Ki Teitzei, כִּי-תֵצֵא  "When You Go Out"  Deuteronomy 21:10-25:19

God's Engagement And Marriage

Poetic notes on the parashat Ki Teitzei 5783*

Harmony is love for melody

and, the melody of melodies

is the melody of God’s morality,

the melody that is the mother of moral beauty,

the grandmother giving birth to creations’s humility 

The beautiful captive is set free

God's law has protected her dignity

The firstborn inherits her harmony,

her right to be seen pure in sound and sight,

as when the day consumes the night,

like the Torah on Mount Moriah

in the day of Moshe-Messiah

Adam ascended from earth to sky

His beautiful wife was captured and was about to die

He sought the help of the spirit of God’s Anointed

His heart was broken, his mind disjointed

He searched for him in the firmament

Hie did not know his hope or where it went

He could not find the redeemer,

but his bride was taken and he could not leave her

The earth was tohu and the heavens were bohu

His home was chaos, the creation a loss

Adam sought on his own to take captivity captive

But was abducted himself and made the captive

Then Moses ascended to take captivity captive

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had made him active

Moshe found the help of Mashiach there

The angels stepped back to give him breathing air

He received the Torah as a gift of prayer

Ten words imperative for mercy

A double-edged sword to end all controversy

In the time to come no convert bride

will be taken by war because her husband died

For Moshe-Mashiach took captivity captive,

turned the world over and made it adaptive,

adaptive to redemption, adaptive to correction,

adaptive to God’s love and his Jewish affection

In the time of the resurrection

it will be seen that the luz bone of the bride,

conceiving new life and spreading it wide,

her redeemed and resurrection bone of the neck,

that was in her like one dead speck,

was preserved for her in the neck of the groom

It will make her resurrection bloom

When a man leaves his father and mother

and chooses his eternal heart's wife,

he is her harmonic world, she is her beloved's life

And he is her chosen river valley, her sky and sea

He is the place she wants to live and be

Unless he has left his father and mother as a rebellious child,

an arrogant hunter and wild,

a child who walked out,

and left the world in doubt,

leaving his mother for dead

and his father to violence, instead

of leaving in the blessing of obedience,

leaving to build a world of expedience

In the way of truth,

a young man will dwell in a Torah booth

“A man shall leave his father and mother

and cleave unto his wife”.

This is the secret of eternal life

For when a young man leaves by way of truth

and comes to dwell in a Torah booth,

his father will receive a Godly reward,

It is the world to come he goes toward

He loses a child from his house,

but God gains his captive spouse!

Instead of leaving his parents to a lonely grave,

he acts the way the resurrected behave

But if his leaving is without worth,

to what then will a new life give birth?

For he has obtained his kingdom by violence

His politics will be war and his children riotous

Who will return a world to its owner if they find it is lost?

What is the value of creation, what is its cost?

When it suddenly happens that you come upon the world's end,

and you cannot save the mother’s nestlings then,

will you force the mother bird to oversee?

Or will you hear her sad and tender melody

and encourage her to fly away in Godly faith and harmony?

Keep your heart safe and your rooftop fenced

Your soul is real and love is licensed

Live by the habit of caring for others,

Every one of them are your sisters and brothers

Protect them from accidental gravities,

from falling from your rooftop into any manner of depravities

Don't give what is not yours to give

Don’t preach life if you don't know how to live

How did we even get here?

How do we even now redeem our fear?

Don't cross the spark of angels

with the seed of the daughters of Eve

Know where you are going before its time to leave

No one can save the heart of the mother bird

if the prayer of Jerusalem is not heard

The slaves who escape from immorality

are like the Jews who escaped from Egypt’s criminality

Amalek tries to return them to their slavery

He is the servant of death for the love of money

Be holy in your encampments, Oh Israel,

encampments matrilineal and patrilineal,

as you war always against Amalek, the anti-Jew,

against Amalek the old and Amalek the new

Be holy in your dialogues crossing over your bridges

In winning world wars there are no eternal riches

Be holy in communing with your neighbor

You are a freed slave, they are victims of forced labor

You are the fiancée of God

He has found you neither blemished or flawed

He is merciful to your failures

He is the admirer of your behaviors

He pays your debts on time

You will rise up before the last hour’s chime

He loans you His word and spirit and credits you alone

He builds salvation from your luz bone

He builds the third Huppah, it is yours

The guests are gathering on eternity’s shores

He will bring you fully to his land,

with his gentle touch, hand in hand

He takes no notice of your doubts and unbelief

His only thought is your relief

Be merciful if your wife or husband fails along the way

Hashem’s Jerusalem is not that far away

Give birth again to their dreams and hopes if they die

The resurrected heart cannot lie

If you cannot, if one has become two,

you can throw down the shoe,

your responsibility is through

But know, Oh Israel, God is not going to force you 

to ever take off his shoe

Though you may have failed to give birth,

and through your broken waters God is not known in all the earth,

though your womb has given birth only to strife

and not to the world of eternal life,

yet he will be a husband to you

He will not repent for having made you

He repented for having made Adam

He was sorry for having made Sodom

But just as Sarah gave life to Isaac,

and God did not keep his joy private,

what came from the heavens and the earth 

out of the waters of their first birth

will come out of the waters of you womb instead

For you will give life to all the dead

You will not know shame

You will not hide your face from eyes that blame,

or remember your fears of widowhood

All will be forgotten like the fears of childhood

For your husband is your Maker

He is your enemy’s undertaker

He destroyed all he touched

But with you he made an exception

The tabernacle of your redemption

he has made to be his home

He has adorned your golden crown with chrome

When you stand with Him beneath the huppah

You will become his haggadah

He will tell His angels the story

He will reveal the hidden glory

of how you crushed the head of your evil serpent beneath your heel!

All the heavens and earth will know how you feel

And you will praise your God for calling Abraham,

for making marital love to be his program,

for naming Isaac as your laughter,

for making Jacob’s heel his own for ever after

And now

Let us leave the illusion formed by the moment of sin

The door of repentance is open, let us enter in,

enter with love into the moment of faith

The first day has returned to become the eighth

Witness the eternal moment of Israel’s engagement to God

Gone is the world of the iron rod

That was the moment of eternal promise

Now its fulfillment falls upon us

Hashem anoints Jerusalem with His intimate light

His joy illuminates the intimate night

and the Sabbath begins