Ki Tetzei

Immediately preceding God’s commandment to leave the gleanings of the vineyard, olive grove and the field, God reminds us that our shared experience of dependency and defencelessness in Egypt must be the touchstone impelling us to ethical behaviour.

Torah exhorts us to treat labourers fairly and ensure that the poor, the destitute, and the powerless are not abused. These ethical injunctions of Torah continue, quite rightly, to serve as our contemporary benchmark as we work towards a just and fair world.

However, in this week’s portion there are laws which are contrary to our contemporary understanding of what is just. Women are treated as chattel and the wayward son, an embarrassment and liability to his parents, can be executed. We can certainly contextualise such laws as being “of their time”, or indeed as never having been intended to be carried out, but nonetheless I find this a difficult portion to read because those who are deemed “guilty” so often remain voiceless, their stories remaining hidden in the shadows.

Torah can sometimes be troubling when we glimpse its shadow side. But it is not only Torah, we too have our shadow sides. We may have qualities and behaviours that we feel ashamed of, ways of being that we would much rather keep hidden. But, like Torah, we are multi- dimensional.