Raise it Together

Raise It Together
Rabbi Rebecca Rosenthal

If you were walking down the street and you saw a stranger had dropped their bag, and groceries were rolling all over the sidewalk, what would you do? Most of us would like to assume that we would help them try to capture their escaped cans and produce. The chances of helping go up if it's someone you know and like in this same predicament. Generally we would not pass by someone we consider a friend when they are in distress.

Now ask yourself, what if the person who dropped the groceries wasn’t a stranger or a friend, but an enemy, someone who, for good reason or not, you despise. Would you help them or would you walk on by? I think most of us would pretend not to see and walk right on by.

And this is exactly where we find ourselves in this week’s parasha, Ki Teitzei. If you ever thought to yourself, the Torah could use more lists of laws, this week’s parasha is for you. 74 laws, the most of any parasha in the Torah, presented basically in a list, with no narrative. And even among all these laws, this one in chapter 22 stands out.

The text says that if you see someone’s donkey or ox laying in the road, struggling under a burden, you have to go over and help the other person raise it. The rabbis ask what this law is doing here. After all, if you saw a person struggling with their fallen animal, stranger or friend, you would probably go over and help them so why do we need a law to tell us to do what we would naturally be included to do?

The answer that the rabbis give is that we should understand this to be the donkey of our enemy, the person we are inclined to ignore or even shun. God gives us this law to require us to go against our instincts not to help out. This law is there not for the best case scenario, where of course you would help, but in the case where our desire is to walk away and pretend we didn’t see, or even to revel in the misfortune of others. Even if we don’t want to, we have to help.

However, the help is not completely one sided. The text makes one very important caveat. The Torah says, if you come across the donkey or the ox in the road, you must help raise it together with the other person. You are not expected to do all the work, but you are expected to do your part. The donkey is your responsibility, even if it belongs to your enemy, but not only your responsibility. The other person, the owner of the animal, has to be willing to work with you to raise it.

There is another verse in this week’s parasha that helps us to understand this commandment even more strongly. The Torah teaches, you should not hate the Egyptians, for you were strangers in their land. This seems shocking. The Egyptians enslaved us, they drowned our babies in the Nile River, they did everything they could to make our lives difficult. And we are not allowed to hate them?

Rashi also asks this question. After all, there is nothing that would be more natural than to hate the Egyptians. Even if we ourselves were not enslaved, it is such a part of our story and our history, that we cannot help but absorb that hatred. So Rashi reminds us of another moment, a story we tell less frequently, that is less a part of the Jewish communal psyche. In Genesis, Jacob and his family are given safe harbor in Egypt during a famine. There was a time when our ancestors were in dire need, and it was the Egyptians who saved them. Rashi is reminding us that, while there is a deep and painful history there, there is also a history of help.

Rabbi Tali Adler teaches, “The Torah resists the temptation to tell a single story about Egypt. We are reminded that our story in Egypt is one of beauty mixed with pain, gratitude mixed with deep resentment. We are commanded to give room to both, to treat our stories with the integrity and nuance they deserve.

We are commanded, in this mitzvah not to hate the Egyptian, to remember the past in all its complexity: not to forget the suffering that we endured, but at the same time, not to allow our memories to become exclusively dark. We are commanded to remember honestly. We are commanded to remember moments of beauty and kindness even as we remember suffering, persecution, and darkness.”

So how does this help us understand the donkey in the road? In both stories, laws are there to help us overcome our initial instinct of hatred towards another person or people. By bringing in the Egypt story, we are reminded that in order to consider someone your enemy, you have to have had some kind of relationship with them, some kind of interaction that allowed the enmity to fester. And that, in all but the most extreme cases, we have to remember that the person in front of us is not just our enemy, but a whole person, with good and bad, with the ability to save or enslave, a person who can hurt and also heal.

The Torah does not say, help raise this person’s donkey and then become their best friend and forgive them for every wrongdoing. It does not say, you have to forge a close and lasting relationship with the Egyptian. The Torah understands that there are some hurts that are difficult to overcome. But we are commanded to think of the multifaceted person before us, who is struggling, and set aside our hatred in order to help.

I can hear you saying, but what that person did to me is really bad! They deserve to have their donkey laying in the road, or their groceries rolling down the street. Until they apologize, they don’t deserve my help. And that is one way to live, walking by your enemy in the road. But the month we are in now, the month of Elul, wakes us up to the idea that there is another way. Elul reminds us that our first instinct might not be the best one, and that we have the Torah to guide us towards a better path. Elul reminds us that there is value in coming halfway to help even our enemy. It gives us an opening to let go of our grudges and hatred and go into the new year open to new possibilities. It reminds us that extending a hand may lead us to a better place.