Parashat Ki Teitzei – 5783

I recently visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and managed to have timed my visit to be able to view the exhibit “Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina”.

It was beautiful, and it was painful.

Beautiful, because the pottery was subtly exquisite. Painful, because each piece was made by an enslaved human being, subjected to horrors we cannot begin to imagine.

In the South in the mid-1800s, the phrase “buy local” had a whole different connotation. “Buy local” meant support the slave industry with your economic decisions. Don’t buy from the North – goods made by free people.

The paradoxical mix of beauty and pain found in the Old Edgefield pottery is not so uncommon. We find it frequently in the Torah. The beauty is in the fact that the words are part of our ancient and sacred tradition. The pain is in what those words say.

Deuteronomy 21:10-14: When you [an Israelite warrior] take the field against your enemies, and your God Adonai delivers them into your power and you take some of them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman and you desire her and would take her [into your household] as your wife, you shall bring her into your household, and she shall trim her hair, pare her nails, and discard her captive’s garb. She shall spend a month’s time in your household lamenting her father and mother; after that you may come to her and thus become her husband, and she shall be your wife.

Deuteronomy 21: 19-22: If a householder has a wayward and defiant son, who does not heed his father or mother and does not obey them even after they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the public place of his community. They shall say to the elders of his town, “This son of ours is disloyal and defiant; he does not heed us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” Thereupon his town’s council shall stone him to death. Thus you will sweep out evil from your midst: all Israel will hear and be afraid.

Deuteronomy 21: 23-24: If any party is guilty of a capital offense and is put to death, and you impale the body on a stake, you must not let the corpse remain on the stake overnight, but must bury it the same day.

I’m sure I don’t need to explain how these verses are painful. And, as we so well know, they are not the only such in the Torah.

So what do we do such texts?

We can ignore them. We can try to explain them away, as the rabbis often did. We can do our best to justify them. We can say, well, that was a long time ago and things are different now (Are they really so different?).

Or, we can hold the pain and the sacredness together. It may be the hardest way to handle such verses. It is what I tried to do when viewing “Hear Me Now.” And it took a lot of psychic energy. But it was worth it, and it is, ultimately, I believe, the only really honest way to engage the horrors of the world.

There is a frightening beauty in wildfires and the spectacular sunsets that their smoke engenders. And so much pain on so many levels.

There is often beauty in plants that don’t belong where they are, but they may also be disrupting ecosystems and driving out autochthonous species.

There are many, many beautiful people living in poverty or in environmentally dangerous places, with no way out.

The list goes on.

I wonder if part of the beauty of the works of the Old Edgefield potters is directly related to the pain they held within them. My mother, z”l, always used to say that one of the challenges of life is to find a way to turn our pain into beauty. I believe that when we are able to do so, we share something powerful and important that touches other people. It is no accident that this pottery is so deeply touching. And in relationships, only when we acknowledge and experience our pain can we build close loving relationships; ignoring or trying to sweep away the pain often ends up being destructive.

As we journey through Elul, I invite us, I challenge us, to hold both the beauty and the pain and to find ways to turn our pain into beauty, for by doing so we open our hearts wider and welcome the Holy One of Blessing into new spaces in our souls.

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Rabbi Katy Allen (R’05) is the founder and rabbi of Ma’yan Tikvah – A Wellspring of Hope, which holds services outdoors all year long and has a growing children’s outdoor learning program, Y’ladim BaTeva. She is the founder of the Jewish Climate Action Network-MA, a board certified chaplain, and a former hospital and hospice chaplain. She received her ordination from the Academy for Jewish Religion in Yonkers, NY, in 2005. She is the author of A Tree of Life: A Story in Word, Image, and Text and lives in Wayland, MA, with her spouse, Gabi Mezger, who leads the singing at Ma’yan Tikvah.