Parashat Ki Tetze 5768
You Must Not Be Indifferent
Evil goes unchecked when we become callous to suffering, when we fail to live up to our potential as images of the Divine
Many of you know Mr. Karsh because he hands out the programs in the lobby on Saturday morning. Many of you also know that Mr. Karsh is a Holocaust survivor. That’s about as much as I knew about him until yesterday morning. Like every day after minyan, the regulars sat down for cake and coffee, but yesterday, Mr. Karsh – who is usually very quiet – decided to tell us his story of survival in Nazi occupied Poland. With great courage and emotion, Mr. Karsh told us about how he and his family were forced into a ghetto; he told us about how the German soldiers and Ukranian police would torture and kill the Jews. And he told us about the ultimate liquidation of the ghetto in which his mother and sister were brutally murdered. He told us about how he was able to hide from the Nazis and briefly reunite with his father – only to witness his father’s murder at the hands of Ukranian thugs. He told us about his long trek through the small villages and forests of Poland as he searched for safety, and the individuals who either tried to harm him or tried to help him along the way. And he told us how he joined the Jewish underground – the partisans – who hid in the forest. It is a remarkable and terrifying story that testifies to the strength of Mr. Karsh’s spirit. At the end of the story, Arlene Stein, turned to me and asked with despair and bewilderment: “how is it possible for human beings to do such awful things to other people?”
That is probably one of the most important questions that can come out of the Holocaust and many sociological and historical studies have been done aiming at answering that question. In Hitlers’ Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Political Scientist Daniel Goldhagen argued that centuries of anti-Semitism had become so engrained and normalized in German culture, that even quite ordinary people had no problem carrying out Hitler’s orders. In another well-known book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, social theorist Hannah Arendt observed in Adolf Eichmann what she called, “the banality of evil.” Eichmann, she observed, was no more anti-semitic than any other German, nor was he a socio-path, but rather he had willingly accepted the orders of his superiors because they had “normalized the unthinkable” – that is to say, that when people are surrounded by evil, when cruelty and inhumanity have been made normal by a larger group – like the state – ordinary people will follow along. This was proven in a number of sociological experiments in the 1960s and 1970s in which researchers like Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram demonstrated that ordinary people will, given certain conditions, follow orders given to them by authority figures and that when put in a situation in which they see others doing the same, they are more likely to comply.
Still, what is it that happens in a person that prevents them from resisting, from saying no to evil? How do we become desensitized to cruelty? And, if cruel behavior is indeed quite common, how do we condition our minds to protect us from becoming susceptible to group-think and the lure of blind obedience? Let us consider the lessons from this week’s Torah Portion, Ki Tetze.
Parashat Ki Tetze is comprised of a collection of laws. In fact, this Torah portion has more mitzvoth in it than any other parsha in the Chumash – more than 10% of all the 613 mitzvot are found in parashat Ki Tetze. They deal with the rules of war, public safety, property rights and lost objects, forbidden relations, worker’s rights, labor law, fairness in business, and a host of other very important statements of social policy. And right in the middle of all these laws is a rather mundane little rule:
Chapter 22, verse 6 states: “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, in order that you may fare well and have a long life.”
According to the Talmud, shooing away the mother bird is the easiest mitzvah to observe. Indeed, if you tried to take the chicks or the eggs, you would probably scare off the mother bird anyway. But why should we do this? What is the moral underpinning of this law? Elsewhere in the Talmud, the sages use this rule as the basis for prohibiting unnecessary pain to animals (tza’ar ba’alei hayyim). In other words, the mother bird is chased away to spare her the pain and suffering of seeing her offspring taken away. This is the conventional understanding of the text. But the Medieval sage, Moshe Maimonides, observed that this explanation is not likely. Even if we believe that birds are capable of such emotional attachment to their young, how is shooing the mother bird away going to spare her the trauma she will feel when she returns to the nest only to find her young gone? Rambam also observes that this law is related to the prohibition of cooking a kid in its mother’s milk because symbolically, killing a mother and her young at the same time are akin to exterminating the entire species.
Therefore, the mitzvah is not really for the bird’s benefit at all. What the Torah means to teach us instead is that callous acts such as these degrade us. They coarsen us and make cruelty more normal. If we become accustomed to rather banal acts of cruelty, it may lead us to greater inhumanities. Witnessing violence all the time makes it normal and easier to stomach. Think about how easy it is – in a culture so accustomed to violence, both real and cinamagraphic – to read the horrors described in the newspaper or watch atrocities on the 11 o’clock news.
Over and over again in the laws of the Torah, we see a concern for our moral conditioning. Just a few verses earlier, with regard to the rules of returning lost property, the Torah admonishes “…lo tu’chal l’hit’alem” - “You cannot be indifferent” (literally, “you cannot hide”). If you find something, you have to do something about it – you have to think about what the person who lost it feels. If you see your fellow’s animal has fallen, you may not ignore it. When we see wrong, we must not hide. And later, in chapter 25, we see this even when the law demands corporal punishment. If a man is convicted of a crime and sentenced to lashes, the Torah warns (25:3): “He may be given up to forty lashes, but no more, lest being flogged further - to excess –causes your brother to be degraded in your eyes.” This rule not only shows a concern for excessive punishment and the cruelty of torture, but for our own moral fiber as citizens of the state that carries out the punishment in our name. It means to tell us that we as a society are debased and coarsened by the excesses of our government’s exercise of power. And, in the end, we must never forget, that even the criminal is our brother because we share the same inalienable dignity of having been created in the image of God. (How much more so, the innocent victim.)
In this season of reflection and repentance, when we take stock of our behavior in the year that has passed, it is important for us to remember that evil – even the most banal acts of cruelty – happen when we fail to cultivate our sensitivities through small acts of kindness. Evil goes unchecked when we become callous to suffering, when we fail to live up to our potential as images of the Divine. The common theme running through many of the laws of Ki Tetze is that they ask us to step out of ourselves and see the world through the eyes of others – through the eyes of the woman captured in war, through the eyes of the son of an unloved wife, through the eyes of a man looking for his lost property, through the eyes of a guest in our home, through the eyes of the day laborer who needs to be paid so his family can eat, through the eyes of a person gripped by debt, and even through the eyes of a rebellious son and a convicted criminal, and through the eyes of a simple little bird. In other words, the Torah beckons us to see the world through God’s eyes.
May the year to come be one in which we rededicate ourselves to the ideals of our tradition. May we each find the strength to do an honest inventory of our lives. May we move forward with greater sensitivity and kindness to others – able to see our fellow human being, and all the inhabitants of this earth, through the eyes of God. And may we see a day when cruelty and inhumanity are no more.
Shabbat Shalom
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