When you will go out at war.. And you take (...) captives (...)and you see among the captives a beautiful woman and you desire her, you may take [her] for yourself” (Devarim 21-11-13)
This year, reading the opening verse of parashat ki tetzei gave me the chills more than usual.
Here is a text, dating back more than two thousand years ago, in a context where we deem cultures to have been much more ‘barbaric’ than today- cultures in which slavery and women’s sexual abuse were natural consequences of the social economy of war, especially in these -already disputed deserts in the middle East, and it unfortunately seems so relevant today.
It actually breaks my heart how resonant it is.
This week I opened parashat ki tetsei just a few days after seeing the face of Eden in captivity. Eden Yerushalmi, one of the six hostages shot dead before the israeli army could get to them, had been filmed by her captors just a few days before they shot her dead, and they thought it would be a good idea to broadcast her then-still alive now ghost face as we were still crying her.The truth is, in the video, Eden’s face really was that of a ghost.
It was another face that had been accompanying us for the past eleven month, in the urban landscape of Tel Aviv, where she used to live. Her then beautiful, youthful, life-full face was all over the street lights, bus stops, and coffee shop windows.
A cute brunette with a playful, sensual gaze, fashionable earrings, and just twenty four years of age when she was taken by Hamas from the Nova Festival where she had been working as a bartender.
No sign of life for so long. Until we heard, just a couple of weeks ago, that Eden’s body had been retrieved with five others from a dark low tunnel deep under a child’s bedroom in Rafah.I didn’t click on the video. I don’t want to play the game of the psychological warfare of terror. And I don’t want to be a voyeur of a human’s vulnerability.
But on the image that jumped at my face without me asking to, I saw for one instant an image that is still haunting me: the image of a beautiful na’ara turned into a rag of a human being.
Her face shrunk like a tiny dark raisin, caved face, abyssal eyes. The young beauty, who weighted 36 kilos when she was found, looked like the shadow of an old woman-ghost hanging to life by a thread.
And then there is what we know happened to many women taken captive by Hamas on October 7.
This is what the mitzvah of the “beautiful captive” is about.
The Torah is setting up an ethical system by which the woman is protected, but not just her: the system also, in a way, protects her captor, the battle winner, from himself- his own impulses.
How so?
The captor is to remove two things from her: her hair, and her “dress of captivity”: he takes away from her the visible symbol of seduction, so as to not be tempted to abuse her, and he takes away the symbol that she is a captive.He sets her free from his own desire. He gives her time to cry the house of her parents.And then, if he still wants her, he is to take her as a wife. If he desires her, he has to commit to her, and to treating her with the respect due to the most precious thing in his life.And here the Mei Ha shiloach is reminding us of something important: desire, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
In truth, everything that is pleasing in the eyes of Israel surely must have something good in it.
כי באמת כל מה שיעלה חן בעיני ישראל בטח נמצא בו דבר טוב,
But it needs to be kept in check:
Then afterwards, one must undergo a process of clarification in order to determine if what is pleasing is an external appearance and not true beauty.
אך צריך לברר בבירורין אם עלה חן איזה גוון בעינו ולא חן אמיתי.
To the Chasidic Master, the halakha of the “beautiful captive’ is there to help us “clarify” (levarer) our desire before we decide to help ourselves to it.
Birur- clarification, really means two things: gaining awareness; and also purifying the impulse.And this applied to all of us. Desire in and of itself, the chasidic master reminds us, is a good thing.
In fact it is the way the Torah describes our relationship with Torah, and with God.
Isn't the Song of Songs an erotic Songs? Isn’t the acronym of the month of Elul - “I am my beloved and my beloved is mine’ (Ani le dodi ve dodi li)- a romantic engagement?
But desire can turn to its own dark side if it isn’t framed by ethics.
Ethics, which we can defined, based on the opening story of our parasha, as follows: not abusing my power just because I can.
This is a time of Tshuvah (return). This is a time for Cheshbon Nefesh.
We may already hear the Shofar each day. It is a calling, a calling for Ethical Redemption.
Let us embody it.
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