As he ran through the trees, the lad's breath was beginning to come more easily, and the burning feeling in his face started cooling. He had been running for half an hour, and was getting in his running groove. This was a pace he could keep up for hours. He was far and away the best runner among his peers, and he took pride in that. He loved the solitude of the trail, and whenever he was angry or upset, he would go off on a run.
Like now.
Except that now was different. Now he might never come back. Well, he didn't have to decide that immediately--he would decide when he got to the river, which was still a couple of hours away.
He tried to imagine what would happen if he never came back. His mother, of course, would be devastated. In fact, if he came back, it would only be for her sake. His father would say "good riddance," as would his brothers. His half-brothers. And maybe things would be easier for his mother if he were gone. Lately, all the fighting his parents had been doing had been over him. Maybe if he were gone, things would ease up between them.
But he didn't really believe that. With him gone, his father would just find other ways to berate his mother. She couldn't cook the way he liked; after eighteen years, she still spoke like a foreigner. She had funny-looking green eyes. She had never fit in, and she never would. She was forever getting confused about their customs.
Customs. Well, there was one custom she wasn't confused about, and she had told his father straight to his face last night: "The inheritance rights of the oldest son have to be honored," she had intoned in her stilted speech, "even if that son's mother is not honored. Even if that son's mother is a war bride--the spoils of victory, captured in a raid like a piece of booty. A first born is a first born."
That had really set his father off. "I would rather burn everything I own," his father had ranted, "than see a shoelace go to Spirit Listener. If you weren't so stubborn, you would join me in going before the elders and having him declared incorrigible. You know as well as I do, it's not only me he disobeys; it's not only me he disrespects."
Spirit Listener--for that, indeed, was the name of the lad--frowned as he thought about his father's words. For as much as he hated his father, in this regard, his father was correct. Of course, he didn't think of himself as incorrigible: "independent" is the word he would have used. But he supposed it came to the same thing. Most of the time, he was so angry at his father for the way his mother was treated, that he would go out of his way to aggravate him. And when his mother took his father's side, he got angry at her as well. How could she respect herself so little as to put up with the shameful way in which she was treated? It made Spirit Listener crazy.
He could feel his face flushing from the anger, and he tried to stop dwelling on it. He looked about him as he ran, thinking that if he didn't come back, he would never see this land again. To his left, through the trees, he could see the pasture where they had their flocks. He could see his half-brother, Spirit Wrestler, sitting on a rock while the animals grazed in front of him. Spirit Wrestler was six months younger than he, and this morning his father had announced to the entire tribe that Spirit Wrestler would inherit as the eldest son. "Spirit Wrestler, the son of Wolf," he had proclaimed in a loud voice, "is my true first-born son, and in accordance with the traditions of our people...." Spirit Listener could imagine how the speech would have gone. His father was an eloquent speaker. Spirit Listener hadn't waited to hear it.
Instead, he had stood up and shouted: "I renounce all claims of kinship with you, Wolf son of Laugher. You have denied me my birthright; you have mistreated my mother, your wife. You have forfeited any right to be called my father. I will not rend my clothes at your death; I will not mourn your passing. You are for me as the dust beneath my feet." He had taken one long last look at his mother, and started running, tears streaming from his green eyes he had inherited from his mother, the one inheritance his father could not take away.
Spirit Listener stopped reliving that morning's scene and looked around. He knew where he was: the river was just over the next rise, not five minutes away. He would stop at the river, wash up, eat something, and then decide what he would do. Would he go back? Could he go back? He had shamed his father in public--he would never be forgiven that. Even his mother might not forgive him that. What if he went back, only to face banishment? Or worse? No, better to make a clean break.
Spirit Listener got to the river, and stopped running.
****
Let’s leave Spirit Listener refreshing himself at the river.
Our Parsha this week is Ki Tetzei. The Parsha is a collection of miscellaneous laws about all sorts of matters. The first law discussed pertains to a time of war, when a soldier becomes attracted to a female captive, and deals with when and how he can marry her, and what his obligations are to her should he tire of her. The law does everything it can to discourage such liaisons short of outright prohibition. The second law discusses inheritance rights if a man has two wives, one beloved, and one less loved ("hated" literally), each of whom produces an heir. He must recognize as his firstborn whichever child is actually born first, even if that child is born of the less loved wife. And the third law is the law of the incorrigible child, a law that gives parents the right to have an adult child declared incorrigible under certain extreme circumstances. An incorrigible child could be put to death, although the Talmud makes clear this law never was and never could be enforced (B Sanhedrin 71a). Rashi explains that because of the placement of these laws right next to each other, they are not three unrelated laws. Rather, he says, they are elements in a chain of causality; the natural consequence of a hot-blooded soldier allowing his appetites to control his actions. Our story about Spirit Listener--Ishmael, if you will--is based on Rashi’s understanding.
The soldier in our story is Ze’ev ben Itzhak, Wolf the son of Laugher, who captures, and is in turn captivated by the strange green eyes of a woman of the enemy, and marries her. They produce a child, Ishmael. However, there is no love in that marriage, and Ze’ev soon takes another wife from his own people, and they also produce a son, Israel, Spirit Wrestler, who is six months younger than Ishmael. It is a recipe for disaster, and slowly but inexorably, the disaster plays out.
How does the story end? We know how we would like it to end. We would like for Ishmael to go back and apologize to his father and be reconciled with him; we would like Ze’ev to become reconciled with his first wife, and for them all to become one big happy family. But we know, as Rashi knew, that human nature doesn’t work that way. Ishmael never comes back. His mother dies an embittered woman, hating her abusive husband for driving away her son. And Ishmael never forgives his father, despises his brother, and passes on this hatred, along with his green eyes, to his children and his grandchildren.
Rashi is teaching us that ill-considered actions lead to transgressions, and transgressions bring consequences. Not just black marks against us for Judgment Day, but real world consequences in the here and now. When you have a foreign people living among you, you must not oppress them. The laws we began with about marrying female captives and the inheritance rights of their children, they are just particular instances of a general law cited much earlier in the Bible, in Exodus 20:18: YOU SHALL NOT WRONG A STRANGER OR OPPRESS HIM, FOR YOU WERE STRANGERS IN THE LAND OF EGYPT.
During the past 2000 years, it is only since 1948 that the Jewish people have had a state, a political apparatus where we could actually be held accountable for this law. So how do we stand in the "do not wrong a stranger" department? Well, let’s see.
On the plus side of the ledger:
- In the late 1970’s, Israel gave sanctuary and even Israeli citizenship to over 300 Vietnamese refugees, "Boat People" who had been turned away by much larger nations;
- Since 2007, thousands of African refugees have crossed over illegally from Egypt into Israel. They have received food, clothing and medical care from Israel, and their eligibility for refugee status is being investigated on an individual basis. Israel is a small country, and this large influx has met with a lot of resistance by many poorer Israelis who see these refugees as direct competitors for scarce jobs and resources. Riots have ensued, sometimes sparked by right-wing politicians. Nevertheless, their situation is far better than in Egypt or Sudan.
On the minus side of the ledger:
- It was reported recently that under new rules established by the Israeli government, it is about to deport hundreds of children of migrant workers who were born and raised in Israel;
- As noted in The United States’ State Department report on religious freedom around the world in 2011, over 300,000 Israeli citizens from the former Soviet Union, who are not halakhically Jewish, are unable to get married in Israel, because as far as the State is concerned, they have no religion, and Israel has no provision for civil marriage.
So, like everywhere else in the world, Israel’s record in this area is a mixed report: better than most, but with room for improvement. Certain actions we can be proud of, and certain situations we can seek to change.
However, despite the concerns about the migrant workers and their children, and the issue of the "Jews" from the former Soviet Union, by far the largest problem facing Israel in the "do not wrong a stranger department" is how we treat Arab citizens of Israel. And here, there is a great deal of room for improvement. Education, sanitation, and infrastructure in the Arab villages and cities lag far behind Jewish communities. And there is outright blatant discrimination, sometimes in the highest levels of society. For example, in December of 2010, the chief municipal rabbi of Safed, Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, and 49 other rabbis issued a ruling that it was against Jewish Law to sell or rent property to "non-Jews"--read Arabs.
In this month of Elul, as we begin our preparation for the High Holidays, let us give some consideration to how we treat the stranger among us. And let us hope for a better year:
May it be your will, our God and God of our ancestors, that we strive in the coming year to defend our land and our people with strength and resolve; and yet in so doing, to treat our neighboring peoples with respect and decency, and our strangers within our midst with kindness and understanding, with equity and with justice; and that we be able to reach a peaceful accord, inside and outside Israel, with the children of Ishmael, Abraham’s first born son from his less-loved wife.
KEN Y’HI RATZON Shabbat Shalom.