Our portion is Ki Tetze – which means “when you go out”. The laws that follow are laws regarding what happens when you – the Jewish person – go out to war, and the limitations imposed by Torah to certain behaviors, specifically around beautiful women of the conquered. Not only the soldier cannot commit rape – the soldier actually needs a cool off period of 30 days before he consumates anything. The Rabbinic tradition will add more days – 60 more – and a set of rules that intend to make the woman be seen as a person, and not as someone who the soldier can lord over. And, of course, the rabbis add conversion to the mix. Ki Tetze continues with an enormous amount of laws, 74 to be exact, making it the most law-dense portion of the entire Torah.
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“Ki tetzei la-milḥamah al oyvecha — begins our Torah reading. When you go out to war against your enemies.” The scene is a battlefield, and the first law this reading gives us is strange and unsettling: the law of the yefat to’ar, the beautiful captive. A soldier sees a beautiful woman among the captives, desires her. The Torah then slows everything down. He needs to bring her to his house. She shaves her head. She cuts her nails. She takes off simlat shivyah, the clothing she had before. And she sits in his house and weeps for her father and her mother, a full month of days. Only then can he touch her, and make her his wife.
The Zohar Ḥadash refuses to read this only as a law of war. It reads it as the story of every one of us. That beautiful captive, the mystics say, is actually the soul. “Ki tetzei la-milḥamah” — the war is this life, this world, this ordinary week, its pressures and desires rubbing against the beauty of the soul, trying to bring us down from the best we can be. The yefat toar is the soul: she is captive to the pressures of the world. She is beautiful because she comes from a beautiful place; she is a daughter of the King. And as the soul descends into a body and a world, she is taken captive — stripped of her own garments and dressed in the rough clothes of exile. . All week long the soul is a captive weeping for home — and most of the time, she does not even know that what she feels is grief. And so she sits, weeping for her Father and her Mother, for God and Tora, the divine source from which she has been torn.
We know that weeping. And in a few moments, we are going to sing it. “Yedid nefesh av ha-raḥaman” — Beloved of the soul, Father of mercy. “Nafshi ḥolat ahavatecha” — my soul is sick with love for You. Rabbi Elazar Azikri, in Safed, gave the captive her voice. The weeping of the yefat to’ar and the longing of Yedid Nefesh are one voice — the soul calling out to the Father she was taken from, lovesick, homesick, exiled in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday.
Because that is what the week is. Six days the soul is at war and in exile. Not because the world is evil, but because the world scatters us. We go out. We are taken. We are distracted. Our thoughts of being good are dispersed. We put on the clothing of the week, work work work, and forget that we are children of the King.
And then, once a week, the exile is interrupted. Lecha Dodi calls: “Hitna’ari me-afar kumi” — Shake yourself from the dust, arise! “Lo tevoshi ve-lo tikalmi” — do not be ashamed, do not be confounded. We sing Lecha Dodi to the Shekhinah, to Jerusalem, to the bride — but it is sung, too, to the captive soul sitting in the dust of her own week. Get up. Shake it off. Your Beloved is coming out to meet you, and you are going home. That is what Shabbat is: the soul’s homecoming. Once a week the exile is suspended and the neshamah is allowed back to her Father’s house. Perhaps this is what we mean by the neshamah yeteirah, the extra soul of Shabbat. The extra soul that we all receive on Shabbat is not an addition so much as it is a reunion. The exiled soul comes home for a day, tastes a little of the homecoming that will one day be complete.
And now I want to say something honest, because I suspect you feel it too. Do we truly feel this homecoming? Or maybe do we manufacture it? We light the candles, we dress nicely, we prepare meals, we sing and tell ourselves the week is behind us. Do we perform our contentment? Somewhere underneath, we might suspect that the peace we feel on a Friday night is at least partly something we made up, a mood we talked ourselves into.
If that worry sounds familiar, you are in very good company. Two brothers were once troubled by exactly this — Reb Elimelech of Lizhensk and Reb Zusha of Hanipol. Both of them felt the holiness of Shabbat pour through the entire day, especially at the table, when the Ḥasidim sat together over words of Torah. And one day Elimelech confessed: “Zusha, ahi, my brother, sometimes I am afraid the holiness I feel on Shabbat isn’t real — that I only imagine it. And if I imagine that, then maybe my whole service of God is imagined too.” “Ach, ahi, my brother,” said Zusha, “I feel the very same fear!”
So they decided they’d make a test. On a Tuesday — an ordinary weekday — they would hold a complete Shabbat: the candles, the white clothes, the streimel, the meal, the songs, the services, the Ḥasidim, the Torah, every detail. And their reasoning was this: if we feel the holiness of Shabbat on a Tuesday, it proves the feeling was never real; and if we feel nothing, that proves our Shabbat is true. So they dressed, and they sang, and they danced, and they learned — and they felt it. Every bit of the holiness of Shabbat. On a Tuesday. Alarmed, they traveled to Mezritch and laid the whole thing before the Maggid. And the Maggid answered: “When you put on the Shabbat clothes and the streimel, when you made the meal and opened the Torah — of course you felt the holiness of Shabbat. These things have the power to draw the light of Shabbat down onto the earth. The holiness of Shabbat is always there. You simply brought it down, on a Tuesday, with your own hands. It is people, and what people do, that make a day holy. You have nothing to fear.”
They had nothing to fear because the making was never faking. This is exactly what the Torah asks of us: “Ve-shamru vnei Yisrael et ha-Shabbat, la’asot et ha-Shabbat” — to make the Shabbat.
We do not fabricate a false peace. When we light candles, when we prepare, when we carve out this moment of rest from all our labors – we build the vessel. And the holiness that is always waiting comes down to fill it. The soul does not come home to a house that builds itself. She comes home to the house we build for her — and when we build it, she comes. Then she is at home.
So tonight, when we sing Yedid Nefesh, hear the captive finding her voice. When we sing Lecha Dodi, hear the call to shake off the dust and rise. We are the yefat to’ar, we are taking off the clothes of the week. We are letting the week go so we can find the beauty of our souls anew, so we can sense it shine and glow with the candles. We are the lovesick soul turning back toward the Father she was taken from, going back to the Mother, to Torah, from where our souls sprung up. And we are Elimelech and Zusha — dressing for a homecoming with our own hands, drawing down, with candlelight and melody and the willingness to let the week go. We are ready to receive the holiness that is always there, waiting for us to make it room.
Shabbat shalom.