Principles are different from rules. Both are critically important to living a good life, but that may be where the similarity ends.
Rules derive at least much of their power from their clarity and reliability, if not their inviolability, since most every rule must also admit at least the occasional exception. But by and large, rules work because they can be readily understood and largely relied upon.
With principles, it is almost the exact opposite. Principles are broad statements that invite, and even demand, ongoing understanding and interpretation. In fact, that fluidity may be the greatest source of their enduring meaning and utility. This week’s Torah reading, Parashat Ki Teitzei, invites us to see the value and necessity of both. In fact, honoring the necessity of both rules — even those that can be rigid or picayune — and principles that point beyond those very rules, lies at the center of this week’s Torah reading.
Ki Teitzei shares a long list of rules. However, I want to suggest that the first three rules it shares are also a frame — three guiding principles — that teach us not only how to think about the rules that make up the rest of the reading, but how to think about having a healthy relationship with rules in general.
The reading opens with the rules of a woman taken captive in war by an Israelite soldier who desires her (Deuteronomy 21:10-14). For all of the finessing and historical contextualizing one can, and even should do, it still effectively boils down to sanctioned rape of a captive, which is pretty disturbing to read as part of our sacred system of rules.
When you take the field against your enemies, and the ETERNAL your God delivers them into your power and you take some of them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman and you desire her and would take her to wife; and you bring her into your household, and she trims her hair, pares her nails, and discards her captive’s garb; and she spends a month’s time in your household lamenting her father and mother: after that you may come to her and thus become her husband, and she shall be your wife.
It may not have been experienced that way thousands of years ago, perhaps not even by captive women, but it is hard to read it any other way now. And therein lies the first of Ki Teitzei’s principles about living with rules: The sacred law of today — one which should and must be observed — may be a source of discomfort or even shame, tomorrow.
Since we rarely know which laws will fall into which category until we have lived with them for some time, we need to observe the rules with both deep commitment and an equally deep sense of humility about whether or not they really are meant to be forever. There is no one way to pull off that balancing act — the one between passionate commitment and equally passionate humility — which leads us to the second of the big principles that open this week’s rules.
Deuteronomy 21:15-17 instructs us regarding the disposition of our estates when they must be divided between loved and less loved children. Or more precisely, when divided between the children of different spouses — Biblical Israel was polygamous, some of whom were more loved than others.
If a man has two wives, one loved and the other unloved, and both the loved and the unloved have borne him sons, but the first-born is the son of the unloved one— when he wills his property to his sons, he may not treat as first-born the son of the loved one in disregard of the son of the unloved one who is older. Instead, he must accept the first-born, the son of the unloved one, and allot to him a double portion of all he possesses; since he is the first fruit of his vigor, the birthright is his due.
Either way, we are instructed to follow the accepted norm of the times, i.e., that the firstborn inherits the most, whether that distribution of assets reflects our emotions or not.
Principle two teaches us that we are not always meant to follow our hearts. Sometimes we are meant to follow a norm, in the name of greater fairness to others. That may sound harsh, but like principle one, it is an expression of humility before something larger than our own personal intuition.
Of course, this principle can be abused, for example to invalidate the exercise of personal conscience, but presuming that what we feel is always best can also lead to wrongdoing. As with principle one, we need to hold the tension as best we can, and let it inform our life within a system of rules — whether those in Ki Teitzei or in any other system.
Finally, immediately following these two laws, we have the law of the utterly rebellious child.
If a man has a wayward and defiant son, who does not heed his father or mother and does not obey them even after they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the public place of his community. They shall say to the elders of his town, “This son of ours is disloyal and defiant; he does not heed us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” Thereupon the people of his town shall stone him to death. Thus you will sweep out evil from your midst: all Israel will hear and be afraid. (Deuteronomy 21:18-21)
Strangely, there is no biblical evidence that this law was ever enforced. Not only that, the Sages teach that in fact, there never was nor never will be a child who was rebellious enough to merit the law’s required punishment.
What then is the purpose of such a law? I would suggest that it is here to teach us the third principle of how best to live with rules: Some rules reflect the fears and anxieties of those who make them, but the existence of those fears and anxieties does not mean that we render judgments in light of them.
This last principle may be the most important of the three, and it certainly has a special applicability to the moment in which we are living — in which the fears and anxieties of some cause them to implement rules that others find reprehensible, while those same others claim the first group’s fears and anxieties are illegitimate.
The law of the rebellious child suggests that we can make rules that reflect our fears and anxieties, and that others should honor those fears and anxieties as real. At the same time, just because they are real, doesn’t mean we can enforce them on others.
All three of Ki Teitzei’s opening principles invite us to hold healthy tensions: the tension between today and tomorrow, the tension between personal feelings and common norms, and the tension between what may be real for us and what is legitimate to legislate for others. Taken together, they point us toward a system that is both stable and dynamic, passionate and humble, honoring of self and aware of others. Not the worst way to go — not 3,000 years ago, and not now, either.