Ki Seitzei: You Gotta Slow Down... This week’s Parshah starts off talking about war, following on from the theme at the end of last week’s Parsha, Parshas Shoftim, where the Torah spoke about preparations for war, and procedures in conquests. This week deals with battle itself.
The Akeydas Yitzchak comments that these commandments can be understood allegorically, as referring to a much more subtle and dangerous kind of war, one in which we are all involved. It is subtle because it is a war most people don’t realize they fight. We don’t perceive our victories and defeats; we can’t assess our position on our own. This is why we need guidance from our generals – the sages. This war is dangerous because it affects our soul, and so leaves everlasting results – well beyond the life span of our bodies. The Torah, explains the Akeydas Yitzchak, is giving us advice here on how to combat our Evil inclination.
The beautiful captured woman is someone we would not expect the Torah to let us marry, being a non-jewess. Chazal (our sages) saw she was only permitted due to a person’s Evil Inclination. HaShem knew that had He not provided a legal way to marry her, a person would marry her anyway illegally. But the way HaShem did this, was to set a procedure for marrying her, in a way that can help a person overcome his Evil Inclination. Victory was to be achieved bit by bit, step by step, until he loses interest in her, and forgets about her altogether, or at least lead him to marry her in a perfectly acceptable manner after having her convert. This is no different then any righteous convert and was not his intent from the start. The process will have still helped him break free of the desires that originally took control of him.
We will now trace through the steps of the process.
When a person’s desires are at the peak of excitement, seeing this captive woman, under his power to do with her as he wants, we all know full well that he will never listen to those voices that remind him of the prohibitions involved in marrying her. In fact, knowing that she is forbidden to him just serves to inflame his passions even more. So the only option was to temporarily permit her. This is similar to the principle of permitting non-kosher food to someone suffering a life-threatening illness. The idea is to calm him down, so his passions will allow him to follow the rules forbidding her again until he has met the guidelines to follow.
Once he has cooled down a lot, he is ready to proceed by taking things slowly. Just by slowing himself down and not rushing to wherever his passions lead him, he can bring himself to have her shave her hair and grow her nails. This is designed to make her look ugly and dirty (because she can’t clean or file her nails). In this way, he takes out of play her beauty, the major factor in his attraction at first sight.
Similarly, he removes her provocative prisoner’s clothes, and obviously dresses her in old, worn-out unattractive clothes. She cries for her parents in a palace where he will always see her in this degraded state.
Symbolically, these refer to shaving out her false ideologies, stripping her of her lowly traits, dressing her in refinement and coming to despise and reject her old ways.
Now, he is in a state to make a sensible, thought-out decision, no longer blinded by physical attraction. So he will only continue to carry this through, if he sees something in her making it worthwhile i.e. if she is willing to convert, then she is perfectly permitted. Otherwise, he’ll realize he really doesn’t care about her. Still, the Torah adds he cannot sell her. This is because HaShem knew that some people’s desire for money is greater than their desire for other pleasures. By selling her, he would still be giving in to these desires of which the Torah is trying to debase us.
The lesson we can learn from this is when we fall our inclinations getting the better of us, and we don’t have the strength to stand up to it. However, rather than trying to fight a futile battle, all we have to do is slow ourselves down. Settle our minds first, then act, not to act rashly out of excitement. In this way, we will eventually take control over our desires. This was the advise given by R’Elazar (kedushin 40a) to when we feel we can’t stand up to the temptation, to dress in dark clothes, go to a foreign town, creating for yourself a process to slow yourself down before you succumb, giving your passions time to cool. Once the passions weaken even slightly, we can start to subject emotions to directing reason and passion both to HaShem
Good Shabbos! |
