I wrote this as a blog post on the Times of Israel website back in 2014. I think it was one of the first really “political” Torah pieces that I ever wrote. I don’t think I ever adapted it as a sermon.
There are some edits from the original blog post, because I couldn’t help myself. The footnotes are new.
In a profile published before Michael Brown’s funeral, the New York Times referred to the unarmed 18 year old killed by a Ferguson, MO police officer as “no angel.” The response was fierce and the Times’ Public Editor called the choice of phrasing “a regrettable mistake.” But Michael Brown was in fact “no angel”; he better fits the Torah’s description of the Wayward and Rebellious Son (ben sorer umoreh). But in the rabbinic view, that makes his death even more troubling.
Deuteronomy (21:18-21) describes a son who refuses to listen to his parents, despite their repeated warnings. They take him to the court and throw up their hands, accusing the son of being “a glutton and drunkard.” Astonishingly, for those seemingly insignificant crimes of vice, the son is then put to death by the court.
To wrap their minds around the shocking harshness of the punishment, the rabbis of the Talmud add context.1 In their view, the rule of the Wayward and Rebellious Son is the logical culmination of the two sections of laws that precede it. The first (Deuteronomy 21:10-14) describes the “beautiful woman” (yifat to’ar) who is abducted at war by an Israelite soldier and brought into the household of her captor as a wife.
The second (Deuteronomy 21:15-17) describes the laws of inheritance in a polygamous household. The father’s first-born is entitled to a double portion of the estate, even when he is the child of “the hated one,” not “the loved one.”2
Putting these three paragraphs together, the rabbis reconstruct an unfortunate series of events. A married man goes to war and is overcome by his passions, which lead him to abduct a woman and take her home. This naturally creates domestic strife, leading to a situation where one wife is “the loved one” and the other is the “hated one.” It is not hard to forecast that a child born into such a home would grow up to be a criminal. As the rabbis put it, “One sin leads to another (aveirah goreret aveirah),” almost inevitably.
In a separate bit of exposition, the rabbis explain that the sins of drunkenness and gluttony reveal deeply-rooted character flaws that need to be dealt with harshly before they cause real damage. The Wayward and Rebellious Son is judged not for what he actually did, but for what we presume he is likely to do (nidon al shem sofo). After all, a child with such appetites and raised in a home with such little regard for societal norms will surely eventually come to steal and even kill in order to continue to overindulge.3
These two lines of interpretations intersect. Petty juvenile crimes can be trivialities, or they can be harbingers of the much worse things we know are to come. It depends on the background and circumstances of the person committing the crimes. But what if we get it wrong, or worse, what if our projection is self-fulfilling? In this way, the Wayward and Rebellious Son is punished more for who he is than for what he did.
For a young man trying to overcome difficult circumstances, it might be frustrating to know that a youthful indiscretion (or even the appearance of one) may be treated as a serious, even capital crime. It means that to succeed while growing up in a challenging environment, he needs to meet a much higher standard than anyone else – and might even then fail. That might itself be reason enough to rebel angrily against a world so stacked against him.
Perhaps this is why the rabbis insist, in a near-consensus, that the law of the Wayward and Rebellious Son was never actually implemented in practice – and they added enough technicalities, exemptions, and loopholes to ensure that would forever be the case.
One Talmudic sage, though, claims to have seen the actual grave of a Wayward and Rebellious son. We, less fortunate, have seen several in recent weeks. Their names include Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Kejeme Powell, and John Crawford. They represent a segment of our society that is chronically over-policed and criminalized, whose young men are automatically suspected of being dangerous and threatening, born into a context of struggle against law enforcement instead of a community protected by it.4
Still in the Book and on the books, the law of the Rebellious and Wayward Son challenges us to see how unfair prejudice can develop against society’s most vulnerable, how we can end up collectively condemning those who most desperately need our support and encouragement. The need for us to be concerned about this tendency taking hold is reaffirmed with every press conference discussing surveillance videos of petty theft, every circulated cellphone picture depicting a possible “gang sign,” or every over-analyzed rap lyric.
Perhaps there were some in the days of the Talmudic rabbis who argued for a strong “law and order” policy. They might have claimed that failure to strictly enforce the law of the Rebellious and Wayward Son only encouraged similar behavior, ignored crime where it was most common, and would ultimately leave everyone less safe. They may even have called on the fellow’s family to change their “culture.”
The Rabbis, though, were wise enough to legislate these laws out of practice. By doing so, they validated the humanity of someone born into difficult circumstances by giving him the chance to work his way through the challenges he faced, not by punishing him for them. We would be wise to follow their model.
The rabbis were also trying to answer the question of what kind of parents would willingly drag their kid into court to be tried and executed in this manner. Their best answer was that it was a broken home. (The question is better than the answer.)
If this makes you think about all of the stories in Genesis, good - that’s part of the point!
It is probably not a coincidence that this section is read each year during the penitential month of Elul, leading up to the High Holy Days. The concept of nidon al shem sofo - judging someone based on where we think they are likely to wind up - is antithetical to the concept of teshuvah - repentance.
This is an ongoing concern. According to Campaign Zero (MappingPoliceViolence.org), there have been 612 fatal police shootings in America this year. The vast majority were non-white.