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Deuteronomy May 16-22
CFM manual assigns 6-8; 15; 18; 29-20; 34
As the Israelites are about to enter the promised land of Canaan, the book of Deuteronomy is written as a lengthy farewell addresses by Moses
Speeches about Israel’s past
Reiterating laws that Moses had communicated to the people at Sinai
Reemphasize that these laws are essential for the well being of the people
“Deuteronomy” means retelling or second telling or repetition of the law
Themes of remembrance as the people go into this new land
Chapter 1-30 can be read as a single sermon
Introductory words, reiteration of laws, details about blessings and curses if you keep or break the covenants
Moses recounts a history of the Jews’ experiences over the past 40 years
From a chapter in Torah Queeries written by David Shneer
“He tells the story of the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt, the gaining of the commandments, and then the many struggles of their sojourn in the desert. It is not always a glorious history— despite a few miracles and triumphs, the wandering in the desert was largely marked by struggle, failure, and disappointment. Still, this is the history of this people. Moses does not simply recount a litany of facts, place names, and conquests. His history is peppered with admonitions, laments, and lessons for the future. In some ways this at times depressing narrative is Moses’s “ethical will,” to his community. As the elder, he has the responsibility to tell the Israelites their own story and to give meaning to the past in order to shape how the Israelites will live in the future. The recitation of past disappointments and failures is meant to instruct the Israelites how to do things better as they prepare to enter the land.”
31 putting affairs in order
32-33 final words of blessing
34 death of Moses
Themes of remembering - remember the marginalized, remember where we came from and remember what we have learned
Content warning for kidnapping, sexual assault, and rape
Kidnapping and Rape Chapter 21:10-14
This is one of the many instances of violence against women in Deuteronomy. Others include chapter 21:18-21 about stoning your stubborn and rebellious daughter and 22:22-27 where the law says that a woman should not be punished for being raped, as long as the rape occurred in a field, where no one would have heard her if she screamed, to name a few.
Before we even get to the content of this section, for the last three years, the scriptures conitnaully address war, murder, rape, assault, and gendered violence. Imagine what our lessons and CFM manuals and discussions could be like were we to talk about sexual violence each time it is addressed in the text. Not just what we think we know about sexual violence or what the text condones, but what if we were to have compassionate, educated, and justice- and consent-focused conversations about sexual health, reproduction, and the reality and perpetuation of sexual assault and rape?
Remaining silent about these issues is part of the reason they continue.
If we talked about rape as much as it appears in the bible, we would be having so many conversations.
“When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them captive, and seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to thy wife; then thou shalt bring her home to thine house; and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails; and she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month: and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife. And if it shall be, if thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not make merchandise of her, because thou hast humbled her.”
These verses address, detail, and standardize abducting women during war and forcing them into marriages and pregnancies, i.e., kidnapping and raping them
This is also called genocidal rape: the taking and raping of women identified as belonging to the foreign enemy
Within our theme of remembering, this verse calls us to remember these women of past times and witness the modern day women who still experience such atrocities both in and out of war times
Remember, Israelites were commanded to wage war against and kill many groups of “foreign enemies,” especially as we discussed last week in the book of numbers
This brings to mind colonization: the process of taking power and control of land and labor
In “10 reasons why colonialism strengthened rape culture in Latinx Communities” by Mala Muñoz
“Colonizers used rape as a way to take power and control of Indigenous people’s bodies away from them and dominate Native societies”
Damary Rodriguez, a Dominicana advocate, blogger, and Database and Resource Assistant at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center adds
“Sexual violence…was used as a way to control people during the colonial period. Sexual violence is now used to control intimate partners. The connection is that sexual violence was used on a grand scale during colonialism and is now being used on more of an interpersonal level.”
Professor Rita Laura Segato explains
“In the old conventional wars, with conquered territories came the insemination of women’s bodies. Soldiers raped the women of conquered territories as if women’s bodies were extensions of those territories.”
With an intersectional lens, we can also recognize the ways racism, sexism, militarism, and colonialism intersect
The justification for war in the bible story and in many other instances is that other foreign enemies are occupying land that God promised to us, God’s chosen people. Often the perceived enemy does not look, act, or worship like the attacking group
Such justifications are also bolstered by racism, dehumanization such as when European conquistadores often used these tactics against Indigenous and African people to justify colonization, genocide, land theft, and slavery
Sexism shows up here too as the domination and exploitation of women’s bodies: objectification (spoils of war), fragmentation (shaving hair, stripping of clothes, disconnecting from family and cultural traditions), and consumption (rape and foced assimilation)
Rape war and colonization are both about power and control
Value of power over humanity and human rights
Rape in this context is to cause terror, to humilate, to torture, to grow the peopulation of the Israelites and extinguish other groups,
From last week’s episode:
“Terrorizing Indigenous Women in the Contact Zone: Placing Cozbi and the Midianites in Colonial Australia” by Laura Griffin
“Under the logic of empire, the reproductive capacities of the Indigenous woman’s body, as with the reproductive capacities of the land, must be contained, controlled, and put to use for the colonizing group.
In imperial ideology, what is threatening is not the local woman herself. It is her connection to (and potential continuation of) her Indigenous…identity, and thus her tradition and culture. The Indigneous woman, like the colonized land she represents, is not simply to be avoided. She must be absorbed into the colonizer’s identity and mission.”
Perhaps our call to remember is two fold in this story
1st: Read these texts in memory of the abused, violated, and exploited characters both in the story and the victims today
2nd: The violence of colonialism, racism, and sexism are alive today but also experienced through intergenerational and historical trauma
As white women, how can we remember the roles we have played as violator, abuser, colonizer, and aggressor and move toward reparative action? How too can we recognize the complex nature of our ancestral history that is one of both colonized and colonizer?
From the article cited earlier Mala Muñoz writes
“Trauma has a way of sticking with people and can be passed between generations in a cycle of generational violence. Colonization was profoundly traumatic on multiple levels and took place over hundred of years. Native and African ancestors who survived colonialism most likely experienced sustained sexualized and gender-based violence in our Latin American home countries. The trauma that our ancestors lived through lives on through us.”
Here is a call to remembering the pains we have caused and the pain that lives in our ancestry.
Remember as keep in our memory, preserve, unforgotten
Re-member as weaving healing threads through our family lines in an attempt to connect and heal each member in our ancestral lines
A really lovely example of remembering ancestral histories shows up in Deut 6:20-25.
Deut. 6:20-25 When, in time to come, your children ask you, “What mean the decrees, laws, and rules that the Lord our God has enjoined upon you?” you shall say to your children, “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt and the Lord freed us from Egypt with a mighty hand. . . . Then the Lord commanded us to observe all these laws, to revere the Lord our God, for our lasting good and for our survival, as is now the case. It will be therefore to our merit before the Lord our God to observe faithfully this whole Instruction, as He has commanded us.” (Deut. 6:20– 25)
I like this story because it encourages us to ask, connect, and look into our histories to find meaning both to our ancestors and make meaning for our present-day selves
Verse encourages us to ask in sincerity, “What does this mean to you?” in hopes of learning more about how our communities and families have been shaped, harmed, and healed.
I also think this story could be a great way to build relationships with people whom we might disagree with or who we think are different from us.
What would happen if you were to ask those who are most at risk and affected by abortion bans and anti-trans legislation, “What does this mean to you?”
Asking with an open mind and sincere heart might lead you to compassion and understanding, even if you don’t agree. Can we learn what matters to others and then show up for them?
Turning to Deut. 22:5 we have a verse that has been and has the potential to harm genderqueer and trans folks
“The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God”
Let us first begin by noting that clothing has no gender, we make gendered meaning and then put that meaning onto clothes. We do this with other things like food and drinks and colors and decor.
Manly food is steak and potatoes whereas as feminine food is salads
Manly drinks are whiskey and feminine drinks are fruity blended drinks
Here, I hope we can see that we construct gendered meanings and place them on things
From an article “To Wear Is Human” by Rabbi Elliot Kukla and Reuben Zellman we learn a bit more about the historical context of this verse
“In other words, according to the classical scholars of our tradition, wearing clothes of “the wrong gender” is [forbidden] only when it is for the express purpose of causing harm to our relationship with our loved ones or with God. The prohibition that we learn from this verse is very specific: we must not misrepresent our true gender in order to cause harm. Otherwise, wearing clothing of another gender is not prohibited.”
For many people, their gender identity is not what society expects or demands it to be based on the sex they were assigned at birth
For example, based on ones external genitalia and internal reproductive organs the might be assigned the sex of male or female at birth.
Becuase we are taught to misunderstand and conflate sex with gender, we expect and demand that ones gender identity align perfectly with the sex they were assigned at birth. This means we expect folks who were assigned male at birth to identify their gender as man and then express their gender in masculine ways. We also expect folks who were assigned female at birth to identify their gender as woman and then express their gender in feminine ways.
What we get is a type of if/then scenario. If you are assigned x sex at birth you will identify as y and express yourself as z and have a sexual orientation of w.
What we also get is a binary that says there are only two categories for everything. Sex is either male/female, gender identity is either man/woman, gender expression is either masculine/feminine. Binaries are boo! They are narrow, limiting, harmful, and erase queer, trans, and nonbinary folks. Boo to the binary.
I could talk a lot more about this, but for trans people, their gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth.
Kukla and Zellman write
“Many people feel like their true gender is not (or is not only) the gender that was assigned to them at birth. The Torah is asking us not to misrepresent our gender, which we can understand as using external garments to conceal our inner selves. Unfortunately, many transgender and genderqueer people today feel forced to hide in exactly this way. In our society the penalty for expressing the fullness of a gender-variant identity is often severe and can include verbal, sexual, and physical abuse, employment discrimination, an inability to access education and health care and, sometimes, murder. Gender rigidity does not just impact transgender and genderqueer people. It also harms the eight year-old boy who was suspended from school for wearing his ballet tutu to class in upstate New York, the flight attendant in Atlanta who is currently suing her employer for firing her because of her refusal to wear make-up, and the butch lesbian who was shouted at and harassed in a “women’s” restroom in a synagogue in Los Angeles. Much of this mistreatment comes from those who insist that wearing the clothes of the “other gender” is wrong “because it says so in the Bible.”
Kukla and Zellman then advocate for filling the verse on its head to find positive, affirming, and uplifting meaning by suggesting that this verse says “we have a sacred obligation to present the fullness of our gender as authentically as possible…the Torah wants us to be our true selves.”
They also note that the verses before and after this address minimizing harm: if someone’s donkey falls down, you have to help that person pick it back up, if you neighbor loses their ox or sheep, it’s our responsibility to help them find them. If we are collecting eggs, we must not hurt the mother bird.
In this way, perhaps a verse nestled in a list of minimizing harm also calls us toward empathy, understanding, and harm reduction for our trans and gender queer friends.
Another LGBTQ affirming verse and interpretation shows up in Deuteronomy 30:9-14
To summarize, God will make thee plenteous and abundant in your work, in your body, in your cattle, and in your land if thous shalt hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God and keep their commandments. For this commandment is not hidden from you. It is not in heaven and you don’t need someone to go to heaven and get it for you. This commandment is not in the sea and you don’t have to ask someone to travel the depths of the ocean to bring this commandment to you. “But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.”
The answers are not outside of you, you have all the answers and knowledge you could ever need.
From the Queer Theology podcast the hosts say
From podcast: “Yes! And I think that like as someone who grew up fundamentalist, or evangelical, or conservative, I understand that impulse because we were taught that we had to find the right way to do things. And usually, it was: we just have to listen to what the pastor tells us to do and then do it, and then God will like us, and we will be good to go. What I love about this passage is that here we have a commandment that’s given to the people. Then they are also told that you don’t have to go searching for it. It’s in your mouth and your heart waiting for you to do it. I think that this passage is telling us: you know what’s right. You can trust your heart. You can trust your gut. You can trust your sense of your relationship with God. You don’t have to go looking for the right answers. You can trust yourself. The challenge then becomes — for those of us who grew up in traditions that we were taught not to trust ourselves and we were taught that our desires were bad and evil and that what we want is wrong — the real test isn’t to go out and find answers; the real test is to learn how to trust ourselves again, to trust our bodies, to trust our guts, and to trust our souls. That to me is the larger message from this passage. Frankly, it’s harder. It’s a lot easier to say, “Okay tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” Than it is to say, “What is it that I want? Who am I? What are my values? What do I think my relationship with the divine should look like?” It’s harder work but I think it’s more fulfilling work.”
For me, I hear “you are the expert and authority of your life.” What would it look like to trust LGBTQ+ folks to be the experts of their own lives? To trust that they know what is best for them and perhaps we should keep our well-intended advice or corrections to ourselves?
There’s still so much I didn’t get to cover today!
Chapter 15 about caring for the poor and releasing people of all debts and bondage every 7 years. Could have had a great conversation about economic justice.
Chapter 26 has a lovely creed recounting God’s goodness leading the people out of Egypt
Either way, I hope this week we can remember the pain and reality of sexual assault, remember our ancestral connections and trauma, and remember that queer folks are the experts in their own lives. May we also move from remembering to action as we heal patterns of abuse and erasure in our own actions.
