Mattot

Mattot – Lindsey Taylor Guthartz

Lindsey studied Archaeology at Cambridge and the Hebrew University and lived in Israel for 17 years. A graduate of the Susi Bradfield Women Educators Fellowships, she is a Teaching Fellow of London School of Jewish Studies and is currently in the second year of her PhD at University College London.

I have to admit that my heart sank at the prospect of writing a devar Torah on this parsha. It opens with regulations that enable a woman’s vows to be cancelled by her father or her husband, and continues with a divinely-commanded war against the Midianites, in the course of which Moses rebukes the Israelite soldiers for sparing the Midianite women and orders them to kill all the non-virgin women, while allowing them to keep the virgins as wives or concubines.

What am I meant to do with this text, as a modern woman who believes that women no less than men are the creation of God (see Bereshit 1) and that women have the same rights as men to life, and to making decisions in how to lead their lives? 

I could, I suppose, repeat the usual justifications. In terms of women’s position in ancient society, the regulations about vows are actually quite advanced. The fathers and husbands who control women’s lives are only permitted to annul a woman’s vows on the day they hear of them; if they don’t, such vows stand, and if a woman is subsequently forced to break them, the man is guilty, and she is innocent. But the basic ability of the woman’s male relatives to declare her vows void, regardless of her will and feelings, is enshrined in the Torah.

And as for the Midianite women, of course the Torah also records that they deliberately tried to seduce the Israelite men in order to make them worship idols and thus lose the support of God. But were ALL the Midianite women guilty? Is collective punishment alright if it’s commanded by Moses? And what about the assumption that virgin Midianites are fair game as wives or concubines? Did anyone ask them what they felt about it?

Not only do I have no answers, but I have to recognize that these issues, so painful and difficult for me, are barely discussed by our traditional sources. Neither the midrash nor our mediaeval commentators agonize over the paternalistic control of Israelite women or the massacre and rape of Midianite women. 

To make things worse, this parsha comes at the beginning of the Three Weeks, the period between 17 Tammuz and Tisha Be’Av when we contemplate our shortcomings, examining them in light of the failures in Jewish society that led to the Temple’s destruction. 

I have no answers. But I am not ready to give up the struggle to understand the Torah, to find some reading that preserves God’s word as central to my life and morality. I turn to that most comfortless of prophets, Jeremiah, whose inauguration as a prophet forms this week’s haftorah. Jeremiah lived through the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE; he was in the thankless position of relaying God’s warnings to a people who refused to listen, and of watching the consequences of their neglect of God’s moral imperatives. In God’s opening words, He warns Jeremiah that he has been chosen as a prophet ‘to uproot and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant’ (Jer: 1: 10) - four negative verbs to two positive verbs. Jeremiah himself even tried to stop being a prophet at one point - it was too painful - but could not. I take heart from his commitment to and trust in God amid an unbearably flawed reality.