Change and Survival

Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 12 September 2022

In 2016 there was much controversy when the IDF appointed Rabbi Colonel Eyal Karim to take over as the chief chaplain of the army. Karim was a controversial choice because four years earlier, he had seemed to suggest that the laws about the captive woman about which Hannah has spoken to eloquently this morning were entirely justified by the rules of war. He justified them by pointing out that, for the purpose of winning a war, a soldier had to be allowed to exercise their evil inclination. Karim was later forced to publish a clarification for his statement, stating that he had been speaking purely in theoretical terms: “Obviously, in our times, when the world has advanced to a level of morality in which one does not marry captives, one must not perform this act, which is also entirely against the army’s values and orders,” he wrote.

Of course, given the regard in which Israel and in particular its military is held throughout the world, it was important that such a clarification was issued. The IDF is not an army that condones battlefield rape. But we cannot deny that this does seem to be the intention of the Torah that Hannah read for us this morning.

And, indeed, there is a deeper point to be made about the nature of some of the halachic pronouncements that we read in the Torah – particularly in the long list of permissions and prohibitions that are included in our portion this morning. We begin with the permitted rape of the captive woman, but we also read about the stoning of a rebellious child, and just after where we finished reading this morning, we read the prohibition against cross-dressing – of men dressing in what were considered to be women’s clothing and vice versa.

The world is different to how it was when the Torah was written 3000 years ago, and our values have shifted.

Already in the time of the Talmud, composed around 1500 years ago, the rabbis of the ancient world questioned the morality of stoning a rebellious child. Like Karim in the case of the captive woman, they did not deny that as a law it was still, as it were, ‘on the books’ – but they use their own interpretive powers to qualify the law to the extent that we could not imagine a case in which a child would actually be stoned for being rebellious.

Firstly they narrow it down to a son – therefore it cannot be a daughter. Then they say that because the Torah says sorer u’moreh ‘a wayward and defiant son’ (i.e. because it uses two different adjectives) this must mean that he has to be rebellious in two different ways. They say that the only situation in which he may be stoned is if he actually stole from his parents; if he has already received several lesser punishments in the hope of rectifying his behaviour; and if in the intervening time the judges have died or changed, then it would be impossible to move on to the more severe punishment of stoning. In the end, the rabbis say it quite explicitly: ‘there never has been a wayward and defiant son and there never will be one in the future’. Why, then, was it included in the Torah, they ask? So that children might read it and learn not to rebel against their parents.

Perhaps the opposite can be understood about the rape of the captive woman – that it is still included in the Torah and we still read it because while it is morally repugnant, battlefield is still a feature of war, and one that we cannot afford to simply ignore and pass over in our reading. Now, this understanding may not have been originally intended by the authors of the text. But that does not mean that we cannot read it this way.

In removing the possibility of the stoning of the rebellious child, the rabbis of the Talmud were demonstrating that, in a sense, they were progressive Jews. They were willing to see Jewish law in a new context and to reread it and reinterpret it in the light of their contemporary reality and their contemporary values.

It is this ability to accommodate to a changing world that allowed rabbinic Judaism to survive. When the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in the year 70 CE, the rabbis adapted and refined Jewish engagement with God from one ruled by animal sacrifice to one governed by prayer.

It is more generally this ability to change and to adapt to an ever-changing world that allows us to survive.

When she died on Thursday, the Queen left behind a very different and changed world from the one in which had been coronated in 1952. Even then, there were those who doubted the relevance of a constitutional monarchy, and there were moments in her reign in which the institution did look as though it might have reached the end of the road. But at each new adaptive challenge, the Queen found the ability to adapt and change, to continue to make the British monarchy relevant and important to a new generation. Regardless of what one thinks about the institution, it must be admitted that the overwhelming popularity of the monarchy today is thanks to her ability to read the public mood, to shift the way in which the institution engaged with the public around it.

Yet this act of adaptation and change with the times in which we find ourselves is not at all as easy as some may make it seem. And of course we will get it wrong. But the strength of living in the progressive Jewish world – and the hint is there in the name progressive – is that when we come to shul on Yom Kippur and repent for all the mistakes we have made, every time we said or did something we shouldn’t have, we aim not to do so not with reference to some static set of ideals that was crystalised thousands of years ago. Rather, we judge our lives on our ability to respond appropriately to the moment – did I do the right thing for that particular person at that particular time. In doing so, in a sense we set ourselves an even harder task than those who refer to that static ideal of a halachah set in stone by previous generations – generations who faced different challenges, and who held a different moral code.

So, while we continue to read our ancient texts, may we continue to be conscious that we read it in our time. That we have a responsibility to allow our religion to evolve and to grow – into a world that we cannot imagine, just as those who stood at the Queen’s coronation 70 years ago could not have conceived of the world they would inherit today. Let us learn from both the ancient rabbis and from the late Queen, and strive to replicate their ability to evolve and change with the times, for that is perhaps the only way to survive.