Shabbos Parashas Ki Seitzei - 5777
Shabbos Parashas Ki Seitzei - 5777
Rabbi Hal Miller
Fathers shall not be put to death because of sons, and sons shall not be put
to death because of fathers. A man should be put to death for his own sin.
[Devarim 24:16]
At first glance, this seems pretty obvious, so there must be more involved.
Although our verse talks about putting someone to death for sin, our parsha is
really one about mercy. It covers laws of the captured woman, hated wife, hanging
the executed criminal, restoring or assisting with a neighbor's animal, restoring lost
property, sending away the mother bird, putting a fence around the roof, etc. How is
our verse one of mercy?
In addition to numerous other examples of mercy, our parsha also deals with many
aspects of the relationship between parents and children, in such varied areas as:
- the double portion of inheritance to a firstborn
- requiring acknowledgement of the son of a hated wife, including firstborn rights
- punishment of the rebellious son
- shiluach hakan, chasing away the mother bird before taking the chicks
Rashi and the Gemora in Sanhedrin tell us that our verse means that fathers cannot be
given a death sentence based on the testimony of their sons.
Sforno relates the verse to his own times, when it was common for a king to kill the
members of the family of someone he didn't like as well as that disliked person himself,
and the verse here forbids a Jewish king from doing that.
Chiddushei Ran explains that there was a common belief that evil was actually
hereditary, born into the child of someone who sins. Our verse puts this to rest. Whether
true or not is not within human capability to determine, only G-d can do so. Thus any
relation to the accused cannot be put to death for what the accused may have done. We
must treat each person as innocent until proven guilty, an idea codified in Western law
centuries later.
An answer to our question comes from Nechama Leibowitz and the commentators she
cites. We know that elsewhere the Torah speaks of "visiting the sins of the fathers on the children and on the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me", which seems to be in direct conflict with our verse. There, the Torah speaks of G-d taking action against those descendants who maintain their parents' evil ways, whereas in our verse, the Torah is stopping the earthly courts from doing the same thing. This is a decision that only G-d can make, thus our verse is in fact a show of His mercy in this world, and a way to give another chance to a guilty person to repent and return during his lifetime.