Parshat Ki Teitze: Going Outside of our Comfort Zone

This Parsha is about how we function in previously unknown territory, that is, what do we do when we “go out,” in other words, go out to new experiences, outside of the confines in which we find comfort and routine as we confront new and challenging horizons. Does going out to war mean all bets are off and we can do what we want? If we find someone in need outside of our home base, can we just ignore them and say “not my problem?” To be sure, GOING OUT can be scary, but if we do not meet such experiences with adequate preparations and set parameters, it can also be limiting, paralyzing even, and at worst self-effacing. How has this “going out” had its impact on us and how have we done in meeting its challenge?

One of my favorite contemporary teachers and thinkers is Tamar Ross. Ken and I and an assortment of our daughters and daughters-in-law have had the zichut/privilege to learn by her. In her book, Expanding the Palace of Torah, she speaks at length about how the male- dominated world of Jewish text learning and scholarship did not want to allow women to enter its doors, but rather wanted to keep the keys to our hallowed texts and their lessons to themselves. They, too often, did not want to have their beloved texts GO OUT to the domain of the women, for fear of what would happen to them; and more importantly concerned about the loss of the power they held in hiding those keys.

Virginia Wolff makes a very similar point in her essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” in which she audaciously presents the topic of women potentially writing fiction to show the male dominance of her world in the first decades of the twentieth century, where male college men ate well, lived well and thought well, while women who had precious few academies of higher learning even available to them, did not have the comfort of monetary stability or even high quality food to give them the security and nourishment needed to write fiction – to think about their world enough to create one that was believable within its boundaries. She imagines that Shakespeare had an equally brilliant and erudite sister, who lacking the privileges of her brother, ended up wandering listlessly and ultimately dying by suicide. How grateful I am that enough women have GONE OUTSIDE of the confines set for them so that we can have the lives we have as women today, including bringing in the texts and legacies of our collective lives!

Ken and I have been watching, which by the way I find extremely difficult, Tales of the City, a series which reflects the work of Armistead Maupin, and his representation of the world of LGBT persons in the United States from the years of 1978 – 2014. In this magical world of Anna Madrigal and her Barbary Lane community, individuals who cannot find a place in the larger world given their sexuality or gender identity, create their own. In the fifth installment of this ten- part series, there is a carefully scripted narrative of how the generations cannot speak with each other even within the confines of this idyllic collective. Younger members of this community that is supposedly inclusive, where members did not find the same outside, cannot find a way to respect how those in their 60s and older lived a different reality than their own, losing their entire circle of friends to AIDS, and confronting profound prejudices that did not allow them to literally come out into the world. Younger women take for granted the equality that did not grow up with the more experienced members of the community, but rather became an option due to their hard work and battles. Younger people of color do not understand the gratitude they need to show towards the elder members of their own community, for whatever the battles are now, they were that much more difficult and unmanageable then. How grateful I am that our daughters and daughters-in-law are able to live their very important and meaningful lives as gay women today, with gratitude to those who ventured out in years past. I love the kindness they show to people of all ages, colors, situations in life, gender identity and sexuality, as they daily GO OUT into the world.

Then I am also following Our Boys, the collaborative work of Joseph Cedar, Hagai Levi and Tawfik Abu-Wael, telling a specific part of the long arc of narrative of the difficult summer of 2014 in Israel that led to the Gaza War. Many people in Israel and the Jewish community are angry that this film does not focus on the inside Jewish story of the three young Jewish boys who were kidnapped and killed, but rather on the dynamics that came later with the revenge killing of a young Palestinian man. We would rather focus on our inside stories, not those that take us outside … outside of our comfort zone, outside of what we know to be true, outside of our established loyalties, outside where we have to confront the humanity and challenges of the other.

However, the problem is that this is where so much of life happens and our ability to develop and use well-honed skill sets to confront these challenges – be it considering a tragedy of another person with whom we may or may not feel a kinship, understanding the truths of another generation and their battles, or showing gratitude to those who paved the way for us to live our lives today with whatever challenges we still confront – it is that ability that will determine how we manage outside of our known truths, our comfort zone, our established habits and so forth. I am so grateful for the hundreds of thousands of Jews across the ideological spectrum, Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians, Christians and others who understand that this chapter of the events of that summer was chosen to be told as a story showing the anatomy of hatred, something we are all both prone to and subject to, in an attempt to make us all take a hard look at its disastrous impact. I am also grateful to the hundreds of people who span all of these groups who came together to create this important series, with the noblest of intents. To be sure, many CAME OUT of their worlds to do so.

We are in the last chapters of our Torah Reading cycle. We are taught that in the repetitive tropes and new ideas of Devarim, we are now no longer sharing the legacy of the narrative that came before us, but rather looking to those generations not yet present and sharing in a manner that will insure their continuity and lives as members of this Jewish collective. We will no longer be a desert nomad people as we had been for the previous forty years, but an empowered group in charge of our destiny. That destiny comes with both established practices and new ones to insure our identity does not get lost but rather strengthened as a result of the new horizons to be reached. We will GO OUT to many lands, some of which will accept us and others that will not, and then we will GO OUT again and do so again until we can live ... with our practices and identity and the promise of yet more generations to come.

This particular Parsha reminds us of boundaries that we are to observe in our behavior and actions that may have been normative for others. How we are to act in times of war, not taking the eggs from a nest when the mother bird is sitting on them, insuring our children behave properly, not engaging in prostitution, not taking advantage of those who are working for us or who do not have the privilege we may have, insuring our legacy and so much else. In other words, we are to consider the good of the collective whole and monitor our actions accordingly, always remembering that we do not do this ourselves, but through the work and hard-won battles of others. This is commanded to us as we are reminded that we are part of God’s holy congregation, no matter how far outside of our physical and psychological boundaries of past experiences we venture.

Then in the middle of all of this, we read

You shall not despise an Edomite, for he is your brother. You shall not despise an Egyptian, for you were a sojourner in his land. לֹֽא־תְתַעֵ֣ב אֲדֹמִ֔י כִּ֥י אָחִ֖יךָ ה֑וּא לֹֽא־תְתַעֵ֣ב מִצְרִ֔י כִּי־גֵ֖ר הָיִ֥יתָ בְאַרְצֽוֹ:

These pivotal words remind us to go against what our inclination may be in terms of how each of these people acted towards us in that past, yet we are instructed to remember that God has a larger plan, that the Egyptians did provide for us in time of need, and additionally we are not to engage in unseemly behavior regardless of what others do. This notion of remembering what it is to be a stranger, that is outside of one’s comfort zone, and treat others accordingly as they themselves venture out of their zones and into ours is critical, a repeated trope appearing no less than 36 times throughout our Torah. Who knows, doing so may just break old established and not-so-constructive patterns!

These teachings we confront in these final Parshiot are all about doing as reflected in the very names of these Parshiot … כי תצא about going out, כי תבוא coming into the land, ראה watching others, נצביםstanding at attention for important instructions, האזינו listening to all that is instructed and only after all do we finally come to the point where we receive the blessing – וזאת הברכה. There is an important message here in this structure --- going out into unchartered territory is admittedly cause for concern, it is scary, and to be sure we are taking chances. However, it is only through those chances that survival happens, the very reason that each and every one of us is here today – those chances taken by others to go out of what was known, take WHAT was known about how to proceed and to go out, GO OUT AND LIVE, for as we are taught, the Mitzvot are given to us to live by them, wherever our lives and our journey may take us. Let us remember that this is both instructive for us and equally, in terms of how we treat and regard others around us.

Shabbat Shalom.