Parashat Ki Tetze | Rabbi Alex Braver | August 22, 2026

Shabbat Shalom.

How many of us have read

this is real and you are completely unprepared?

I saw the announcements.

That's going to be the basis of the high holiday 101 class.

Coming up with the senior rabbinic fellow, Jo Blumberg.

So if you haven't read it yet, now's your chance.

I, Rabbi Alan Lu, you know, I it's an incredible book, I revisit it.

At least in part every year at this time in the run up to the holidays,

if I'm if I'm really ahead of myself, I'll start it right before Tisha.

But because he talks about Tisha.

But I have to And it's a sort of journey through the holidays from Tisha, but,

through a little Rosh Hashanah and Kipper ending on two coats.

And it leans on traditional Jewish texts and also integrates

perspectives of mindfulness and meditation.

And it's written by Rabbi Allen Lu, who, spent much of his life

pursuing Zen Buddhism.

He actually has an autobiography, I think, called The Sound of One

God Clapping, if I'm not mistaken, which is a great title.

And and abruptly,

he decides to reconsider his path and returns back to his Jewish roots.

And in this book, he draws on what he's learned about meditation

practice and mindfulness to reflect on core Jewish ideas.

Casting very authentic and ancient

Jewish sources in a sort of new light.

So it's been an inspiration for me.

I first encountered it as a rabbinic fellow here, and 13 years ago, I think.

But it's not a perfect book.

And there's one piece of it that has kind of irked me increasingly

over the years, that I want to talk about as a way into the parsha.

Lu uses the passiert of the month of Elul, as reflections

to guide us into the holidays, including this week's parsha.

Key to say.

It contains some of the most meaningful legislation in the Torah.

Animal cruelty legislation

returning lost objects and livestock protections for workers.

Protections for the poor.

The the rule of fair weights and measures in business dealings.

And it also has some of our most difficult and most challenging legislation, too,

including the opening verses which describe what you do.

Tasty light meal camera. You go out to war.

And in war, as happens, apparently in the Iron Age,

you take captives, and among the captives you find in your feet

to are a beautiful looking woman.

And you want to take your for your wife.

So that parsha says you bring her into your household,

and she trims her hair and pairs her nails and discards her captives garb.

She spends a month's time in your household

lamenting her father and mother, and after that

you may come to her and become her husband.

And she shall become your wife.

Problematic, problematic.

I think we can agree on that much.

Much ink has been spilled about how to deal with these verses

in a lot of different contexts, but I want to sort of talk about,

Rabbi Lou's take on it.

Because because I actually really love it.

I find it very meaningful.

And I also find it increasingly unsatisfactory, for a number of reasons.

So in his book, of course, Rabbi Lu does not like this law either.

Trust me. Right. He does not think this is a good thing.

He describes it, though, as an ancient

and human impulse that is pernicious and pervasive.

But he does not condone capturing a woman in war

and forcing her to become your wife.

Instead, he turns this

hypothetical scenario in the Torah into a sort of extended metaphor

for thinking about cravings and desire from a mindfulness perspective.

So he says, when a craving arises in your mind, you treat it like this captive.

You bring it into your household, you trim its nails, you pair its hair,

you take out all the sort of trappings around it, and you sort of

just let it sit there for a month or however long

and watch the bare impulse of it for a time.

And once its been stripped of all its allure,

and with this sort of pause, most harmful longings that you find

will be revealed as fleeting and then more easily put aside.

So from a spirituality perspective,

from a mindfulness perspective, I think this is actually really amazing.

I've tried to use this in various occasions.

I think paying attention to our thoughts as they come and then giving them

their moment, and examining them without judgment

is one of the core principles of any mindfulness or meditation practice.

So I think it's a great teaching.

And yet

the captive wife never entirely disappears,

even when she is transformed into a metaphor

and evoking not just the Torah specific scenario,

but all sorts of explicit and implied violence

against women in our tradition and beyond.

I find that her ordeal is too troubling and too vivid,

and to devastating, to just kind of be used as a parable.

And the more I've reflected on this part of Rabbi Lou's teaching over the years,

and the more I've really gained insight into into dealing with desire

and mindfulness and all these things, the more I've been unable to ignore her

and the suffering that she embodies and endures,

even through this sort of metaphor ized teaching

at an even deeper and more subtle level.

Even if we could get past our revulsion and our horror,

and even if we could sort of disappear, the idea of the captive wife

from the captive wife text.

I think that metaphors like these kind of poison

the ground water of whatever is being taught in a subtle way.

Rabbi Tova Spitzer writes about this in her book God Is Here,

which is a book about metaphor and images for God in Jewish life.

And she describes some of the science and theory behind how metaphors work.

She writes, there are areas of our brain

that are active, not just when we're doing an action, but also

when we are just thinking metaphorically about doing an action.

For example, when I contemplate kicking a habit, the part of my brain

that is involved when I physically kick something is activated.

Making the metaphor real in a powerful way.

In another

example, our early experience as infants being held by an adult and feeling

their physical warmth becomes connected via neurons

to our emotional understanding of affection.

And we express this metaphorically when we say things like,

my friend is a warm person.

The metaphor affection is warmth

is very much more than a turn of phrase, she writes.

It becomes a basic way that we experience personal interactions.

All right.

So when we think about warmth of a person, that's part of our brain that's,

you know, in some subtle way, going back to the warmth

we felt as an infant, you know, being held.

It's a beautiful idea

when it's when it's connected to something beautiful like that.

But if we carry associations of metaphors into how we see the world,

then you can see the problem.

When we use a problematic metaphor like the captive wife

and the way that violence against women is normalized

and sort of smuggled in to whatever broader point you're trying to make.

Even when we try to mindfulness

our way out of a troubling verse,

I feel this problem also very acutely

when reading the masters and these rabbis who take all the war imagery

that happens to be in the parsha leading up to the High Holidays

and transforms it into these beautiful sort of

similes and allegories about the war between our yet to have an answer.

How right, right are our good and evil inclinations kind of battling within us?

All right, so instead of spending the month

of talking about warfare and all the violence,

they sort of try to say, no, this is a spiritual war.

This is a spiritual war.

And in some ways, I think, again, this is a great technique

because we do have moments,

I think, inside where it feels like there are warring impulses.

And it's not unlike, I think, what Rabbi Lew is trying to do in his book,

which is taking something very ugly, a text that's very ugly.

About a human impulse that is real, but also very ugly,

and doing his best to sort of find something beautiful in it.

But it's still ultimately a violent metaphor,

and we can't entirely escape the brutality of it,

even when it is watered down to be just a symbol.

I know all that, and I still don't really want

to give up on all these teachings because I love them.

But they contain threads that are deep and real.

And they're also ours.

They're part of our tradition.

They're part of who we are, even when they're difficult.

Ours is a chain of tradition going back 3000 years or so,

and parts of it come from what is really an entirely different world

than the one we inhabit the world of the Iron Age, the world of antiquity,

different worlds in so many ways than the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

And they had different blindspots

and different moral failures and different ways of seeing humanity

and different ways of noticing or not noticing people on the margins.

And there's really no way, I think, to cut out the parts we don't like

without losing links in the chain

and risking the whole thing collapsing.

Years ago,

when I was a student,

I was taking clinical pastoral education, which is a chaplaincy training program,

and I got into a very heated conversation with, with a good friend,

friendly, heated conversation who was a Unitarian Universalist minister

in training when I was a rabbi in training.

And I at some point I sort of said, you don't understand what it's like.

You know, I have the weight of 3000 years of tradition on me

all the time when I want to do anything that's so stifling, you know?

And she's like, yeah, but you don't know what it's like

to not have that foundation all the time, right?

You don't know what it's like to sort of have to start from scratch and sort of

build and construct.

And I said, oh,

I guess, yeah, I guess you're right to,

And so in that moment, she helped me to see the challenge

and the beauty of what we have, just as she understood,

I think the challenge and the beauty of what she had.

And so there's no silver bullet, which is also a violent metaphor, unfortunately.

But we can try to contextualize these sources historically.

We can try to interpret them generously, we can critique them, we can reject them,

we can downplay them, we can ignore them, we can metaphor ize them.

And each of these strategies, while imperfect, can be a help in this.

And we can also, I think, work to expand our palette of images.

I don't know if expanding your palette means the palette

of your mouth, like the tastes, or if it means like a palette of,

you know, like a painter that's paint.

I don't know which metaphor it is, if anyone knows which one that I

the painting, do you think? All right.

I tried to look it up and I couldn't find a definitive answer.

Anyway, a mixed metaphor.

But but if we expand our our palette, our taste buds or our colors,

for metaphors and what we use and not sort of just

unthinkingly rely on tired metaphors,

but really explore more creative ones.

And some of these don't have to be made up from scratch.

We have so many in our canon, so many in our tradition.

Just I was thinking about UVA, which is the theme,

and you have Maimonides,

who thinks about it like a wake up call, the shofar, you know, wake up of sleepers.

Rev Cooke writing in, in 19, I think late 28.

No, late 19th, early 20th century British Mandate Palestine.

He writes about Shiva as light or sometimes even.

I think he says a rock party like a like a spiritual lightning bolt.

Soloveitchik, in a famous essay, talks about UVA

as an act of self-creation, of creation, like creating a new human being.

All these are really beautiful metaphors.

And and you don't have to look far to find them.

Not to mention opening up our palette to different voices and newer voices

that maybe have not been part of the traditional canon

and so forth to us, all of these imperfect options.

The path forward, I think, has to be yes.

And which is loving our tradition, embracing it for what it is

without being afraid of hiding

its rough edges or flaws or failures.

We are taught that the Torah has 70 faces, and while each face may be imperfect,

they are part of a whole whose beauty is greater than the sum of its parts.

To see the Torah

and its truth, we can employ all these strategies

with the knowledge that they're not

here to erase this problems, but to help us live with them.

It's part of that process I've been moved to see happening here

at BJ through the Half Torah Project, which many of you have have

written for, studied with, and it's, a project where many of our members

have written and reflected on the roles of violence and misogyny and intolerance

in some of our sacred texts, especially in the Half Chariot.

And doing so as insiders in this tradition,

as people who love this tradition and want it to be able to respond

to the moment

without pretending

like things are not there.

In truth, that's the only way I think we can love anything,

whether it's the Torah or Judaism, whether it's a community

or a country or ourselves or any other person,

which is learning to love flawed things

because everything and everyone is flawed.

And in this season, when we work so hard

to acknowledge and repair our flaws,

we know that it's the only way God can live us to,

which is to love us as flawed and imperfect creatures

striving to be better

and still worthy of love.

Shabbat shalom.