Parashat Ki Tetze: Set adrift on the island of Elul

Parashat Ki Tetze represents an abrupt shift in the biblical narrative.

Parashat Shoftim is overwhelmingly collective in its orientation, outlining the structure of an ideal Jewish society. Judges administer religious and civil law, kohanim supervise religious life, a monarch provides effective government, and prophets deliver the word of God while checking royal authority.

Shoftim then turns to the laws of warfare and the settlement and defense of the Land of Israel.

The parasha thus sketches Jewish collective life: government and law, religious institutions, national settlement, and the wars necessary to defend our land.

Parashat Ki Tetze abruptly shifts from collective responsibilities to personal ones. It is the densest legal section of the Torah, containing more commandments than any other parasha.

These laws range from marriage, divorce, levirate marriage, and inheritance to charity, loans, returning lost objects, and agricultural practices. Almost no area of human experience remains untouched.

Despite their remarkable range, these commandments share a common feature. They address the responsibilities of individuals rather than the collective institutions and national concerns that dominated the previous section of the Torah.

The individual before God

This marks an important shift in Deuteronomy. Much of the book is delivered in a collective voice. Before his death, Moses looks toward the Jewish future and anticipates the challenges the people will face upon entering the Land of Israel and assuming its historical mission: military threats, cultural pressures, spiritual and religious challenges, and moral failures.

Haunted that he will not live through these experiences alongside the people, he offers guidance for the future. Much of his farewell address concerns how the Jewish people will navigate the transition from desert life to settled national life and preserve its identity across history.

Parashat Ki Tetze recalibrates that perspective. Life does not begin and end with collective identity, national mission, or our place within the larger arc of Jewish history. As essential as that broader vision is, Jewish identity also has an intensely personal dimension. Each of us stands constantly in the presence of God and bears responsibility for our own behavior: the commandments we observe, the prohibitions we avoid, the character we cultivate, and the way we treat the people with whom we share our lives.

These are deeply personal responsibilities. They do not depend on sovereignty, national circumstance, or historical mission. Jewish history moves through dramatically different eras, but the individual always stands before God. Our personal relationship with Him is timeless.

Continents and islands

John Donne famously wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” We are bound to family, community, people, and history, and much of Jewish identity is shaped by those larger circles of belonging.

Yet religious responsibility requires that, in another sense, each of us also become an island. At times we must stand alone before God, stripped of collective identity and historical circumstance, and account for choices that are ours alone.

The voice of this Elul

Elul is upon us, beginning the lead-up to the High Holy Days. Each year, as we enter this season of reflection and self-improvement, we return to the classic elements of teshuva: prayer, charity, introspection, confession, and new commitments.

Yet each year we must also search for the authentic voice of that particular Elul. Teshuva cannot become performative or mechanical, something we simply shift into because the calendar tells us to. To be authentic, teshuva must feel fresh and contemporary. It must reflect our current experiences, respond to the world we are living in, and speak honestly to who we are at this particular moment.

Living collectively

This year, part of our teshuva journey should mirror the shift from Shoftim to Ki Tetze, from collective responsibility to personal experience.

For nearly three years, we have lived in an intensely collective space.

In Israel, wars have been thrust upon us by enemies who seek nothing less than our destruction, and we have shouldered the enormous burden of defending our country.

Jews overseas have confronted a frightening resurgence of antisemitism that is rapidly becoming normalized. The hatred was always there, simmering beneath the surface, waiting for an excuse to erupt.

In both settings, the assault itself has been compounded by the collapse of assumptions we once took for granted.

In Israel, we believed that a smaller, technologically sophisticated army, combined with the threat of overwhelming retaliation, could provide sufficient deterrence.

That conception has been shattered. We are confronting religious fanatics who are prepared to absorb enormous losses in pursuit of their goal of destroying Israel. The past three years have forced us to reconsider our security assumptions and confront questions about the size, strength, and manpower the IDF will require.

Overseas, many Jews similarly believed that after the horrors of the Holocaust, virulent antisemitism had been relegated to the yellowing pages of history. We imagined that we now inhabited tolerant and enlightened societies in which such open hatred of Jews could never return.

That assumption, too, has been shattered. The resurgence of antisemitism has created not only fear and insecurity but a profound identity crisis for Jews who believed they were fully accepted in the societies they called home.

All of this has forced us to rethink Jewish history and the future of our people. Inevitably, our mental and emotional space over the past three years has become more collective and less personal. Given what we have been living through, that is exactly as it should be.

One by one

With the onset of the High Holy Days, however, perhaps a different shift is required. Perhaps we must devote more attention to our individual lives and not only to the condition of the Jewish people.

During the “Unetaneh Tokef” prayer of the High Holy Days we describe how every human being passes individually before God, each life counted and examined for the coming year.

When we appear before God as individuals, we must account for our private world as well as the historical world we inhabit and the national moment for which we bear responsibility.

Imagine being transported 200 years into the past. The circumstances of the Jewish people would be entirely different, and nearly all of the collective questions that currently occupy us would disappear.

Yet the personal questions would remain remarkably familiar: What kind of person am I? How do I treat others? What are my commitments? Where have I failed morally and religiously, and where must I improve?

The same would be true if we were transported 200 years into the future. The challenges facing the Jewish people may be completely different, but the fundamental questions of personal character, religious commitment, and moral behavior would remain.

Both responsibilities

This does not mean retreating from our collective responsibilities. The challenges facing Israel and the Jewish people remain urgent, and our concern for Jewish history cannot be suspended during Elul. Ki Tetze does not erase Shoftim but follows it. Collective responsibility remains essential, but it does not exempt us from confronting our private religious and moral lives.

Perhaps that is the particular challenge of this Elul. After years in which history has demanded so much of us as a people, we must once again ask what God demands of each of us as a person.

We stand before Him as members of a nation with a historic destiny, but also one by one, carrying private choices, relationships, failures, and possibilities for change.

This Elul, even as we remain part of the larger Jewish continent, each of us must find that private island where we stand alone before God. ■

The writer is a rabbi and educator at Yeshivat Har Etzion (Gush). Find his latest book, Reclaiming Redemption, Vol. II: Faith, Identity, Peoplehood, and the Storms of War, at mtaraginbooks.com.