Shoftim 2024

Margaret Holub - September 7, 2024

Here’s an outline of Shoftim:

When you get to the land that God has appointed for the Israelites, you shall:

Appoint judges for each tribe;
Not plant any tree or slaughter any animal that HASHEM does not favor;
Destroy any Israelite who strays and worships a foreign god;
Do what the judges decree; if you don’t you shall be killed;
Sustain the levites, including Kohanim, with a tax on the animals, grain, wine and oil of the landholding tribes;
Not do anything like the native people in the land you are settling; in particular no divination practices, which are abhorrent to HASHEM;
Only believe prophets who speak in HASHEM’s Name and then whose prophecies come true:
Provide cities of refuge for manslaughterers but not for those who kill with intention;
Not move the boundaries of land granted to your neighbor;
Accept only testimony from two confirming witnesses in court proceedings. If a witness testifies falsely, they are to be killed;
If someone acts in such a way that another person’s eye is poked out, the eye of the offender shall be poked out; likewise with teeth, hands and feet;
When you go into battle certain categories of people should be exempted from the obligation to serve;
When you attack a city and the inhabitants surrender, the native population shall be enslaved to you;
If they do not surrender you should besiege the city until it falls, whereupon you should kill the males and plunder the women, children and possessions of the people you have conquered. Do not cut down the fruit trees;
If an unclaimed corpse is found in your precinct you shall follow a strict procedure to bury it.

You can see from all this that it’s time for some order! Moses has been slogging through the wilderness for forty years with these Israelites. Poor Moses is about to release the so-called “Children of Israel” — who really are quite child-like in some ways — to go live their lives in this land he himself will never see. In preparation he is doing everything he can to consolidate, organize, structure and institutionalize the people to prevent the mayhem he knows is just a breath away at every moment.

The people are preparing to enter a land that they do not know; they have heard that it is verdant, with grapes so large that a cluster had to be carried on two poles and rivers flowing with milk and honey — also that it has gigantic indigenous residents living in walled cities. They are being prepared by Moses to conquer and colonize the land which, from their vantage point, has been promised to them.

Of course there is much to be concerned about in this narrative of a people being organized to occupy. But as I was getting ready to lean into this parshah I happened also to be reading a very strange — and not entirely linear — piece of writing that challenges me to be provoked by a whole different set of concerns than the ones that usually arise when I encounter this colonialist language.

The piece I was reading, a long essay by Nigerian philosopher (or something — social theorist, broad, weird and wild thinker) Bayo Akomolafe, is called “I, Corona Virus.” It’s about a lot of things: slave ships and monsters and interrogators and the author’s children and much more. But at its heart I think he is trying to tell the story of the COVID epidemic not from the point of view of human beings but of the virus. He is de-centering human experience.

Just reading something that tries to de-center human beings is a kind of a mind warp. I’m not generally a reader of science fiction. And that’s not quite what this is anyhow. But I am intrigued by the possibility of de-centering the usual protagonists. Torah obviously centers the experience of the Jewish people. Some would further point out that it centers the experience of Jewish men. And Jewish adults. And tribal leaders and elders at that.

Inspired by Akomolafe and the Corona virus, let’s experiment a bit with de- centering Jewish and human experience too. I pause for a moment, for example, and notice in our aliyah: (20:1) When you go out to the battle against your enemy and see horse and chariot…” And I think for a bit about the horse. What is in it for the horse to be domesticated to pull a chariot into a battle? How is that horse bred, chosen, tended, fed? What has been the career of horses in the ancient Near East?

I pull out my concordance and learn about horses in Torah. It’s a quick study — they don’t come up much. And when they do, it is always in connection with Egypt — except in our parshah, which speculates that the folks up in the Promised Land will come at the Israelites with horses. The first mention of horses in Torah is in Genesis, after Joseph, second in command to Pharaoh down in Egypt, has siloed the grain from the seven fat years. As famine sets in, he lays it down to the Egyptians, “Bring your livestock, and I will provide for you in return for your livestock if the money is gone. So they brought their livestock to Joseph, and Joseph gave them bread in return for the horses,” sheep, cattle, donkeys and so on. (Gen. 47:17)

A little while later, in parshat Vayechi, Jacob is blessing each of his sons. Of Dan he says, “Dan will be a serpent on the highway, a viper by the path, that bites a horse’s heels so its rider falls backwards.” A strange and specific image.

Still later on, as the Israelite slaves are fleeing Mitzrayim, they are pursued by Egyptian soldiers in chariots pulled by horses. The horses, as well as the chariots and their riders, drown in the Red Sea.

I read a bit of google archeology to find out about horses in Egypt. It seems that wild horses were probably first domesticated well northeast of Egypt, in the Caucasus. There is DNA in remains of wild horses from Kazakhstan from around 5000 BCE that is similar to that of early domesticated horses. They were imported to Egypt by the invading Hyksos around 1600 BCE. To get there they would have passed through Canaan. So it makes sense that the indigenous tribes of Canaan would have horses too. Since history is generally written by the victors, we know little about the experience of domestication from the POV of the horse. But there are many beautiful artifacts that can stimulate our imagination:

Changing gears here for a second: at the women’s retreat a few weeks ago I offered a little one-minute meditation on a subject I know little about. I was reflecting, as I have been a lot lately, on resources for facing an uncertain future. And I felt like I had to say something about ancestors — since many people find solace and wisdom in relationship to their forebears. So I asked people to think about the ancestor furthest back in their own history that they know something about —at least, say, their name and where they lived. Then go back one more generation, to an ancestor about whom you know nothing. Ask that ancestor for a gift. Now I don’t always participate in my own little thought experiments when I’m teaching — but I shut my eyes for a minute. And, blow me over with a feather, a sentence came to me clear as a bell: “Pay attention to the birds.”

Wow, I had no idea what that was about… But later I thought about it for a bit. I’m no birder, but in recent years I’ve become a little more conscious of birdsong and of birds flying around above me. And I have begun to realize: they’re always there. I just hadn’t noticed. It was a tiny little lesson in de-centering — in noticing something which is always present, which has its own life and experience, its own triumphs and crises — but because of my habitual interest in my own body, other humans, buildings, books, my phone, I just tend not to notice. There is a whole world there, singing over my head — not for my entertainment but for reasons that have nothing to do with me. They are the center of their own story.

So thinking about the horses in Torah, the brief mention in our aliyah, it hits me: horses are always there. They have their own history, their own experiences. And, looking at the ancient cave paintings, tomb decor and so on, I am struck: the horses in these images resemble human slaves. They are harnessed, pulled, whipped, made to go to war, drowned. Also owned by Pharaohs, sometimes mummified, sometimes buried alongside their masters.

The language of occupation in Shoftim and throughout Deuteronomy is blunt and shocking. To my contemporary ears it is appalling that it takes no notice of the people indigenous to the land that was “promised” to the Israelites. More than taking no notice, it casually counsels brutalizing and erasing them. This is a sadly familiar politics, which centers the agenda of only one people and erases all the rest.

As I was reading “I, Corona Virus” and imagining the experience of the pandemic from the perspective of the COVID virus, while at the same time reading about my ancestors getting organized to conquer the population of a land their own god told them was promised to them, I thought about this deeply ingrained habit of centering our own agenda and erasing all the many others that are at play in any complex situation. In our Torah portion, and indeed in all of Torah, it is hard enough to de-center the experience of our Israelite ancestors enough to even center the experience of the seven indigenous tribes of Canaan. Being able to do even that would be a big leap of consciousness. It would fundamentally change how we tell the story of our own origins. It might well change our attitudes towards those other peoples who live in the Promised Land today.

I think further about my imaginary ancestor counseling me to “pay attention to the birds” and about the horses harnessed to chariots, barely mentioned in our portion here, though they too were about to be dragged into a war against an invading power. There is always so much going on, especially in a place of conflict. It is a habit of mind to center our own experience and to dismiss and invisibilize the experiences of others, to not even see them, though they are always present. And they are as important to themselves as we are to ourselves. When reading Torah we might do well to pay attention to the horses.