Ki Teitzei | Adorning our Enemies

 

כִּי־תֵצֵא לַמִּלְחָמָה עַל־אֹיְבֶיךָ וּנְתָנוֹ יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּיָדֶךָ וְשָׁבִיתָ שִׁבְיוֹ׃ 

When you go out to battle against your enemies, Eternally Present, your divine presence, will place them in your hands

Deuteronomy 21:10

Alternative translation:

When you take the initiative in dealing with the unique challenges which your soul needs to confront, Be-ing who G-ds you places the challenge within your power…

— Tr. Rabbi Moshe Aharon Ladizhyner (aka Rabbi Miles Krassen)

 

The Israelites receive a teaching about going out of the land of abundance before they have gone in. Torah awakens us to the knowledge that our lives, all existence, is a continual process of going in and out. We enter a promised land, and then we go out again. Nothing is permanent. We open and close, we move in and out of satisfaction and longing, compassion and anger, awareness and forgetfulness. All of us. This is the human condition we are given to work with.

When do I "go out to battle?" When I set out with an image in my mind that someone is an enemy. When I make choices from the consciousness that someone is an enemy because they have done something I judge as wrong, bad or unforgivable. From that place, I go out to do battle. I enter the battlefield where "right-doing" and "wrongdoing" control my consciousness. I am blocked from understanding the human pain and suffering, the love and fear, behind other's actions. I become a captive in the same cycle of separation.

The Jewish sages taught that the "battle" to integrate our full human experience is done through prayer. The Zohar, the foundational work of Kabbalah by Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his students in the 2nd century CE, says: שעת צלותא שעת קרבא, "the time of prayer is the time of battle." The Kabbalists went out into the field to pray. In prayer, we are reaching for connection with the Source of everything, beyond our judgments of good and evil. We pray that our hearts will open to Oneness and Unification. Prayer itself is the form of practice that can bring us into the consciousness of Oneness, where there is no enemy.

As Rabbi Moshe Aharon Ladizhyner (aka Rabbi Miles Krassen), writes:

In this verse, the Torah uses the term, milchamah, which literally means “war,” but the sages have already taught us that the verse refers to the inner struggle that all souls must encounter in order to achieve integration.  In confronting our own challenges, which are unique to each person’s soul and experience, it is necessary to seize the initiative, to go out and deal consciously with these “enemies,” before they become too much for us. (Source:  https://planetaryjudaism.org/ki-teitzei/)

A story attributed to the Bal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism, teaches us to look beyond the blinders of seeing others as enemies. When we look deeply, we recognize that divine energy is at the root of everything. Our practice, our "battle," is to learn to see this:

A king once wanted to test the faith and love of his subjects. So he chose one of his closest servants, dressed him up as a great king and sent him out to declare war against his subjects.  When the servant appearing as king met the first group and declared war, they immediately prepared themselves for the battle. When he came to the second group, they said “Since he is such a great king, why should we fight?” Finally, the faux king traveled farther until he came to a town of sages. The sages inquired deeply, until they were able to see through the disguise.  (Sefer Toledot Ya’aqov Yosef, Va-yaqhel, see Sefer Ba’al Shem Tov, Bereishit, 141) (Source:  https://planetaryjudaism.org/ki-teitzei/)

How do we learn to "See through the disguise"? One starting point is to understand that harmful words and deeds disguise the divine nature of a person, their longings to be seen, to know and be known. In the words of American Buddhist teacher Robert Thurman:

Enemy, then, is not a fixed definition, a label permanently affixed to anyone we believe has harmed us. It’s a temporary identity we assign people when they don’t do what we want or they do something we don’t want.

— Love Your Enemies: How to Break the Anger Habit and Be a Whole Lot Happier, by Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman

Transforming Enemy Images

Nonviolent Communication offers many tools to see beyond the "enemy images" we form about people. Looking deeply into others' actions (or into parts of ourselves that we are alienated from), we see that all actions are attempts, however tragic, to meet precious needs. The actions disguise the precious needs because of many conditions, such as trauma, frustration or hopelessness. When we see harmful behavior as human attempts to alleviate suffering, to create safety or empathy or respect, we don't see enemies. We see life energies under the actions that need nurturing and protection. We find our shared source when we look inward, or outward to the vast arc of human history.

Return to Yourself

Buddhism also offers mindfulness practices to calm our minds and free us from the images that cause separation. At Plum Village Monastery in France, where I have practiced Buddhist mindfulness since the 1990s, we practice "returning to yourself." When you feel irritated, jealous or angry, return to yourself. When you are lost in thought about what other people did "wrong," you are not awake to the present moment. This is the time to return to yourself. We do this by noticing what's going on in us,  stopping and using our breath to feel into what's going on in our bodies, emotions and mind. This is returning to yourself. Not to judge or suppress. To know and feel.

Through practice, we see that returning, just returning in this way, calms us, and give us an opportunity to get insight into how we are experiencing the situation. What was touched in me and what was touched in the other person? From that centered place, new choices for response arises. Returning to yourself through breathing, awareness of walking, sitting and sensations, opens the space your heart needs to connect with how you and other people are experiencing life and what life needs in this moment.

In this Jewish month of Elul, we also practice returning, teshuvah. We return to remembering what is written in the beginning of Torah, that all earthlings are created in the divine image and are inherently good.

Most of us, thankfully, are never on the battlefield of military war. And yet, we live in a time when we routinely see battlefields created where people live. And all of us live surrounded by the trauma and wounding left from war. Millions of people in the world today live in refugee camps from wars. Others finance the wars and share the booty. We all live in the boundaries and systems created by war. This week many of us watched teenage soldiers arriving in Kabul carrying weapons from the US, Russia, and China.

The roots of war run deep.

And daily we all go out to war, over and over, in our minds. Judging, attacking, criticizing, comparing, resenting. These mind states, in Buddhism, Judaism and Nonviolent Communication, are the root causes of war.

As Reb Krassen writes, by transforming how we see the challenges we face, the sparks of a deeper teaching shine through the shells of the letters at the beginning of the Torah portion. Our images of enemies become transparent and we see through the shells and disguises into people's hearts.

Finding Beauty in Longing

The second verse in the Torah portion invites us into the complicated path of longing. When your longing takes you out into the midst of the battlefield:

וְרָאִיתָ בַּשִּׁבְיָה אֵשֶׁת יְפַת־תֹּאַר וְחָשַׁקְתָּ בָהּ וְלָקַחְתָּ לְךָ לְאִשָּׁה׃ 

...and you see among the captives a beautiful woman and you desire her and would take her to wife [redeem her]...

Deuteronomy 21:11

The challenging imagery goes on to set rules and conditions for holding or releasing the captive woman. Before turning to the mystical and inner teachings in this, I want to own that I struggle with and reject using imagery of women taken captive by men. That this isn't innocent is underscored today as we fear for the women and girls each hour in Afghanistan. Using someone else's suffering as an instrument of personal growth or spiritual uplifting is painful and reprehensible. The time is past when it is acceptable to use violent imagery about women or anyone, in spiritual imagery.

And still, I choose to engage with this imagery because the Torah has such influence in the world today. Redeeming it, lifting its fallen sparks, the sparks that use any of this to justify or reinforce violence, misogyny and xenophobia, is needed and is what the Torah is calling for. Most if not all spiritual traditions have drawn on similar imagery to depict longing, greed, anger and love.

We can lift and find beautiful energy in  the image of redeeming the captive woman in the Torah.  The tradition sees this as a teaching for redeeming and rededicating the life energy, the sparks of life, that are held captive in actions we regret. We heal ourselves and society by redeeming and reviving the life energy that was frozen into trauma by taking enemies, kidnapping women and dehumanizing others. In the Torah story, we went out intending to battle enemies and in that battle, in our prayer, we connected with love and beauty.

How do we transform this from the taking of a love-object, a crude possessing, to true love? Torah herself is crying out to us, free me, Torah, from being a captive in a fundamentalist reading. Look for something beautiful in what you think of as your enemy. Make me an instrument of your peace.

In Jewish mysticism, the captive woman is in fact the Shechina, the feminine aspect of the Divine. Torah tasks us with bringing her out of the battlefield and into our house, adorning her and either loving her or setting her free. Through prayer we purify our image of the enemy, change our way of perceiving.

Judaism and Buddhism both teach that through prayer and looking deeply we redeem and transform the urges, triggers, and traumas that cause us to act in harmful ways and ways we regret. Redemption in kabbalistic thought means lifting the fallen sparks of holiness that reside within us, transforming the energies into healing of the world as we do this.

Adorning and Freeing Your Enemy: A Nonviolent Communication Practice

• Think of a judgment or an image you have of someone — yourself or another person
• Acknowledge that you have this judgment and that it is your attempt to satisfying a yearning in you. As you do this, you are creating space between yourself and the judgment. You are creating more choice about how you hold and encounter this judgment and what it represents for you.
• See something beautiful in the judgment. What are you longing for that this represents? Do self inquiry: Am I longing for connection? Am I longing for safety? Or understanding? For trust, respect or peace?  Is it that I want caring and nurturing, warmth? List of living Energies.
• Take the beautiful energy you long for into your house.  Bathe it, nurture it, care for it, experience it in its fullness.
• Do not enslave it — if it is no longer fully beautiful and wanted by you, release it. The judgment is released with it; if you are in love with it and want it, the judgment is no longer part of it, just the yearning for inner peace, nurturing, warmth.

 

---

 

A Prayer and Practice for Reuniting with the Shekhina in Elul

When you break out of the conventional way of relating to your challenges as a war, Be-ing who G-ds you places Herself in your hands, and you can redeem the spark of Shekhinah that was held captive within your unique challenge.  (Devarim 21:10).

You will then be able to recognize the beauty of the Shekhinah even within her captivity and your passion will be aroused to liberate Her and merge with Her. (Devarim 21:11).

Invite Her into the depths of your soul, where she can reveal Her true nature and rid Herself of the fangs of judgment. (Devarim 21:12).

Once She has removed the disguise of Her captivity, let her dwell deep within you, arousing tears of teshuvah for the entire month of Elul, and then in the month of Tishri, you may fully merge with Her, in the way that consecrated lovers know they are One. (Devarim 21:13).

May we all be blessed to recognize our unique challenges

As opportunities to liberate sparks of Shekhinah.

May rescuing captive sparks become our passion.

May their liberation melt our Hearts

With holy tears of teshuvah for the whole month of Elul

That we may unite with our Beloved on Rosh Ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur.

Amen.

— Rabbi Moshe Aharon Ladizhyner 
(aka Rabbi Miles Krassen)
, 5766

 

---

 

The Women of Captivity
Parsha Ki Teitzei and the 5th Shabbat of Consolation

... and you see among the captives a beautiful woman and you desire her and would take her to wife, you shall bring her into your house, and she shall trim her hair, pare her nails, and discard her captive’s garb. She shall spend a month’s time in your house lamenting her father and mother; after that you may come to her and possess her, and she shall be your wife.                 

— Devarim 21:11-13

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost

— Dante Allihieri, Inferno Canto I

One thing I ask for, one thing I hope---
To live in your house All the days of my life

—Psalm 27

I

My longing is to restore their voices,
the captive women, our grandmothers
     though not by their own choices,
ghosts roaming the dark woods
in exile with Shekinah.
If only I could have offered another way,
sanctuary where there was none, washed their
worn feet, soothed their broken young hearts
and bodies.  A month was never enough time
to lament their losses, a lifetime
not enough, to mourn
mothers and fathers, lost
cultures and language. Her holy body that
once was her own, stolen and
turned into a spoil of war,
and then called a marriage, veil upon
veil over trauma and violation.
Afo Na-che-ma-tenu ach-i-ot, afo,
where is our consolation my sisters, where?

II

From the quiet of my inner cheder
Reb Menchem of Chernobyl insists:
Take it inside. The captive woman is you,
within each of us, is Shekinah,
constricted by our generational pain,
woven through bone and muscle,
held captive by the ways we marry
our suffering, bound and gagged
by old beliefs and habits
unable to hear the freedom
that is calling to us from beyond the
small tent of our captivities.
Then we hear Tiferet calling to us
from our loneliness:  a humming bird,
a fleeting deer, a silver fox
and so we step through a threshold
that has always been there
onto the winding path,
finding a different way through,
recognizing who we are: etzim chayim
whose roots live in union
with a vast understory and that we
belong to the forest canopy,
filtering and receiving the light.

III

Ashrei, how generous is this house
so full of blessings
they chanted so beautifully
generation upon generations of only men
and now in my lifetime
these are also women’s prayers
sung in a daily morning minyan
during a time of plague,
a tent led by a woman Rabbi
filled with women from Jerusalem,
New York, Massachusetts,
wide open to all who have been exiled, marginalized,
to all who still wait for when justice will
kiss kindness. We have cleansed
and are repairing the tents
where once our grandmothers
had been taken against
their wills. We rise and sing more than
100 blessings a day. We pray for
all who are still captive,
for the day that we might dwell
in peace and belonging
in the house of Shekinah
for all our remaining days -
one thing I ask for, my
longing, my hope.

— Elana Klugman, draft  8-18-21

 

---

 

I Wasn’t One of the Six Million: And What Is My Life Span? Open Closed Open
By Yehuda Amichai, translated By Chana Bloch

 

    I

My life is the gardener of my body. The brain—a hothouse closed tight
with its flowers and plants, alien and odd
in their sensitivity, their terror of becoming extinct.
The face—a formal French garden of symmetrical contours
and circular paths of marble with statues and places to rest,
places to touch and smell, to look out from, to lose yourself
in a green maze, and Keep Off and Don’t Pick the Flowers.
The upper body above the navel—an English park
pretending to be free, no angles, no paving stones, naturelike,
humanlike, in our image, after our likeness,
its arms linking up with the big night all around.
And my lower body, beneath the navel—sometimes a nature preserve,
wild, frightening, amazing, an unpreserved preserve,
and sometimes a Japanese garden, concentrated, full of
forethought. And the penis and testes are smooth
polished stones with dark vegetation between them,
precise paths fraught with meaning
and calm reflection. And the teachings of my father
and the commandments of my mother
are birds of chirp and song. And the woman I love
is seasons and changing weather, and the children at play
are my children. And the life my life.

     2

I’ve never been in those places where I’ve never been
and never will be, I have no share in the infinity of light-years and dark-years,
but the darkness is mine, and the light, and my time
is my own. The sand on the seashore—those infinite grains
are the same sand where I made love in Achziv and Caesarea.
The years of my life I have broken into hours, and the hours into minutes
and seconds and fractions of seconds. These, only these,
are the stars above me
that cannot be numbered.

     3

And what is my life span? I’m like a man gone out of Egypt:
the Red Sea parts, I cross on dry land,
two walls of water, on my right hand and on my left.
Pharaoh’s army and his horsemen behind me. Before me the desert,
perhaps the Promised Land, too. That is my life span.

     4

Open closed open. Before we are born, everything is open
in the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closed
within us. And when we die, everything is open again.
Open closed open. That’s all we are.

    5

What then is my life span? Like shooting a self-portrait.
I set up the camera a few feet away on something stable
(the one thing that’s stable in this world),
I decide on a good place to stand, near a tree,
run back to the camera, press the timer,
run back again to that place near the tree,
and I hear the ticking of time, the whirring
like a distant prayer, the click of the shutter like an execution.
That is my life span. God develops the picture
in His big darkroom. And here is the picture:
white hair on my head, eyes tired and heavy,
eyebrows black, like the charred lintels
above the windows in a house that burned down.
My life span is over.

     6

I wasn’t one of the six million who died in the Shoah,
I wasn’t even among the survivors.
And I wasn’t one of the six hundred thousand who went out of Egypt.
I came to the Promised Land by sea.
No, I was not in that number, though I still have the fire and the smoke
within me, pillars of fire and pillars of smoke that guide me
by night and by day. I still have inside me the mad search
for emergency exits, for soft places, for the nakedness
of the land, for the escape into weakness and hope,
I still have within me the lust to search for living water
with quiet talk to the rock or with frenzied blows.
Afterwards, silence: no questions, no answers.
Jewish history and world history
grind me between them like two grindstones, sometimes
to a powder. And the solar year and the lunar year
get ahead of each other or fall behind,
leaping, they set my life in perpetual motion.
Sometimes I fall into the gap between them to hide,
or to sink all the way down.

    7

I believe with perfect faith that at this very moment
millions of human beings are standing at crossroads
and intersections, in jungles and deserts,
showing each other where to turn, what the right way is,
which direction. They explain exactly where to go,
what is the quickest way to get there, when to stop
and ask again. There, over there. The second
turnoff, not the first, and from there left or right,
near the white house, by the oak tree.
They explain with excited voices, with a wave of the hand
and a nod of the head: There, over there, not that there, the other there,
as in some ancient rite. This too is a new religion.
I believe with perfect faith that at this very moment.

Yehuda Amichai, “I Wasn’t One  of the Six Million: And What is My Life Span? Open Closed Open” from Open Closed Open, trans. by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, published by Harcourt, Inc. Copyright © 2000 by Yehuda Amichai. Reprinted by permission of Hana Amichai.

Source: Open Closed Open: Poems (Harcourt Inc., 2000)

The Place Where We Are Right
Yehuda Amichai

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.

Yehuda Amichai (1924 – 2000) was an Israeli poet. He was born in Germany, then immigrated with his family to Palestine in 1936. He fought in the Israeli War of Independence as a young man, but became an advocate of peace and reconciliation in the region, working with Palestinian writers. American poet Ted Hughes first translated several of Amichai's books into English.