Download Ki Tetze-A Rebellious Son

A Rebellious Son?
Parshat Ki Tetze contains more mitzvoth (commandments) than
any other Torah portion, 72 out of the 613! Some of the commandments
are very humanitarian, such as shooing away the mother bird before
taking her eggs or making a parapet for your roof so that those who
would be sleeping on the roof would not fall off. Others seem less so,
such as how to treat a captive girl that you want to take as a wife. Today
I want to talk about one of those commandments that might give us
“cause for pause”: the rebellious son.
Deuteronomy 21:18 sends a very strong message: it equates
rebelliousness with not listening to either one’s father or one’s mother.
How many parents have children who did not listen to you at one
point or another? According to the pshat of this text, that could enable
you to bring the child to the elders of the town for stoning!
Deuteronomy 21:20 seems to shed some more light on the
situation: The parents, in bringing their son to the elders, not only say
that the son did not listen to their voice but add in that he is a glutton and
a drunkard! The rabbis take these words and apply them to all rebellious
son situations: not only does the son not listen but he also must be a
glutton and drunkard. Furthermore, they define glutton and drunkard (in
Mishnah Sanhedrin 8:2) as one who eats a maneh of meat and drinks a
log of wine, literally ___________! The requirements get even stricter in
the next Mishnah, as the son must steal food and wine from both his
father and mother and that he did not eat and drink at a simcha! In the
next Mishnah, the consent of both parents are required to stone the son
and both parents must have both their hands (because the verse says they
need to “grab hold of him”,) cannot be lame (because they need to bring
him out), cannot be mute (because they need to speak to the elders) and
cannot be blind (because they say “he does not listen to our voice” and it
is presumed that if they were blind they would not know if he fulfilled
their words.) Furthermore, if the parents meet these criteria, the Mishnah
goes on to say that he is not stoned until his second offense, provided the
3 elders who were there the first time are present again.
What is this all about? The Bible is explicit and the Mishnah is
bringing in qualification after qualification, exemption after exemption.
If one sees the Mishnah as being given in concurrence with the Torah
than one would see these restrictions as emanating directly from Sinai.
At JTS, however, we studied the Mishnah independently from the Bible,
and with that being the case, it appears that the rabbis of the Mishnah are
trying to qualify the rebellious son out of existence. This point is further
made in the Gemara (Sanhedrin 71a) where Rabbi Shimon says there
never was and never will be a rebellious son: that this portion is written
for us to expound upon it and receive reward.
Is that really the case? Can a section of the Torah, the Five Books
of Moses, just be there for “window dressing?” The interpretation I
learned is that the rebellious son being stoned was a real commandment
in biblical times, and yet the rabbis were so uncomfortable with it that
they tried (very creatively) to qualify it out of existence. What I like
about this interpretation is that it demonstrates that Jewish law has
always developed and changed with each generation. The laws were not
given at Sinai and then frozen into place but rather further developed
with each successive generation.
A modern way of putting this is best said by Blu Greenberg, an
Orthodox feminist: “Where there’s a rabbinic will there’s a halachic
way.” For Blu, to look at the sources and say something is outright
impermissible when there are so many layers of commentary and
interpretation is taking the easy way out. Another example of this comes
from my teacher, Rabbi Joel Roth, who illustrated to us the difference
between Conservative Judaism and Orthodoxy with the analogy of a
chessboard. Rabbi Roth argued that for Orthodox Judaism the pieces of
the chessboard moved until the codification of the Shulchan Arukh (the
premier Code of Jewish Law in the 1500s) after which they froze. He
said that for him and for Conservative Judaism, the pieces continue to
move, that contemporary generations and those to come can continue to
shape Jewish law.
How far one chooses to go remains a question. Every rabbi
(including myself) has limits as to how far I will go in changing current
practices and traditions. However, the example of the rebellious son
demonstrates that there is precedent with making changes. In this case a
commandment was qualified out of existence; in other cases laws were
changed mipnei tikkun olam, for the sake of improving the world, or
mipnei shaat hadahak, because of the pressing needs of the moment.
May we recognize that like American law, Jewish law does not get
frozen in time but continues to develop, with one eye looking towards
the words of our great sages of the past and the other eye looking
towards our contemporary and future needs.