Sermon – Parashat Shoftim: The ‘Broken-Necked Calf’
Written by Student Rabbi Nicola Feuchtwang — 23 August 2023
(This sermon is based on an assignment written for a Pentateuch module at Leo Baeck College in 2021)
Picture the scene. A middle-class family has gathered for an evening together to celebrate a forthcoming Simcha. They are financially comfortable and rather pleased with themselves, even if the head of the family does go on a bit about the bright future ahead and the importance of taking care of ‘number one’.
The setting is not modern Finchley. It is the home of a family called Birling in England, in 1912. The happy evening is abruptly interrupted by a visit from a police inspector who needs to question them in relation to the death of a young woman ‘Eva Smith’, apparently by suicide.
Initially, none of them can understand what this has to do with them, but as the play progresses, we in the audience learn that each member of this family had encountered the young woman at some point: her employment in the father’s business ended because she spoke up about conditions, the daughter had triggered her dismissal from another job, the daughter’s fiancé had helped but then abandoned her, the mother had turned down her appeal for financial support from a charity – and she was pregnant by the son of the family.
Some members of the family are shaken and prompted to review their own behaviour; others are more concerned about reputation and scandal, remaining indifferent to the young woman’s suffering.
When Priestley wrote An Inspector Calls in the 1940s, there is no doubt that he was deliberately intending to shock his audiences into reflection about the ills in their society. He has the Inspector say bluntly:
‘This girl killed herself– and died a horrible death. But each of you helped to kill her. Remember that. Never forget it…’[1]
Now picture another scene, in a very different time and place; Israelite society some two and a half thousand years ago, in fact the (hypothetical) scene we read about this morning. The body of a young man has been discovered in open country, probably murdered. Neither the victim nor the killer have been identified. A young life has ended prematurely, unfulfilled; somewhere a family and possibly a widow do not even know what has happened; a killer may still be at large.
Until this point, our parasha (Shoftim) had been all about laws for establishing and maintaining a just society – the need for judges, and officers, and priests, each with their own role (as Sophia taught us). Here we confront the opposite. An unsolved murder is not only a personal tragedy; there is something inherently obscene about an unidentified corpse; it is a ‘stain on the society’ in which such an incident can occur. The word used for the body is חלל ‘halal’ – which means ‘empty’ but is also the word for ‘profane’. As Rabbi Plaut points out in his coomentary, it would have been perceived as affecting the very purity of the land itself. This notion was current in the Ancient Near East, and we have seen it previously in Torah. In Genesis, after Cain kills Abel, God tells him:
‘..your brother’s blood calls out to me from the ground’[2]
And near the end of the book of Numbers we read even more explicitly:
‘Blood pollutes the land, and the land can have no expiation for blood that is shed on it, except by the blood of the one who shed it.[3]
So how do we resolve this state of affairs? Deuteronomy prescribes the strange ritual we just read about. The nearest settlement is deemed responsible for the body. That town must provide an expensive animal which has never been used for work; it is to be killed by breaking its neck. Its throat is not cut, it is not burnt, it is not eaten – this is not the usual fate of a sacrificial animal. The location for this symbolic killing is a nachal eitan – probably an uncultivated wadi with a reliable source of flowing water. In the presence of the priests, the town elders must then wash their hands and declare before God:
‘ “We did not spill this blood; our eyes did not see… Absolve, O LORD, Your people Israel whom You redeemed, and do not let guilt for the blood of the innocent remain among Your people Israel.” ‘[4]
And Deuteronomy adds:
‘Thus … you will be doing what is right in the sight of God.’[5]
Just how can a cow, a fertile but untilled valley, handwashing, and a public declaration and prayer resolve the crises of an unsolved murder and the land being in a state of impurity? What sense can we make of all this?
The medieval commentator Rashi suggested that there may be a symbolic connection between the place, the animal and the victim:
‘Let the heifer which has never produced fruit … be killed in a spot which has never produced fruit, to atone for the death of a man who was debarred (through premature death) from producing fruit.’[6]
As for handwashing: whether each of us prefers to make an association to Lady Macbeth, or to Pontius Pilate, or to sanitising our hands during the Covid pandemic, we all intuitively understand that washing hands in public is both an acknowledgement of possible contamination, and a real and symbolic distancing oneself from it.
Maimonides considered that the elders are calling on God as a witness that they are not even indirectly responsible for the death by failing in their civic duties of hospitality, care and maintenance of public facilities:
‘that they have always kept the roads in good condition, have protected them, and have directed every one that asked his way; that the person has not been killed because they were careless in these general provisions…’[7]
Another medieval commentator Abarbanel proposed that one effect of the unusual ritual would be to draw public attention to what has happened, so that it would become a topic of conversation, increasing the likelihood that the killer might actually be identified and brought to justice.
Another modern commentary, the Jewish Study Bible, invites us to notice some finer details. Unlike the priestly ritual of the scapegoat on Yom Kippur, the elders in our case are not laying hands on the heifer, or in any way transferring guilt to it. Further, they insist the passage is carefully worded to establish that it is prayer and divine action, not ritual, which is the key to absolution.
So far, then, if we accept these interpretations, the eglah arufah, the cow with the broken neck, may be a model for dealing with a communal crisis:
- The murder has been publicised, not ‘hushed up’, and the shock to the community is acknowledged.
- Those in power have stepped forward and reflected on their responsibilities, also making it clear that this is a communal issue, even if no-one present is individually liable for the crime.
- Perhaps the dramatic killing of the cow will help people feel that ‘something is being done’, and that personal vendetta or vigilantism is not called for…
- The whole incident has been given an additional dimension by the public prayer.
Strange as it is, this passage may have some additional helpful messages for us. After all, Parashat Shoftim is invariably read during the month of Ellul, just over one month before Yom Kippur, when we are already thinking about guilt, responsibility and repentance. On Yom Kippur we are going to confess repeatedly: Ashamnu, Bagadnu, Gazalnu – We have sinned, we have betrayed, we have stolen….., admitting to a list of sins which we personally have not actually committed. At first glance, this sounds very different from the declaration by the town elders in our text. Rather than saying ‘we are not liable’, we will say that we are. The rabbis of the Talmud explained: Kol Yisrael Areivim Zeh BaZeh – all of Israel are responsible for each other.[8]
‘A person is held responsible for the sins of his family, or of his community, or even of all mankind, if he fails to use his influence for the corrections of wrongs.’[9]
In other words, before I figuratively ‘wash my hands’ of something that is amiss in my world, I need to ask myself: Might I have been able to stop this happening? Is there anything I can do to change that behaviour? How can I be a better role model?
Returning to our text about the unsolved murder, there is a helpful piece in the ‘Women’s Commentary’ by the writer Beth Kissileff:
‘The crucial aspect of the perplexing ritual of the eglah arufah is to force the living to acknowledge their responsibility to the dead… It is the right thing to do, both for the collective of society and for the dead individual… It is only in this state of being a collective that a society can operate with justice.’
If just one member of the Birling family in Priestley’s play had been less self-centred, more empathic, and behaved differently, the fate of the suicidal young woman might have been very different. The Inspector says towards the end of the play:
‘… One Eva Smith has gone- but there are millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their lives, their hopes and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives, and what we think and say and do. We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other….’
Our Jewish texts have been saying that to us for thousands of years.
[1] Priestley, J.B. (1947) 1992. An Inspector Calls: A Play in Three Acts. Edited by Tim Bezant. London: Heinemann. Act 3
[2] Genesis 4:10
[3] Numbers 35:33
[4] Deuteronomy 21: 7-8
[5] Ibid v9
[6] Hertz, J H, ed. (1937) 1988. The Pentateuch and Haftorahs. 2nd ed. London: Soncino Press. (834)
[7] Maimonides Guide for the Perplexed 3:40:6
[8] bShavuot 39a
[9] Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Berakhot, as cited in Forms of Prayer 1977 p119