Never was, never will be

by Raphael Morris

Parashat Ki Teitzei contains one of the more infamous laws in the Torah: the stubborn and rebellious son. To quote Deuteronomy 21:18-21:

“If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, who does not heed the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and they discipline him, and he still does not heed them, his father and mother shall seize him and bring him to the elders of his town, at the gate of his locale. They shall say to the elders of his town: ‘This, our son, is stubborn and rebellious. He does not heed our voice. He is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Thereupon all the people of his town shall stone him to death. Thus you will sweep out evil from your midst: all Israel will hear and be awed.”

Awful indeed. Such brutality was typical for the ancient world: Hammurabi’s Code mandates mutilation as punishment for filial insolence, and infants in classical Greece and Rome were regularly left to die of exposure. But it does not lessen the moral horror of such a commandment, and to judge atrocities by the standards of the day is to deny that the long arc of the moral universe, as MLK put it, bends towards justice.

Many critics of religion have pointed to these verses from Deuteronomy as evidence that Torah cannot be the word of God - or at least not of any God deserving of our worship. And even the Tannaim, the rabbis of the Mishnaic era, went to great lengths to ensure that this commandment could never be followed.

Let me be clear - the Tannaim are not exemplars of the humane treatment of children. They are shockingly comfortable with corporal punishment, even claiming that culpable homicide in knowingly inflicting corporal punishment beyond a victim’s limits can never be murder (Mekhilta, Yitro). But in Mishnah Sanhedrin 8:1-5, they add in all sorts of qualifications to make it even harder to count someone as a stubborn and rebellious son (and this is on top of the various strictures that already make capital convictions virtually impossible). For example, he has to steal from his father, and eat and drink elsewhere, and he must eat specifically Kosher meat and drink a specific kind of wine.

But some of the Tannaim go even further. For the Talmud (Sanhedrin 71a) records a baraita (an extra-Mishnaic Tannaitic passage) that asserts: “There never was a stubborn and rebellious son, and there never will be one in the future.” Why, then, would the Torah include the commandment at all? The baraita anticipates the question, and answers it: “That you may expound and receive reward.” A starkly horrifying and unjust law is reduced to a pure hypothetical that exists only for the sake of intellectual exercise and analytical enrichment.

I admit that the tactic meshes well with my particular approach to Judaism. The Torah is full of details that I believe to be factually inaccurate, immoral, or irrelevant to my life. But I nevertheless believe that there is value in analysis, in using blatantly inadequate answers as provocative launchpads to ask deeper questions. This too is the Talmud’s mode of pedagogy - it will offer up a poor answer to its own question just to have a conversation about why the answer is insufficient.

There never was and never will be a stubborn and rebellious son.

Or, to put it another way, there’s no such thing as a bad kid.

Defiance and disobedience are not inherently pathological, much less character flaws. Whatever the mores of the Biblical world, most of us now know better than to assume people should bend the knee and submit to authority. Dante might have reserved the deepest circle of Hell for those who commit treachery against their masters and benefactors, but Jews have long had a more ambivalent attitude toward authority, to say the least. Rabban Gamliel the son of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi used to say: “Be cautious with authorities, for they do not befriend a person except for their own desires,” we learn in Pirkei Avot 2:4.

The democratic values that Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan so treasured ask us to envision a world where we collapse many of the hierarchies that make insubordination a coherent concept. But many of the staunchest advocates of democracy still have blind spots. They abide militaries whose hierarchies inevitably pressure soldiers to commit war crimes. They ignore the prison-industrial complex and how the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution still permits slavery as punishment for a crime. And they expect children to obey parents, teachers, and other authority figures.

Now, one might well argue that parents and teachers deserve honour (although alas, exceptions are all too abundant). “Honour thy father and mother” is, after all, the Fifth Commandment. And our tradition holds that teachers are to be respected even above parents (Mishnah Bava Metzia 2:11).

But honour is not the same as obedience. There’s a reason why most Anglicans have dropped “obey” from the wedding vows alongside “love” and “honour”. The commandment to honour parents does not entail an obligation to obey them.

Moreover, honour and respect should be reciprocal. As Ben Zoma said: “Who is honoured? One who honours his fellow human beings.” (Pirkei Avot 4:1) Too often, parents and teachers do not honour their children, or even give them basic human respect. As Foucault observed in Discipline and Punish, the model of the school is the same as the model of the prison: designed to survey and to internalise respect for authority. Schools are rarely designed with a mind to promoting the agency and autonomy of children.

This past summer, working at a Jewish summer camp in the USA, has been something of a culture shock to me. I grew up going to Jewish summer camps in Australia, but such camps are an entirely different beast. For all their flaws, the camps and activities I went to growing up exist firmly in the model of the highly political youth movements that evolved from the youth arm of the political movements of prewar and interwar Europe. Such movements were deeply ideologically charged, with Zionism in a myriad of different, mutually antagonistic flavours, and non-Zionist movements like the Bundist SKIF to boot.

These youth movements have played a key role in the past century of Jewish history, driving aliyah (immigration to the Land of Israel), leading the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and encoding political differences and divisions that map to major Israeli political parties and factions. They are in my blood: my Bobe and Zaide met because my Bobe went to the left-wing Socialist Zionist Hashomer Hatzair and my Zaide went to the right-wing Revisionist Zionist Betar (my Bobe always adds that the children went to Hashomer!).

At the camps of my youth, our unruly and chaotic natures were channeled into a sense of pride and a passion for ideology and informal education. By the time we were teenagers, the movement had us having serious ideological discussions. Could Israel really be both Jewish and democratic? Should we omit the blatant falsehood that “never have I seen a righteous man forsaken” in birkat hamazon (grace after meals). Older teenagers would meet at summer camp for a two-day caucus where we would propose and vote on amendments to the ideological documents of the movement. At the age of 16, I proposed and successfully passed a political statement adopted by the Reform Zionist movement Netzer Australia in support of Palestinian statehood.

The youth movements were far from perfect. We were often under-resourced, insufficiently trained, and a lack of adult supervision at times allowed issues like hazing and cliquish, even cultish social dynamics to proliferate. I have mixed feelings about my time in the movement.

But we were certainly never expected to sit still and listen quietly. We were being trained to think critically, to argue and debate. We were told that part of the purpose of being in a youth movement was because of the risk of adult culture growing stagnant, how youth were needed to be the cutting edge of progress.

Once, when I was around 12, I stubbornly refused to help out when it was my group’s turn to help clean the kitchen after lunch. Instead of being chastised or ordered to help, my madrich (counsellor) instead chose to engage with me on my terms. He pointed out that I was a self-described Marxist (I was a precocious 12 year-old), and that by my own principles of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” I ought to pitch in and help the others out for the common good. The argument worked and I joined in the cleaning - begrudgingly, but of my own conscious free will.

Seventeen-odd years later, after reconnecting in graduate school, the madrich in question is one of my closest friends and a lifelong chevruta (study partner) in all manner of philosophical and ideological thought.

After these experiences, the authoritarianism of American Jewish summer camps was jarring at best. This past summer, I have seen willful children who refuse to follow instructions treated as if they are the problem, even when no one has attempted to explain why the instructions are worth following. Children are regularly commanded to sit up or be still when they are perfectly capable of listening while pacing or rolling on the floor - I daresay more capable of listening, much of the time. And when they resist, counsellors are as likely to threaten punishment as they are to reason with the children.

Moreover, the camp where I worked - like far too many places in this day and age - continued to use interventions based on behaviourist approaches, including “planned ignoring” in response to meltdowns. Such approaches effectively reduce children to sets of behaviours, conditioning them to behave ‘properly’ at the cost of neglecting their internal experience and emotional development. Behaviourism is both methodologically outdated and widely criticised by autistic advocates for the lasting trauma it has caused for autistic children. Conditioning a child like one trains a beast does an injustice to their humanity, dignity, and agency by conflating compliance with psychological health (a trend that has been deeply racist and sexist throughout history).

There never was and never will be a stubborn and rebellious son.

If seeing such little value placed on children’s autonomy at summer camp was jarring at best, it was actively triggering at worst. Like many autistic folks, I have never had much respect for authority. (Epistemic authority, which derives from superior knowledge, experience, or expertise - for example, medical training or lived experience - is an exception.) It has always seemed arbitrary to me, and deference to authority is a value of hierarchical societies, not equitable ones. In school, I would argue with and question my teachers, often getting trouble for talking back or speaking out. Like the Tannaim, I believe in the rhetorical virtue of parrhesia, of open speech. The Mekhilta claims that Torah was given in the wilderness so that it was given in dimos parrhesia: in the ‘public domain’. Many are entitled to our respect. None are entitled to compel our silence.

Disobedience and defiance are often treated as symptoms, as problem behaviours that need to be treated or eradicated. Since the 1980s, a suite of traits that lead to entrenched resistance towards doing what we ‘ought’ to do has been studied and is often described as ‘Pathological Demand Avoidance’ (PDA), and sometimes associated with autism. But many prefer the term ‘Pervasive Drive for Autonomy’. Even as we acknowledge that an avoidant response towards tasks - including those that we have chosen for ourselves - can be disruptive and debilitating, we recognise there is something fundamentally rational in grasping for control over our own lives. In a world that would like nothing more than to reduce us to compliant, obedient cogs in the system, we are - to adapt the words of disabled poet William Ernest Henley - “still masters of our fates, we are still captains of our souls”.

After all, Jews throughout the centuries have refused to bend the knee to tyrants and inquisitors. From Shifrah and Puah resisting Pharaoh’s orders to Mordechai’s defiance against Haman, we have survived through disobedience to the unjust or arbitrary demands of humans as much as through adherence to Torah.

Perhaps that is why we keep a place at the Seder table for everyone, not just the Wise Child. In Jewish life, of course there are going to be people who don’t connect with the ritual in the ‘expected’ way. And their contributions are every bit as important as their more conventionally compliant counterparts - perhaps more so.

There is a famous story about the Baal Shem Tov, the great founder of Chassidism. The story goes that there was a villager who used to pray in the shul of the Baal Shem Tov on the Days of Awe. This villager had a son whom he had never brought into town, for the son was a simpleton who could not even read. But when the son was 13, the villager, concerned that he would unwittingly eat something on the fast day, brought him to shul with him on Yom Kippur - just to keep an eye on him.

Now, the boy had a little flute which he would play all the time when he was in the field, tending his flock. He took the flute with him to shul, hidden in his coat pocket, without his father knowing.

The boy sat in shul all of Yom Kippur without praying, because he did not know how.

During Musaf, he said to his father: “Father, I want to play the flute.” His father shuddered. Flute playing was forbidden on Yom Kippur, and he was only just learning that his son had smuggled the flute in! What if he should play it? What a sin! What a humiliation! He snapped at the boy to restrain himself.

During Minchah, the boy again said: “Father, I want to play the flute.” His father saw that the boy wanted to play the flute very badly indeed. What if he did something inappropriate? So the father asked where the flute was. When the boy pointed at his coat pocket, the father grabbed the coat pocket and held it shut, holding it this way all the while as they prayed.

But in the middle of Neilah - the Closing Prayers, the Locking of the Gates - the boy forced the flute out of his pocket and blew a note so loud it shocked everyone.

And the Baal Shem Tov himself shortened his prayer, declaring that the pure breath of this boy’s prayer, expressed through his flute blast, had lifted the prayers of all Israel to Heaven. For his sake had their prayers been heard.

There never was and never will be a stubborn and rebellious son.

But there are those who lift us up with the pure expression of their neshama - their soul, their breath.

May we know better than to fetter it.

Ken yehi ratzon.

Raphael Morris (he/they) is an AuDHD rabbinical student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. He feels privileged to be part of an intellectual tradition where his preferred modes of cognition, learning, and communication are not just tolerated but actively valued. In his spare time, he enjoys wiki walking, Talmud, long rambling conversations and anything else tangential.