Weekly Portion – כִּֽי־תֵצֵ֥א– Ki Teze – When You Go Out; Deuteronomy 21:10-25:19 ; Isaiah 54:1-10
News, images and voices reach us without interruption, yet the person right beside us can remain invisible in the process. It is precisely into this reality that the weekly portion speaks an astonishingly radical sentence. The Bible describes an attitude from which a healthy society can emerge: Whoever truly sees the other, perceives their burden, their need and their loneliness, will eventually be unable to walk on indifferently. And suddenly the many seemingly unrelated commandments of this weekly portion appear as one single great message: Look. See the person.
Our weekly portion is full of commandments that, at least at first glance, appear almost randomly strung together — the return of lost property, sending the mother bird away from the nest, the railing on the roof, a worker’s wages, gleaning for the poor, just weights and dozens of other commandments. At first I thought the common thread connecting all these commandments was responsibility. But the longer I continued reading, the stronger my feeling grew that that...
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