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Parashat Ki Teitzei/פָּרָשַׁת כִּי־תֵצֵא

09/11/2024 07:06:08 AM

Sep11

LL Giordano

✷ to be read on September 14th⎮11 Elul ✷


In Ki Teitzei ("What You Go Out"), Moses delivers numerous laws, more than appear in any other Torah portion. These include laws about family responsibility, sexuality, the return of lost objects, forbidden mixtures, collateral, and workers' wages.

In her drash, Amy Deutsch focuses on the aspect of this parsha that concerns the nature and depth of family responsibility - in particular with the Torah's declaration that "parents shall not be put to death for children, nor children be put to death for parents: a person shall be put to death only for his own crime" (Deuteronomy 24:16). From this, Mx Deutsch derives the more general message that parents are not - and truly cannot be - responsible for who their children become. It is a kindly counter to the anxiety that riddles contemporary parenthood, something itself experientially determined by the prevailing scientific paradigm in which we know all too well that every action is itself a cause of some eventual effect.

It was inevitable, I suppose, in light of the most recent school shooting in Georgia, that I'd receive Mx Deutsch's D'Var Torah with more than a note of dissonance.* But I remain appreciative of the larger point that, in Mx. Deutsch's Judaism at least, our tradition might offer some relief from the constant sense of inevitability that hounds modern parenthood. We are not the cause of the eventual effect of our children's personhood; rather we best fulfill our office when we approach the task of parenting as one of helping our children to become themselves. That is why parenting is an on-going act of love. If it involves an act of self-sacrifice, it is a letting go - or a silencing - of the preoccupations, disappointments, and certainties embedded in our own identity for the sake of our children's freedom: a life unadumbrated by our own past....oh yes, and sleep - that too.

These days, I truly feel what it means to be part of the "sandwich generation" with aging parents in need on one side and small children in need on the other. It is good to be reminded that what can be accomplished is limited to the acts of loving kindness that support these ultimately separate (if not wholly independent) humans in their efforts to continue to be or to become themselves. So, at least this Shabbat, I'll allow myself to live happily (hence more kindly) within my own limitations as a child and an adult.

*In the note of dissonance, what came to mind was Lynne Ramsey's searing 2011 psychological thriller/drama "We Need to Talk About Kevin" in which the incomparable Tilda Swinton plays a woman grappling with her feelings of guilt and perceived criminality over the school massacre carried out by her teenage son. For those whose response to dissonance isn't to seek immediate resolution, but rather deepening, maybe give Mx. Deutsch's drash some thought while viewing Ramsey's film.
Fri, September 5 2025 12 Elul 5785