Hello everyone,

I hope you-all are doing well. We are into the home stretch of the torah cycle, and like a marathon, it is grueling. Let’s see what we are dealing with before we try to make some sense of it.

This week’s parsha (Torah portion) picks up almost from where the previous parsha left off:  with war.  We start with the question of what to do when we capture women.  From there we talk about a couple of issues regarding children, and a strange comment about capital punishment. The Torah then says that one cannot hide from their responsibility of returning a lost object, or of their responsibility to help when someone’s pack animal falls down.  We then jump to the no-no of cross-dressing before we come to a strange concept of shooing away a mother bird before taking her eggs.  If this jump isn’t far enough for you, we then jump to being told to put a fence on your roof, and not to mix seeds with your grapes, and not to plow with a donkey and an ox together.

Take a breath folks, because there is more to come.  Putting tassels on the corners of your clothes is next followed by several laws regarding issues around marriage.  Finally something connects, for next we go to a list of folks who cannot marry into the community (yes, we are exclusive here).  Then it is back to war with making sure the camp is pure.  Ok, enough of war.  Now we go to not returning an escaped slave, followed by no holy prostitution amongst the women and men of the tribes.  We then are warned to keep our vows, and then told when we are harvesting, we can eat as we harvest.  Ok, back to marriage for a moment:  if a man divorces his wife and she remarries and gets divorced again, the first man cannot marry her.  And while we are on the subject of marriage, a man has no military obligations when he has a new bride, for he is suppose to rejoice with his bride.  Enough of marriage for the moment. Another breath everyone, we are almost done.

Kidnapping gets the death penalty.  Be careful about tzaraat (a spiritual disease mistakenly referred to as leprosy).   A quicky in regards to collateral on loans and paying workers on time.  Leave a little bit in your fields for foreigners, widows, and orphans.  And back to marriage, and how a man can die childless and still have a heir…or not.  And women, if you see your man in a brawl, don’t grab the genitals of his opponent!

And we finally end by being told to be honest with weights and measures, and to remember Amelek so you can erase his memory from under the heavens.  “Do not forget!” are the very words that end this parsha.

So, where to begin?  I have been wracking my brains on the question of how to tie the parsha together.  What is the unifying theme?  And I have finally come to the conclusion that haShem (god) is not going to let me see it at this time.  If anyone out there has any ideas on this topic please let us know below.

Hence, I have decided to limit my scope.  The question now becomes:   what do I choose to focus on?  There are so many juicy and troubling and interesting rules our man Moshe (Moses) is handing down.  What to choose?  Something obvious or something obscure?

How about one that kept coming up and sticking around in my brain such as the law that if you happen upon a nest, you are supposed to shoo away the mother before taking the eggs/chicks.  Ok, this one has been talked about to death I realize.  And a lot of religious Jews go out looking for such nests so as to fulfill the law by deliberately finding a nest, shooing the mother, and then eating the eggs.  This has always bothered me.  It wasn’t until a shabbat evening meal in a discussion that it finally hit me what was wrong with this.

We are not being told to go and look for such a nest.  To do so is wrong.  “Why?” one might ask.  After all, the logic goes, do we not have an obligation to shoo the mother away and take the eggs?  My answer to that is, “No, this is faulty logic.”  Here is why.  First, the passage in question (Devarim/Deuteronomy 22:6-7) begins by saying, “If you happen upon a nest…”  Now, I haven’t been in that much nature, but I have never “happened” upon a nest with eggs or chicks being protected by the mother.  I have really had to look, and maybe hidden in the trees or off the beaten path I might see one.  In other words, what this is telling us is that we are not dealing with a normal situation.  In fact, the only time you might see this situation is if the mother bird cannot truly take care of her children.  This is not to say, she doesn’t care for them and that she isn’t trying her best.  It is just saying that, for whatever reason, she could not find a safe place to hatch them and raise them.  Why do I say this?  Because we happened upon them on the ground or in a tree, and if we can happen upon them, certainly other predators will too.  The Torah then goes on to say that if you shoo the mother bird away and take the eggs/chicks, it will benefit you and you will live longer.  The key to this verse is the fact that the word for ‘you’ in Hebrew is ‘lech’ which is the feminine form of you.  Up to this point, the masculine has been used.  Why the sudden change?  The reason is to let us know that we are shooing the mother away and taking the children to nurture them and raise them in a way that the mother cannot.  It is not about consuming the babies; it is about helping the babies survive!  Imagine you lived near a family that had no money and the parents were very ill and could not take care of their children.  In this situation, heaven forbid it should happen to anyone we know, would it not make sense for someone to come and take care of the children?  Are there not in fact government agencies just for this?  Well, the idea comes from these two verses.  However these two verses don’t tell us to wait for the government to step in, but to get directly involved ourselves.  Shoo the mother away.  Yes, it is painful, and she will not be happy and she will fight you.  However, it is what is best for her offspring, and for her.  And doing so will benefit you and lengthen your days.

As this can be applied to the outside world, it can also be applied to the inner world.  We all have inner parts of us, inner children that never felt they got what they needed.  Now is the time to go within and take them and nurture them as a loving mother would.  Doing this will help make you whole which benefits you and the rest of the world, and the more whole you are, the longer your days will be.

Shavuah tov/have a good week,

About the Author

Shmuel Shalom Cohen spent 10 years studying Torah in Jerusalem. Six years ago, he started Conscious Torah to help Jews connect to their tradition in ways they didn’t think possible. Shmuel also started, and is the executive directory of Jewish Events Willamette-valley, a non-profit whose mission is to build Jewish community, pride, and learning. In his free time, Shmuel likes walks in nature, playing music, writing poetry, and time with good friends.