparable to two twin brothers... one became king and the other turned to banditry and was hanged; whoever sees him says, “The king is hanging.” (Rashi, Devarim 21:23, citing Sanhedrin 46b)

 

Even the criminal still bears the divine image. Leaving him suspended is a desecration of the King. Radak’s formulation can be read as pressing the point further: violence against another human being is not only destruction of God’s handiwork but also a deformation of the perpetrator’s own humanity. The Alter of Slabodka draws the ethical conclusion. Contemplation of human greatness and the holiness of the divine image should itself generate reverence and moral elevation. When the dignity of the human being is fully internalized, certain acts become unthinkable.

 

This recognition of tzelem Elokim does not stand apart as another direction. It supplies the center from which both memory and anticipation become obligatory. Without an internalized sense of human dignity, the past remains mere history and the future remains mere calculation. The tzelem anchors both in the present.

 

The text then turns explicitly to memory. Again and again the text commands zachor. Remember what God did to Miriam. Remember what Amalek did on the way. Most insistently:

 

 וְזָכַרְתָּ כִּי־עֶבֶד הָיִיתָ בְּמִצְרַיִם וַיִּפְדְּךָ יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ מִשָּׁם עַל־כֵּן אָנֹכִי מְצַוְּךָ לַעֲשׂוֹת אֶת־הַדָּבָר הַזֶּה  

 

And you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this thing. (Devarim 24:18; see also 24:22)

 

These memories are attached directly to the laws that protect the stranger, the orphan, and the widow, and to the agricultural gifts that must be left for them. The past is not nostalgia. It is the ground of obligation. Those who have known powerlessness are forbidden to reproduce it.

 

The memory of Egypt, however, is more than a recollection of suffering. The Torah repeatedly invokes Egypt not merely as an experience of victimhood, but as a warning about the kind of society Israel must never become. Egypt appears as organized domination by political power. Bereishit already links the lush image of the Jordan plain to the land of Egypt in Lot’s gaze:

 

 וַיִּשָּׂא־לוֹט אֶת־עֵינָיו וַיַּרְא אֶת־כָּל־כִּכַּר הַיַּרְדֵּן כִּי כֻלָּהּ מַשְׁקֶה... כְּגַן־יְהוָה כְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם  

 

And Lot lifted up his eyes and saw all the plain of the Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere... like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt. (Bereishit 13:10)

 

Ezekiel later supplies the moral profile of Sodom:

 

הִנֵּה־זֶה הָיָה עֲוֹן סְדֹם אֲחוֹתֵךְ גָּאוֹן שִׂבְעַת־לֶחֶם וְשַׁלְוַת הַשְׁקֵט הָיָה לָהּ וְלִבְנוֹתֶיהָ וְיַד־עָנִי וְאֶבְיוֹן לֹא הֶחֱזִיקָה  

 

Behold, this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: pride, excess of bread, and careless ease were hers and her daughters’, and she did not strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. (Yechezkel 16:49)

 

Sodom appears as social indifference and the hoarding of abundance. Egypt and Sodom are different expressions of the same deeper failure: power that forgets vulnerability and transforms abundance into oppression. Israel’s obligation is not to reproduce either structure.

 

The chapter’s use of to’eva places commercial dishonesty and forbidden marital reversal within the same vocabulary of moral disorder:

 

 כִּי תוֹעֲבַת יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ כָּל־עֹשֵׂה אֵלֶּה כֹּל עֹשֵׂה עָוֶל  

 

For all who do these things, all who act dishonestly, are an abomination to the Lord your God. (Devarim 25:16)

 

לֹא־יוּכַל בַּעְלָהּ הָרִאשׁוֹן אֲשֶׁר־שִׁלְּחָהּ לָשׁוּב לְקַחְתָּהּ לִהְיוֹת לוֹ לְאִשָּׁה אַחֲרֵי אֲשֶׁר הֻטַּמָּאָה כִּי־תוֹעֵבָה הִוא לִפְנֵי ה׳  

 

Her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife after she has been defiled, for that is an abomination before the Lord. (Devarim 24:4)

 

The same word is used for both. The Torah does not treat dishonest commerce as a separate moral universe. The merchant’s scale and the integrity of family life are described with the same vocabulary.

 

Lot’s story offers an intertextual parallel. He separates from Avraham, chooses the Egypt-like plain, and settles in Sodom. He enters a city that cannot tolerate the ethical treatment of the stranger. Within a short time the situation turns to sexual violence; after the destruction it descends into incest. Bereishit narrates Lot’s choice at the level of appearance—fertility, abundance, and promise. The wider biblical canon supplies the retrospective moral diagnosis. His choice of the Egypt-like plain places him on a trajectory whose moral destination is Sodom.

 

The language of sofo that dominates the opening of the parasha provides the key. Lot sees the Jordan plain at its beginning; the Torah sees it at its end. He sees abundance. The Torah sees Sodom.

 

Memory of Egyptian humiliation teaches Israel to recognize the danger. The Torah then seeks to interrupt that danger before it becomes a settled way of life. The dignity of the tzelem holds both directions in the present, transforming memory into obligation and foresight into restraint.

 

The Torah in this parasha moves in two directions at once. It turns Israel backward toward the memory of Egypt and forward toward the consequences of present action. The tzelem holds those directions together in the present. Both are directed especially toward the economic and social spaces where cruelty becomes ordinary, diffuse, and difficult to see. When memory remains alive, yesterday’s humiliation becomes a refusal to reproduce humiliation in others. When memory fades, the victim’s identity can simply be inverted, and the old cruelty returns under a new name. Ki Teitzei therefore seeks to ensure that yesterday’s victims do not become tomorrow’s Sodom.