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Ki Teitzei

Deuteronomy 21:10 – 25:19

Wrestling With The Uncomfortable   

Each year, when I meet Ki Teitzei — this week’s Torah portion — I come to realize again why so many people are moved to altogether abandon any kind of religious pursuit. Though we find many uplifting verses about ethical living for a 2500 year old society, some of what we read in this portion goes squarely against our most basic modern sensitivities. Laws surrounding instances of rape are among the most disturbing to us. They not only negate the fundamental rights of women, but often compound the woman’s suffering as the sentencing punishes both the perpetrator and the victim.

What do we, citizens of the 21st century, do with such a Torah portion? Some of us would like to simply take out these passages and only keep the ones that align with our current worldviews. Some suggest more extreme action: to simply discard the Torah as an obsolete anachronistic relic. Yet were we to follow the path of editing out distasteful passages in every generation, there wouldn’t be much left of the text after 2500 years. Torah would be so diminished that it would be unrecognizable and we would lose our rootedness in a shared spiritual document.

The problem with these responses stems from their premise. They both assume that religion or spirituality should be exclusively about “the good stuff:” love, compassion, and kindness. Our reaction to a Torah portion like this is a reflection of such a worldview. We start with the expectation that our lives and our world ought to be good, loving, and nice. We become resentful when our reality doesn’t meet these impossible expectations. So, we surmise, if we can’t find that in the “real world” then, at least, spirituality must be the place to uncover this elusive goodness and yearned-for love. We find ourselves attracted to the spiritual teachers and gurus who preach messages of love and light, and become addicted to simplistic platitudes. But as they continue to sell us on what our ego wants to hear, we allow ourselves to be lulled into an ever deeper slumber. And that is not true spirituality.

True spirituality is like Torah when Torah reflects back to us the unsavory parts of the universal ego as well. Torah, as it is, is an expression of our human condition in all its verses, and our discomfort with it speaks to our own biases. Our engaging with Torah shouldn’t be solely about uncovering the good and the light in it. Our wrestling with the text needs to push us to grapple with the shadow and the darkness embedded within as well. To only want the light is imbalanced and dangerous. In truth, light is most needed when confronting darkness, not ignoring it. Loving when the world is hateful, having compassion when society is telling us to be narcissistic, expressing kindness when all around us is callousness and carelessness, and knowing that we, too, harbor both sides of each divide; that’s true spirituality.

In our necessarily tumultuous relationship with Torah we learn to be with what is, as it presents itself to us. We learn to choose it all, welcome it all; to reject nothing, cut out nothing. Most importantly we learn to wrestle with what makes us uncomfortable, to know ourselves in all our light and our darkness in order that we might, ultimately, transcend our self. Such is the journey and such is the path of Torah.