The following Devar Torah was written by Year 11 student, Eitan Meshel delivered in our High School tefillot this week. 
Rabbi Daniel Siegel

Ki Teitsei

Eitan Meshel

This parashah is both famous and infamous in its content, stating both some of the sincerest and philosophically thought-provoking rules, and some of its most ignorant and inconsiderate ones, all contained within the same paragraphs! People against the Torah as a guide would at some point quote from here, and those who find value in the Torah would do the same with different sections. Here, a long list of rules are stated.

It begins with a process to respect the death of someone killed in a field, where the perpetrator is undiscovered. The city nearest to the field will commemorate the individual’s death, while symbolically representing the unnecessary and unavenged death of a human life. This is a beautiful notion that suggests an appreciation and respect for life.

The portion then has two other processes that should happen. One is referring to falling in love with someone who is a prisoner of war, that shows that the partner may marry them, but is not to sell them as a slave if the relationship does not work out. This is because the prisoner has already paid you with the relationship you two had, and so it would not be right to then profit from them further. The second process shows that even an unloved first born child is to still inherit the land and money that a first born child should, as you should not favour one child over another. Both have good intentions and inherent values that are consistent with respectable elements of Judaism.

However, this is suddenly followed by the rule that if a child is rebellious or stubborn in relationship to his/her parents, he/she should be killed! Quite a heavy-handed notion that is rather unforgiving! Then, it kindly says to respect the body of even a criminal, and to bury the criminal, like all others, after death. This pattern continues, where it says that it is your duty to return lost possessions to your fellow human being, and to help him/her. It then states that a woman is not to wear men’s clothing, and that a man is not to wear women’s clothing, and that people who do so are worthy of death!

By this stage, you can probably already tell why this is such a strange portion of the Torah. On the one hand, there is a clear love for humanity, and on the other, a distaste for what is deemed poor behaviour, according to standards that it would have gathered from the common attitudes of the time, attitudes long-since outdated. It is these which are the pitfalls, and are the reasons we must apply our own logic and understanding to such an ancient text that has many invaluable pieces of moral and ethical worth, that may be shrouded in unfortunately inconsiderate writings that by our standards do not match.

In one example of blatant unfairness, if a man accuses his wife of dishonesty, and is proven to have lied about this, he is to be fined and cannot divorce his wife. However, if a man accuses dishonesty, and is proven to be correct about this, the wife is to be killed! This is a clear unbalance that must have been intentional, having been within the same lines of writing.

The question here lies in the intention – why is this the attitude? If there is such huge respect to the significance of death, why is death dealt so easily to rebellious women and children, and people of LGBT Plus nature? Why is their life disregarded? There are so many examples of kind-hearted writings in the Torah, that can so easily be lost when overshadowed by the unforgiving nature of others surrounding it.

Perhaps from this we can learn that people are so flawed, and that humanity is a complex network of contradictions, with the intention of doing well by the world, with the tempting nature of committing the opposite. This life demands both personal discipline, and open acceptance of others, and they should not need to contradict the intentions of one another. We can all learn from this – that we can support each other, and work through our misconceptions, and strive to find a way to love humanity without making exceptions.