Here comes the judge!

This is what this week is all about.   You see, this week’s parsha (Torah portion) is called Shotfim which means, “Ones who judge.”  The parsha starts out by talking about the judges and policemen that we appoint for ourselves.  These folk are to judge the nation righteously, and not take bribes because bribes blinds eyes and perverts the words of the righteous.

Justice is what we are to pursue in order to live and settle the land that haShem (god) is giving us (I want to point out that, even though this is Moshe (Moses) talking to the people about to enter the land, it is still true today:  god is, at this moment, giving us the land.  Before you challenge me on this, I ask of you to just think about it for awhile first.).

Moshe then tells us (we are still in Moshe’s monologue that started several weeks ago, at the beginning of this book of the Torah – D’varim (Deuteronomy) ) not to plant trees used for idol worship near the altar, not to set up monuments that god despises, and not to sacrifice animals that have blemishes.   If we find an idolater amongst us, we are to stone them to death, and that at least two witnesses are required to convict, and these witnesses are the ones that throw the first stones.

On matters that are hard to judge, we are told to go to the place god chooses and go to the cohen (priest) and the judge and they will decide and that decision you must follow.  If not, you will be killed.

When we enter the land, we might want a king.  We are allowed to have a king, but only the one that god chooses, and the king must be one of our brothers, not a foreigner.  The king cannot amass horses or wealth or wives and he is to write 2 torahs which he will read every day in order make sure he will follow the rules and not become haughty over his brothers.

The priests, we read again, have no inheritance of land; they eat from fire offerings, their inheritance of parts of the sacrifice, and the first harvest of the nations produce, wine, and oil and sheep shearing.

Again we are warned not to follow in the ways of the people who are getting the boot.  Other nations can have diviners, but we are not allowed to have them because we have prophets.  And with this, we are warned about false prophets.  Next, we are reminded of the cities of refuge for accidental killers, along with an example of how someone can be killed accidentally.  However an intentional murderer, we are told not to have any pity on.  Next comes warnings against moving the boundary markers of your friend and of being a false witness.

We move on to what happens when we go to war.  Before the battle a priest tells us not to fear because god is with us.  Then the police come forward and tell people who have new houses, or are engaged, or have planted vineyards, but haven’t eaten of its fruits to go home.  Also, a person soft of heart should go home.  Now that we know who can fight, we talk about how to fight a city.  First we ask the city to make peace.  If they won’t, we besiege it, and we learn what we do when we conquer the city.  Then we are told not to cut down fruit trees to help in the siege.

And the parsha ends with a discussion on what to do when a slain corpse is found in the fields between cities.

Now, there is a word in this parsha that keeps sticking in me.  The word is cheel’l and it shows up in two places.  The first is at the meeting just before a war, where it says that anyone who has planted a vineyard and did not cheel’l it must go home so another person doesn’t cheel’l it.  The other place we see it is at the end of the parsha where the word is conjugated as chalal and means a slain corpse.  Now the latter usage is very common and ordinary (chalal means a corpse among other things), but the former seems very unusual.

Elsewhere the Torah says that when you plant a tree, you cannot eat of its fruit until the 4th year that it has produced fruit.  This is also for a vineyard, which is what our parsha is talking about.  Why doesn’t the Torah say this?  Why instead does in use this strange word, cheel’l?  And why only a vineyard?  Why not an apple tree, or all fruit bearing trees?

The reason for this can be found in the root of the word cheel’l, which comes from the verb chol, which means to make mundane or ordinary.  If you remember, way back when the Torah first talked about not eating the fruits until the fourth year, it said the reason was because the first fruits belong to haShem, and therefore we can’t eat them.  In other words, the first three years, the fruits are too holy for us to eat.

Now, we can be begin to see why the word cheel’l is used.  Since the root means to be mundane, what we are being taught is that until your vineyard has become mundane, you should not leave it.

And how does it become mundane?  When you harvest and eat the fruits of the fourth year in Jerusalem, the place where haShem is most manifest in this world.  The reason for this is because it is our job to bring the holy (the fruit) into the holy (place where god is in this world) which puts the holy into the mundane, and we should not leave the job half done.

Now two questions remain:  why is this only relevant for vineyards, and why is this same word used in regards to a slain corpse?

The answer to the first is that grapes have a special property that no other fruit does:  it can transform into wine without anything added to it.  I am afraid I do not know the deeper meaning behind it, however it does seem like many cultures treat wine as a special and sacred beverage, our tradition included.  I welcome any and all thoughts or ideas on this matter.  Please leave a comment below.

I will say one more thing about wine, but before I do, I want to remind you that every Hebrew letter is also a number.  For example, aleph is 1 and bet is 2.  In the tradition of the sons of Yaakov, we believe that words whose letters add up to the same number have a relationship with each other.

Wine in Hebrew is ya-yin and its letters add up to 70.  The word for hidden in Hebrew is sod whose letters also add up to 70.  So, there is some connection between wine and things hidden.  (I heard this teaching many times in Jerusalem, followed by the observation that when wine goes in, secrets come out.  😉 )

Now to the last question:  why does chalal, which is related to the verb to be mundane, mean a slain corpse?

To understand this, we must first understand that a living person is holy.  All living people are holy.  How do I know?  Because we all came from the Adam and the Adam had the breath of haShem blown into him/her.  Therefore, all his/her children have that breath in them too.

Now what happens when somebody dies?  That breath is no longer part of them.  The holiness has left.  It would seem that the word chalal then should just mean any old dead person, because they are now fully mundane or lacking any holiness.  I think however, the reason it is used for a slain corpse is to emphasize the fact that to kill someone, the killer has to have no concern for holiness, as they are so easily and readily able to remove it and make something mundane.  It is this lack of concern for holiness, for sacredness, that is emphasized by the use of the word chalal or empty or mundane.

Putting these two uses of the word cheel’l together, we see that there is a certain process in taking something sacred or holy and bringing it into the mundane, and this is a process that not even national security should stand in the way of – it is that important.

And on the other hand, we see that a person can have no respect for what is sacred, and destroy the sacred to make it mundane.  When this happens, we need to do extra work (that we read about at the end of the parsha) to honor the holy.

By juxtaposing these two ways of making the holy, mundane, I think we are being given a hint as to what our purpose as human beings is:  to bring the holy, the sacred, the godlike, into this world of the mundane, of the ordinary.

If you want to read what I wrote about this parsha last year, click here.

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.