Ki Teitze

Ki Teitze - Anthony Ashworth-Steen

Anthony current works as the UJIA Jewish Activities in Mainstream Schools (JAMS) Education Manager specialising in Leadership and Education. Prior to working for UJIA Anthony worked for Habonim-Dror as Northern fieldworker.

Ki Tetize has more commandments than any other of the weekly parshiot - over 70 in total. As a cultural Jew, who grapples with the idea of God, a commandment is not something that sits easily with me. How can I obey something if I am not sure where the commandment has truly come from?

The answer to that question is that I don't. I don't obey because I am commanded to by God, religion, society, rabbis or my family. I make my own rules. Allow me to explain. Cultural Judaism is often misconstrued to mean I am secular, unaffiliated, disinterested, but for me cultural Judaism is the most meaningful expression of my Judaism as it allows me to take all the values, texts, meanings and writings of Judaism and apply them to my life in the 21st century. 

This is why I was delighted to be asked to write about Parsha Ki Teitze. This parsha gives us all the opportunity to lead a values driven life, something which I feel the community in general is losing in our approach to life. We are very ready to say that we live by our values by going to shul or giving tzedakah, but then we are happy to go to buy belongings to make our life "better", which have come at the expense of others in the world. Is this contradiction something we are comfortable balancing in our lives?

The parsha highlights different areas in which we can make our lives more ethical including treatment of animals, recycling and how to act in a time of war.

Of course the text does not literally say go out and recycle, but the meaning of the text can be studied and we can draw our own conclusions. I will never be in a situation where I have to shoo away a mother bird so I can take her eggs, but I do have a commitment to the future of the planet and I can take it to mean live responsibly. Consider the analogy. I can have the eggs and survive, but by leaving the mother I can ensure that more eggs will be made, thus carrying on with the circle of life.

The text concludes by commanding us to "remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way as ye came forth out of Egypt". We remember when Amalek picked off the stragglers when leaving Egypt including the old, women and children. Is the final commandment in this parsha, not that we should only remember the suffering inflicted by Amalek, but to ensure no-one else in the future has their own Amalek?

I believe that parsha Ki Teitze is demanding that we look within our own lives and see how we can contribute our own little difference to the world. There will be many people that read this and will see it is a distortion of the text, and maybe it is, but the values that underpin our Judaism are something we should all be looking for and aspiring to each day.