Shoftim: responsibility

The parsha is filled with officials.  Judges, prophets, the king, Cohanim,  The parsha ends with the eglah arufa, the ceremony of expiatiation of official guilt .Authority is dangerous. The prophet is killed if ze strays from the (exact) word of Gd, the king is deposed  if he uses his position to accumulate too much wealth.  The judges are held resposible for events that they have no knowledge of, like the unsolved murder.

The eglah arufah  (the heifer of chutzpah ?) is killed to deal with  a murder victim  and the failure to find the perpetrator ( the perp). Were the villain found and duly dealt with, there would be no need for the eglah . Thus, it is not the murder that brings the guilt upon the leaders.  Individual human behavior cannot be controlled, but the tribe can be molded by making every murder significant, either by dealing with the murderer or by hacking the eglah arufah.  

It is interesting to note that the author of Devorim, Moshe, murdered a man at the beginning of his career.  He killed the Egyptian taskmaster. In many ways he may have fit the description of the manslaughterer described in the parsha, in that Moshe did not have a long standing hatred of the man he killed and Moshe ran away for refuge.

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The ax has a special role in the  parsha.  There is a passage about unintentional ( negligent) homocide and the (prison) city of refuge to which the killer must flee to get protection from the blood avenger. An example of such a homocide is offered: the ax handle flies off while chopping a tree.  That same ax ( garzen) appears in the section from which we derived the prohibition of waste.  That ax is now being used to chop down a fruit tree to make a bulwark of war. Once more the ax will be involved indirectly in homocide, this time the organized homocide of war. 

The tool used to kill the eglah arufah is not specified, but Rashi quotes the Sifre and Sotah, that it was an ax. 

The ax destroys ( the living [fruit] tree) to create ( the bulwark,or the house, or the fire) and causes collateral (irreparable) damage.  The parsha raises a high bar for forethought and carefulness.


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2009

2008 Witgenstein