My drashot tend to fall into two themes: Family or progressive Judaism. This portion is all about family, so let's talk about progressive Judaism.
The daughters of Z'lofchad petition Moses for their father's holding, and God responds that their request is just. This is often celebrated as women's rights, as progressive Judaism. However, God then spells out male-preference primogeniture: All sons will inherit first, and daughters only if there are no sons. That may have seemed revolutionary at the time, but hardly seems worth celebrating today.
Immediately following this, in Numbers 36, other members of the Menashe clan argue that when the daughters of Z'lofchad marry, their holdings will be transferred to their husbands, thus reducing the Menashe portion. God resolves this by declaring the women who inherit property can only marry within their own tribe. One step forward, two steps back.
As progressive Jews, we constantly struggle with morally problematic statements like this. How do we treat the Torah as a moral authority while honestly confronting the ethical issues it raises? Dr. Rabbi Zev Farber argues that responses fall into three basic categories:
Fundamentalist—Double down and argue that the Torah reflects God's will and must by definition be moral; it is actually our modern ethical sense that is wrong.
Dismissive—Such laws simply showcase the worthlessness of religion, which should be toppled entirely for the betterment of society.
Selective—Point to uplifting parts of the Torah and ignore the problematic ones.
The third option is quite popular because it's easy, but it's also self-serving: How do we engage with the fundamentalists, the dismissives or the apologists if we aren't engaging with the same texts they are? This is not a question of different interpretations; this is them having a viewpoint and us feigning ignorance.
The good news is, we're not the first to grapple with issues in the Torah; the Talmud is almost exclusively dedicated to this. For example, the rabbinic sages were quite distressed by capital punishment: how does Judaism hold that life is sacred when the Torah casually states, "One who insults one's father or mother shall be put to death"?
The sages' response was ingenious: They didn't argue the Torah was wrong, but they put so many restrictions on it that it became moot. Cases concerning offences punishable by death had to be decided by 23 judges, with at least 13 finding the defendant guilty. (And if all 23 find the defendant guilty, then the person is released, because clearly something was wrong with the court.) Two witnesses were required, they both had to be adult Jewish men who had seen the crime in full, had seen each other, had warned the defendant that the crime was a capital offence, had heard the defendant say he was aware but was going to do the crime anyway, and the witnesses had to agree to be the executioners. (Some of this comes from Deuteronomy – "A person shall be put to death only on the testimony of two or more witnesses… Let the hands of the witnesses be the first to put [the condemned] to death" – although in that portion God was only referring to blasphemy and idolatry.)
I think it's fair to say very few executions occurred under these conditions. The Mishnah states that a Sanhedrin that executes one person in seven years — or seventy years, according to Eleazar ben Azariah — is considered bloodthirsty. In 75 years, two people have been executed by the Israeli government: Adolf Eichmann in 1962 and Meir Tobianski in 1948. I don't need to say anything about Eichmann but you may not be familiar with Captain Tobianski. He was accused of spying by the director of the IDF's intelligence branch during the War of Independence, and after a field court martial was executed by firing squad. A year later, an inquiry was held and Captain Tabianski was exonerated, reburied in a military ceremony and his gravestone reads, "Killed by mistake." The man who ordered his execution was tried and convicted of manslaughter.
In 1954, Israel outlawed the death penalty except for treason and war crimes. In 1959, the Central Conference of American Rabbis and the Union for Reform Judaism passed a resolution formally opposing the death penalty, calling it "a stain upon civilization and our religious conscience."
Dr. Rabbi Aaron Panken talks of a rabbinical school discussion with Dr. Lawrence Hoffman, debating the difference between "Truth" and "truth". Truth with a capital "T" was a singular, irrefutable truth that could never be changed or adapted, while "truth" with a lower-case "t" represented truths that were malleable, transformed or reformed by time, location and experience, seen differently by those with varying outlooks. By that definition, the Torah is not always "true" but it is always "True" in that its ideas and narratives remain the vital underpinnings of Jewish life, debate and thought.
So the "Truth" of Torah is the march of progress, from stoning rebellious children to supporting them. We celebrate the daughters of Z'lofchad while we reject male-preference primogeniture and the entire concept that when women marry their holdings become the property of the husband. We don't deny the Torah contains these things, but that those were truths - lower case t - for the age and the time that have been re-interpreted under the Truth - upper case T - of tikkun olam, making the world more just over time.
Shabbat shalom.
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