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Ki Teitzei Research Paper

Decent Essays

Hello and Thank you for coming to my bar mitzvah it means a lot that you are all here. I will be talking about my torah portion Ki Teitzei which is about the commandments that Moses was giving at the end of his life. The commandments covered many different topics from cheating to inheritance. One thing that stood out to me in my torah portion was the commandment about dealing with difficult children. In the torah it says that if a family has a wayward and defiant son who is bad even after being disciplined. The parents together must take their son to the town’s elders, and say “This son of ours is disloyal and defiant; he does not heed us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” Then if all of this happens the council will stone the son to death as to sweep the evil out of Israel. Finding this …show more content…

Why would God want to hurt us? Why would God want parents to kill their own children? It says in the Mishnah, that if you kill one person, it is as if you are destroying the entire world, and if you save one person, you are saving the entire world. So commanding parents and communities to kill their rebellious children is like asking them to destroy the entire world. The rabbis who wrote the Mishnah, also did not like this commandment. As they explained the details, they made it very specific, so that it could never actually happen. First they restrict it by age: it only applies from a person’s 13th birthday, until three months after that. So for me, I have two more days until I am safe from being stoned for being a stubborn and rebellious son. Then they restrict it so that it only applies to sons, and not daughters. They explain the Torah to mean that the son has to eat meat and wine, no other food or drink counts. They measure out an outrageous amount of meat and wine he has to eat and drink to be deemed a glutton and a drunkard. I think that it is wrong to cover up this part of the

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