September 12, 2024

This past Shabbat afternoon, my closest friend’s son celebrated becoming a bar mitzvah. I named this child at his brit milah and was honored both to teach him for this occasion and to call him up to the Torah. There was much kvelling to be sure. In his thoughtful d’var Torah on Parashat Ki Teitzei, he spoke about the importance of rules, reflecting on the massive number of rules that make up this week’s Torah reading. 

Rules challenge us, he explained, because as human beings with our own desires and needs, we want to have more agency in making choices about how we behave. We chafe against the rigidity of needing to adhere to rules. At the same time, rules provide structure to our lives, accountability for our actions, and predictability in our interactions with others. It was a great d’var - perfect for a bar mitzvah child contemplating his relationship with the Jewish tradition and totally authentic to his personality. 

While many of the rules of Parashat Ki Teitzei do exactly what my friend’s son said, providing a framework for our lives and helping us create safe and caring communities, other rules in this week’s Torah reading perplex us - not because of how much they constrain our free choice, but because their underlying values do not mesh with our own. One example of such a rule is the case of the stubborn and rebellious son, ben sorer u’moreh (Deuteronomy 21:18-21). 

According to this passage, a family that has a stubborn, wayward son, a gluttonous drunkard who does not listen to his parents, should bring him to the elders of the town. His parents should accuse their son before the council of elders and he will be stoned to death. 

The horror of this scenario led the Sages of the Talmud in the eighth chapter of Masekhet Sanhedrin to limit the application of this ruling to the point that the punishment essentially can never be imposed. After this feat of legal gymnastics, the Talmud concludes: “There has never been a stubborn and rebellious son and there will never be one in the future. And why, then, was it written in the Torah? So that you may expound upon it and receive reward for your learning.” (BT Sanhedrin 71a)

Problem solved, so it would seem. The Torah’s rule for stubborn and rebellious children is now understood as purely academic, a textual conundrum meant to spark debate and in-depth interpretation. What would be an ethical challenge becomes an intellectual one instead. 

There are some benefits to this approach. Reading the case of the ben sorer u’moreh as basically a metaphor solves the moral and emotional problems of the text. We no longer need to wonder about the troubling family dynamics, the disproportionate punishments, or the messages this text sends about the acceptability of violence. 

At the same time, making this text into a thought experiment and excising it from the realm of applicable law opens the door to doing so with any other rules in our Torah that we find problematic. When we take a piece of our tradition and say that the Torah never really meant for it to be enacted, we weaken our system of sacred rules. Religious practices can become entirely subjective and we lose the cohesiveness of being part of a community in pursuit of holiness. 

The Talmud, I would argue, had a similar problem with the case of the stubborn and rebellious child being understood in this way. Immediately after the Talmud declares ben sorer u’moreh to be merely an intellectual exercise, Rabbi Yonatan speaks up and says: “I saw him and I sat on his grave.” (BT Sanhedrin 71a) For Rabbi Yonatan, the rules of the Torah, even the ones that horrify us or challenge our ethical values, must be applicable. Nothing in the Torah can exist merely for the sake of argument. 

This approach may preserve the enforceability of the Torah’s rules, but it is not without its own problems. Upholding a practice with such obviously negative moral ramifications goes against the essence of what it is to live a life of religious meaning. 

I find it helpful here to look back at what my friend’s son said on the bimah this past weekend. The rules and laws of our tradition are there to provide structure for our lives, to help us nurture safe and caring communities. When the rules stand in the way of those aims, when they challenge us as ben sorer u’moreh does, we first must sit with the discomfort of that challenge, acknowledging the parts of our tradition that reflect values and worldviews we cannot condone. And then we turn to the rules and practices that do move us toward those aims. By prioritizing them, we bend the arc of our tradition toward justice, fairness, and holiness.

Shabbat shalom.

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