Parshah Commentary
This week’s parshah, Ki Teitzei, features the commandment of “shiluach haken,” or “sending away the mother bird.” “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,” Deuteronomy instructs, “do not take the mother together with her young. Let the mother go, and take only the young, in order that you may fare well and have a long life.” It’s an unusual edict in that, unlike most mitzvot mentioned in the Torah, it includes an assurance that one will receive a concrete reward for performing the stipulated action. But what happens when such a promise is broken?
The Talmud takes up this very question. “There was a boy whose father said to him: ‘Climb up this building and fetch me chicks,’” the rabbis tell us. “And he climbed up the building and dispatched the mother bird and took the young, but upon his return he fell and died.” The text wonders: “Where is the goodness of the days of this one, and where is the length of days of this one?” In other words, how could the boy die while performing the very mitzvah meant to guarantee him a long and happy life? The sages offer several potential resolutions to this theological problem—for instance, that the boy was being punished for “contemplating idol worship.” But the text also suggests that the event was so destabilizing that, for some people, no answer would be satisfactory. Referencing the Talmud’s paradigmatic heretic—“Acher” (literally “Other”), formerly known as Rabbi Elisha ben Abuya—the text indicates that witnessing this scene caused this former leading sage to give up on his belief in and commitment to Judaism. Maybe it was not only the horrifying event itself but also the fact that his fellow rabbis sought to justify it that caused him to turn away.
However, despite his reaction to this traumatic experience of betrayal, Acher did not give up on the Jewish community altogether. Elsewhere in the Talmud, we meet him again, this time publicly demonstrating his repudiation of halacha by riding a horse on Shabbat. Following him on foot is his devoted student Rabbi Meir, speaking to him about matters of Torah. Acher suddenly tells Rabbi Meir to stop; he has been counting his horse’s steps and has noticed that they have reached the “Shabbat boundary,” a limit outside the city beyond which travel, even on foot, violates the Sabbath. Acher felt so betrayed by the Torah’s broken promise—and perhaps by the other sages’ attempts to excuse it with theological and moral explanations—that he left the rabbinic community, previously the center of his world. But he still cares deeply about Rabbi Meir and his student’s dedication to halacha.
As we enter the High Holiday season, leftist Jews are in a moment that echoes Acher’s experience of anger and disillusionment. For nearly a year, we have watched so much of the organized Jewish community turn its back on basic values we thought we shared—even a principle as fundamental as the infinite worth of all human life—while justifying this abandonment in the language of Jewish ethics. We have responded to this betrayal in various ways. Some of us have stepped away from all Jewish spaces. Others have turned to new spaces that share our values but sit at the fringes of the Jewish world. Still others have chosen to stay and push our communities through our pain. (And some of us do each of these on different days.) But we all still find ourselves, like Acher, somehow entangled with fellow Jews.
However we choose to navigate these bonds, and whatever we may decide about when we can and cannot pray and study and cry alongside other Jews, we can hold fast to our sense of betrayal. We can ask how we might bring this disillusionment with us into these relationships and spaces—and what new possibilities doing so might open up.
Avigayil Halpern is a rabbi and writer based in Washington, DC, whose work focuses on feminist and queer Torah. Read more of her writing here.
