By Nicole Martin

This week's parasha, Ki Tetzei (Devarim 21:10-25:19), is composed almost entirely of a series of mitzvot bein adam l'chavero--laws concerning relationships between individuals. You'll find a summary of the parasha here; the full text, with Rashi's commentary (which is worth reading!) is available here.

Ki Tetzei is one of the more "user-friendly" parshiot in the Torah, and certainly in Devarim: no dull census results, almost no mention of ritual impurity, none of those bizarre prescriptions for animal sacrifices that at first glance can make the Torah seem so decidedly irrelevant to our modern lives. Instead, we get all the feel-good laws, the ones we love to quote whenever we're trying to convince people that Judaism and social justice are practically synonyms. You may not charge interest, the parasha informs us (23:20), nor may you take slaves (24:7); you may not demand unreasonable securities on a loan (24:6, 10-13) or delay in paying a poor worker's wages (24:14-15); you must return another's lost possessions (22:1-3). Add in what must be practically the two most quoted lines in the Torah, at least among liberals--al ta'amod al dam re'echa and v'ahavta l're'acha kamocha (do not stand idly by your fellow's blood and love your fellow as yourself; Vayikra 19:16 and Vayikra 19:18, respectively)--and we have pretty much all the popular social justice-y verses in the Torah.

But these verses aren't written quite the way we like to interpret them, or the way I translated them. The ban on charging interest, for example, states specifically that it refers only to loans made to achicha--your brother; the following verse makes clear that one may demand interest from a nochri--a non-Jew. Likewise, the ban on taking slaves is explicitly restricted to Israelites; kidnapping and enslaving non-Jews is, for all we know, permitted. The ban on demanding unreasonable securities makes no mention of whether it applies equally whether the borrower is Jewish or not; the

ban on delaying payment to a worker applies regardless of whether said worker is an Israelite or a ger (literally a sojourner or [non-citizen] resident; to Rashi, and in modern Hebrew, a ger is someone who has joined the Jewish people out of personal conviction; according to the historical notes in the Conservative Movement's chummash, Etz Hayim,

a ger is a foreigner--not a native of Eretz Yisrael--who "has taken up permanent residence with the people Israel" [see page 385].) Finally, the commandment to return lost objects applies only if they belong to fellow Israelites--the word used, again, is achicha, your brother--and the commandments to love the other and to take action if he is in danger speak of re'echa, which almost certainly means your fellow citizen, your fellow Jew.

This is complicated. We are required to care for our neighbors, to look out for them, to treat them with no insignificant degree of dignity--even to love them--provided the neighbors in question are Jews. If they are non-Jews who for one reason or another (or, as Rashi has it, out of true conviction) have joined the Jewish people, they are awarded a perhaps slightly lower degree of protection. And many of obligations to act decently towards other Jews do not seem to apply at all in our relationships with the rest of humanity.

Is that bad? It certainly can be. I stumbled on a responsum the other day written by an Israeli rabbi; I don't remember who wrote it, but it doesn't matter because it's a fairly standard opinion: the question was whether the commandment v'ahavta l're'acha kamocha requires us to love non-Jews as well. The answer was a simple no. Is that bad? It can be. But it also seems to be the inevitable result of the basic idea of

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