Family life is messy at worst and meaningful at best. Parent-child relationships are not as easy to navigate as one might think. Just because parent and child might share a genetics or an emotional bond, that does not mean they both inherently connect with, or understand, one another. One of the things I love the most about Judaism and our Torah is the inclusion of life’s messiness as meaningful experiences. 

Parashat Ki Teitzei contains some of the Torah’s most uncomfortable family laws. Deuteronomy 21 moves rapidly from the captive woman to the loved and unloved wives and then to the ben sorer u’moreh, the “wayward and defiant son.” The sequence itself is telling. Rashi, drawing on earlier rabbinic tradition, reads these laws as connected: disordered desire produces conflict within the home, and conflict within the home can eventually produce rupture between parent and child.

The rebellious-son law is terrifying. If a son refuses to heed his parents even after discipline, they bring him before the town elders and declare that he is defiant, gluttonous and drunk. The Torah prescribes death (Deuteronomy 21:18–21).

The rabbis were so disturbed by this law that they effectively legislated it out of existence. The Talmud records the view that there “never was” such a case and never would be; the passage exists so that we........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)