If you spend any significant time interpreting Torah thru a queer, anti-Zionist, or otherwise progressive lens, you will, inevitably, eventually run into the charge that you’re reading into the text, putting affirmation of your pre-existing values ahead of plain interpretation so you can “discover” that the words already mean what you want them to say.

There is, I think, a sliver of truth here, but not a very interesting one. There is no literal, neutral, ideology-free reading of Torah, or of any other text. All reading is interpretation, and all interpretation is colored by the interpreter. We come to texts as people, not voids, and we bring our values with us when we read. For every homosexual finding clever ways to obviate Vayiqra’s homophobia, there’s a misogynist spinning out the rabbinic fabrication of “positive time-bound mitzvot” to excise women from Jewish ritual life. The project of halakhic discourse has never really been about unearthing some impossible pristine viewpoint-independent reading of Tanakh; the project has always been building a livable and just system of religious law, and that necessarily depends on what you find livable and just. You values always shape the project, however much the project may recursively shape you in turn.

It would be tempting to dismiss this reactionary response against progressive readings as “not very Jewish”, but I’ve heard it from plenty of Jews. Nevertheless, there are plenty of other equally Jewish approaches to eisegesis, to reading into a text instead of out of it. Perhaps the most famous instance is the Talmudic rabbis’ treatment of the stubborn and rebellious son. The Torah commands that a stubborn and rebellious son be executed, but in a long and digressive treatment that occupies most of the eighth chapter of masékhet Sanhedrin of the Babylonian Talmud, the sages add so many restrictions and qualifications to this mitzvah as to essentially technicality it out of existence. From the fact that the Torah describes the miscreant in question as the “son of a man”, for example, they derive that the son (and not a daughter) must be almost but not quite a man, limiting the age window to a period of about three months. From the fact that the Torah says the boy’s parents condemn him by saying that he will not listen to “our voice”, the sages conclude that the parents must both have an identical voice, and thus also an identical appearance and height. After they pile on all these conditions, a consensus [a] emerges that בֵּן סוֹרֵר וּמוֹרֶה לֹא הָיָה וְלֹא עָתִיד לִהְיוֹת | bein soreir umoreh lo hayah vəlo atid lihyot | “a stubborn and rebellious son has never been, nor in future will there be one” (Sanhedrin 71a).

[a] Of course, being Jews, it’s not a unanimous consensus, but close enough.

This is not a neutral exegesis of the Biblical text. The sages generally express horror at the prospect of erring in the slightest punctilio of following the word of G-d, but I think we should be wary of taking them too literally here. The stubborn and rebellious son may be an extreme example, but the Talmud is full of other instances where one sage or other goes “Sure, the text of the Torah might not say what I need it to to prove my point, but if you rearrange the letters to spell out different words, it says what I want it to, and what more evidence do you need that I’m right?”. In constructing the halakhic foundations of Rabbinic Judaism, the sages are not seeking to unfold some kind of objective expression of the original intention of the Torah [b], even if that’s what they claim to be doing. Instead, they are actively and aggressively reading whatever they need to into the text in order to make it fit the way they know the system ought to work. Indeed, one could easily argue that part of what makes a sage a sage, what distinguishes wisdom from mere intelligence, is knowing when this kind of eisegesis is necessary and how to make it [c].

[b] If such a thing were even possible!
[c] Their interventions aren’t always for the better, of course. They may have obviated the abhorrence of the stubborn and rebellious son, but there are plenty of places where they read their own bigotries into texts in the same way. It turns out that they were human too, and failed in all the ways that humans fail.

The original Torah text condemning the stubborn and rebellious son shows up in this week’s parashah, towards the beginning, Dəvarim 21:18–21. It’s a mixed bag of a parashah. There’s some powerfully humanitarian stuff in it, and also some real horrors. We start with instructions on how to marry a woman abducted in war and end with yet another exhortation to genocide. Deuteronomy is just kind of like that.

In the middle, there’s an instruction on what to do with a woman who grabs a guy’s balls while he’s brawling with another guy. Specifically, the Torah commands, וְקַצֹּתָ֖ה אֶת־כַּפָּ֑הּ לֹ֥א תָח֖וֹס עֵינֶֽךָ׃ | vəqatzotah et kapah lo taḥos einékha. | “Cut off her hand — don’t have pity!” (Dəvarim 25:12). I’m struck by this final exhortation to pitilessness. In spaces across the political spectrum, I regularly encounter the notion that resistance to and rejection of the Torah’s cruelties and injustices is a modern phenomenon, or at least a solidly post-Biblical one. When and where they were written, this argument goes, everybody shared these texts’ fundamental moral calculus, even if they maybe weren’t necessarily uniformly on board with every single jot and tittle of every single rule.

And yet there’s this exhortation to be pitiless here. In fact, there are a lot of exhortations in this parashah, and in Dəvarim more generally. It’s a very hortatory text. And the thing is, people generally don’t need a lot of encouragement to do things that they were inclined to do anyway. We don’t spend a lot of time, as a society, encouraging people to buy food they think will be tasty when they go grocery shopping, or to drive on the side of the street that won’t immediately put them at risk for a catastrophic automobile accident. We’re pretty happy to trust that most people will be understanding and compassionate towards people they really like. But when it comes to having compassion and understanding towards people we find weird and offputting? That’s when the big rhetorical guns come out. That one really needs emphasis.

And it seems to me that that’s also going on here. Dəvarim’s constant exhortations to do evil — “Remember to murder children! Don’t have pity in regards to corporal punishment! Don’t forget to do genocide!” — tell me that even people in the original audience weren’t inclined to do these things. There was resistance to them, resistance that Dəvarim tries to overcome with exhausting rhetorical doggedness. People really had to be pushed towards injustice.

A fifth consolation, then, albeit a small one: If we find parts of our sacred text repugnant and morally unacceptable, we are not alone. We are not latecomers to tradition, voicing disagreement against a unanimous tradition of assent. As far back as you care to go, back to the very beginning of these texts’ existence, people rejected their cruelties. The texts themselves, even bent on crushing this rejection as they are, betray traces of its existence. This lineage of dissent is as long and deep as the entire Jewish tradition. We are not alone.

So in line with that tradition, in the spirit of the rabbis close-reading a text into a negation of itself, when we come to Dəvarim 25:12 this week, let us read:

“Cut off her hand? Don’t! Have pity!”

and go on our gloriously stubborn, rebellious way.

[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]