Ki Seitzei - The Prohibition of Cross-Dressing

In Parshas Ki Seitzei we read of the prohibition of cross-dressing (Deuteronomy 22:5):

The vessels of a man shall not be on a woman, and a man shall not don a woman's garment; for whoever does these things is an abomination to Hashem your God.

In practical terms, this means that we may not wear garments associated with the opposite gender. Moreover, as understood by the Sages, the prohibition also forbids men from specific behaviors - such as shaving body hair or dyeing their hair - that are commonly associated with women, and the same rule applies to women.

Most sources explain that the reason for this prohibition is that it can lead to immoral behavior and also that such cross-dressing was associated with idolatry. However, many commentaries see a more fundamental issue here, as R' Avraham Ibn Ezra (d.1164) concludes his commentary on this verse:

... ה' יתעב מי שישנה מעשה ה'.

God abominates he who changes God's deeds.

Similarly, the Rekanti (kabbalistic commentary on the Torah by R' Menachem Rekanti, d.1305) writes:

פשטו ידוע, אמנם על דרך הקבלה יש לך לדעת כי הרמז הוא שלא ישנה סדרי בראשית וכו'

The simple meaning [of the prohibition] is well know, however, kabbalistically, you should know that the symbolism [of the prohibition] is that one should not change the structure of Creation....

The Toldos Yakov Yosef (R' Yakov Yosef of Polnoye, d.1794) explains that the basic idea underlying this prohibition is that every person must accept the role, i.e. the unique task that God has given him, and not attempt to challenge or change that role.

Every human being has unique spiritual capabilities which no other person can duplicate. Thus, every human being has a unique role to play in bring the world to its ultimate state of perfection. As the Sages teach us (Talmud, Sanhedrin 37a):

כל אחד ואחד חייב לומר בשבילי נברא העולם.

Every person is obligated to say, "The world was created for my sake!"

Every individual plays an essential role in the world, and we are obligated to recognize this. As each of us has a unique role in this world, there is no way to compare the circumstances of different individuals. Just as responsible parents need to work with each child as an individual, in order to enable that particular child to fully develop his own unique potential, as we are taught in Proverbs (22:6), "חנך לנער על פי דרכו" - "Educate the child according to his way," so too God directs the circumstances of our lives in order to provide us with the ideal circumstances in which to develop our own unique spiritual potential. Thus, each of us experiences different challenges in life, different spiritual affinities, different temptations to sin, and so on, for each of us has a different task to achieve.

As God's children, our role is to trust Him and to accept the role that He has given us and by doing so we relate to Him as children to a father. This is particularly important at this time of year, as we prepare for the day of judgment on Rosh Hashana. Our relationship with God has two basic levels, that of Father and child and that of King and servant. While both are always present, in many places in our prayers we express the hope that, when we come before God in judgement, the Father-son relationship should be dominant.

As many sources make clear, the primary factor that determines how God relates to us is how we view our relationship with Him. If we see God as a powerful king who imposes decrees on us which we have no choice but to obey, then we relate to Him as a servant to a King. But if we relate to God as a wise and loving father whose rules and demands are always purely for our benefit, then we relate to Him as a child to a Father.

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Noach - The Value of Diversity

Towards the end of Parshas Noach we read the famous story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9):

The whole earth was of one language and of unified terms. When they journeyed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they settled there. And they said, a man to his fellow, "Come, let us make bricks, and fire them," and they had brick for stone, and asphalt for mortar. And they said, "Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, and let us make for ourselves a name; lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth."

And God descended to see the city and the tower which the children of men had built. And God said, "Behold, they are one people with one language for all of them, and this is what they begin to do! And now nothing that they plan to do will be withheld from them! Come, let us go down and confuse their language, so that a man will not understand the language of his fellow." And God scattered them from there over the face of all the earth, and they stopped building the city. Therefore it was called by the name Babel, for there God confused the language of all the earth, and from there God scattered them upon the face of all the earth.

The story of the Dor Haflaga - the Generation of the Dispersal - is one of the most enigmatic narratives in the Torah. Humanity joins together in a great project, to build a great city and tower, that would enable them to live together in unity. This would seem to be a good thing, certainly not a sin! Yet, while the Torah never actually accuses them of committing a sin, or even of doing anything improper, God clearly disapproved of this plan and instead caused humanity to be scattered over the entire earth.

The commentaries struggle a great deal to explain what the Torah is telling us in this story. There are many midrashim that tell us that the builders of the Tower were engaged, in some sense, in a rebellion against God; that they intended to ascend to the Heavens and wage war against God (an utter absurdity, if understood literally). Others say that the Tower was intended for idolatry, or to somehow prevent another flood. However, in the final analysis, the Torah does not mention any of these concerns, and instead focuses only on the fact that the entire human race was unified. The Torah is clearly indicating that, whatever other issues may have been going on, the critical problem was the fact that they were unified. And, in the end, they were not really punished, but simply dispersed over the face of the earth. Thus, the problem was unity and the solution was dispersal.

How are we to understand this? Aren't peace and unity among the most basic values taught by Judaism? The unity of the human race should have been a good thing; one that we should try to emulate! Indeed, the Ibn Ezra writes that even the most righteous men of that generation - Noah, his son Shem, and even Abraham himself - were among the builders of the Tower of Babel!^[1] Clearly, then, the intent of the builders of the Tower was not wicked. So what did they do wrong?

The Netziv
R' Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin

In his classic essay on anti-Semitism, She'ar Yisrael (usually printed in the back of his commentary on Shir Hashirim), the Netziv (Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin, d.1893) explains that the fundamental problem with the Dor Haflaga was that their actions went against God's intended goals for mankind in two basic ways.

Firstly, because God's intent is that mankind should spread out over the entire earth, as God instructed Noah (Genesis 9:7), "And you, be fruitful and multiply; swarm in the earth, and multiply therein."

Secondly, and more significantly, the goal of the Dor Haflaga was not only to keep mankind united geographically, but also to keep them united ideologically, that they should have a unified culture and philosophy. The function of the Tower was to enable the people to supervise the surrounding regions, in case any group attempted to break away from the community and go off on their own. God, however, does not intend mankind to have a single monolithic culture. Rather, God's intent is for humanity to be diverse, with many different cultures and opinions and ways of life.

While the people of that generation may have had good intentions, they made the same error that has been made by innumerable intelligent people throughout history. They sought to create a utopia - an ideal society. And like every other utopia that has ever been proposed, their perfect society had one critical flaw: the repression of diversity. Every utopia requires a system - ultimately, a totalitarian system - that ensures conformity to the standards of the society. Once true diversity is allowed in, once people are allowed to make independent choices about how to live their lives, the utopia will quickly lose its utopian qualities.

We see here that diversity is a good thing, and that mankind is supposed to have many different kinds of people and cultures. This is true not only on a global scale, but even within the Jewish people themselves, in the twelve tribes of the children of Israel, each of which had its own unique culture and way of life.

Of course, there are limits to diversity. There are moral principles that God has imposed on all mankind, and even more so on the Jewish people. These cannot be set aside for the sake of diversity. However, within the parameters of the laws and teachings of the Torah, there remains a great deal of room for diversity. Indeed, the Chozeh M'Lublin (R' Yakov Yitzchak Horowitz, d.1815) commented on the famous passage from the Talmud (Makkos 3:16), "God wanted to give merit to Israel, therefore He increased for them Torah and mitzvos," that the abundance of mitzvos is intended to enable each individual to serve God in his own unique fashion.^[2]

It goes without saying that peace and unity are extraordinarily important values, but they are not absolute values. Tolerance of diversity is an intrinsic aspect of genuine peace and unity and a peace and unity that is built upon conformity for its own sake has no value whatsoever. True peace and unity must be built upon a foundation of truth and the recognition of shared core values that are far more important than any superficial conformity. Indeed, such a unity of mankind is the ultimate goal of history. As God described the messianic age to the prophet Zephaniah (3:9), "For then I will change the peoples to a pure language, so that they will all call in the name of God, to serve Him in unity."

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[1] Ibn Ezra (Genesis 11:1) states: ...היה אברהם מבוני המגדל, ואל תתמה, כי נח ושם היו שם. The Seder HaDoros (א' תתקע"ד) cites this opinion as well, נח ואברם ושם עזרו בבנין המגדל. Rav Miller similarly cites the Ralbag as saying that Noah and Shem were among the builders, but I was not able to find this in the Ralbag.

[2] ביאורי חסידות לש"ס from R' Y.Y. Chasida on Makkos 23b from Sefer Zichron Zos - Vayakhel.

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Parshas Re'eh - On Excessive Mourning

In Parshas Re'eh we read (Deuteronomy 14:1-2):

בנים אתם לה' אלקיכם לא תתגדדו ולא תשימו קרחה בין עיניכם למת: כי עם קדוש אתה לה' אלקיך ובך בחר ה' להיות לו לעם סגלה מכל העמים אשר על פני האדמה: 

You are the children of Hashem your God; you shall not cut yourselves or make a bald spot between your eyes for the dead. For you are a holy people to Hashem your God, and Hashem has chosen you to be for Him a treasured people from all peoples that are upon the face of the earth.

In this passage, God forbids us from engaging in self-mutilation as an expression of mourning and grief when someone passes away. (Such practices were commonplace in many ancient cultures, and still exist today among some groups.) The Torah tells us that to engage in such mourning practices somehow contradicts the idea that we are "the children of Hashem" and a "holy people to Hashem." What is the connection between these two concepts?

In his commentary on the Torah, Rav Avraham ibn Ezra (d.1167) writes that the message here is that God loves us even more than a father loves his children, and therefore we should trust Hashem like a small child trusts his father, even when he cannot understand his father's actions, that no matter what happens, everything God does is truly for our benefit.

The Ramban (Rav Moshe ben Nachman, d.1270) cites the explanation of the ibn Ezra, and adds that part of the underlying message here is that, as the children of God and His treasured people, we should have absolute confidence in the reality of the afterlife. For this reason, excessive acts of grief and mourning, such as self-mutilation, are inappropriate, for they imply that the loss of our loved ones is absolute. However, the Ramban continues, the Torah does not prohibit crying over the death of a loved one, for it is natural for those who love each other to cry upon their separation, even in life.

Rabbi Mattisyahu Salomon, the famous mashgiach of the Lakewood yeshiva, expanded upon this idea in a speech (printed in With Hearts Full of Faith, p.75):

A father and mother send off their son to a yeshivah in Israel. They are the ones that encouraged him to go. They helped him choose the yeshivah, and they are the ones paying for it. Nevertheless, when they take their son to the airport and say good-bye, they cry. Why do they cry? Isn't everything going exactly as they wanted it to go? Why does a mother cry at her daughter's wedding? Because it is human nature to cry at times of parting with a loved one.

When a loved one dies, it is a moment of parting, not only for a certain period of time but for as long as we live on this earth. This is the pain we are allowed to feel. This is the pain that we are supposed to feel. It is right to feel the loss of a departed loved one, and it is right to give expression to that loss with our tears. But excessive grief? That is forbidden. Did we ever see parents mutilating themselves and tearing out their hair in the airport when they are sending off their children to study in a distant land? Not very likely. Self-mutilation expresses something much deeper than the pain of parting. It expresses the shock at the immensity of the tragedy and horror at coming face-to-face with evil. These have no place at a Jewish death. 

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