Shabbat Parashat Ki Teitzei - 5784

Shabbat Parashat Ki Teitzei - 5784

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]

This idea seems obvious from the standpoint of fairness. Why would the Torah need

to tell us this? What exactly is "because of sons" and "because of fathers"?

Rashi says that it means "by the testimony of". If it meant by the sin of, then how would

we understand the last part of our verse that "a man should be put to death for his own

sin"? Rashi means the verse is instructing that family members may not be witnesses

against each other. Onkelos agrees with this view. Targum Yonatan expands it to say

that they shall not be put to death by the testimony of the relative nor for the crime of a

relative.

Rashbam applies the reasoning of the Gemora [Shabbat 32b] and explains that our

verse means they shall not be put to death by human courts. He understands that "a man

should be put to death for his own sin" does not include a child, who may be killed for the

sin of the father. However, he cites various verses that limit this to where the child grows up

and continues to sin in the way of his father, and that only the heavenly court will act on it.

Sforno limits our verse to the crime of rebellion against the king, that the Torah forbids a

Jewish king from following what had been the non-Jewish practice of killing relatives of the

rebel as a way of punishing that rebel.

Nechama Leibowitz reads it as applying to a different kind of punishment. We know that bad

behavior by parents and their punishment has a significant negative impact on children, in

effect punishing the son for the behavior of the father. Our verse tells a human judge to punish

the guilty one without regard to this other kind of effect, as only God is able to handle such a

situation.

Another, entirely different, way of understanding the difficulty of our verse comes from Rav

Soloveitchik. He agrees that the verse applies primarily to human courts, but says that

the end of it is explaining a point about Rosh Hashanah. We are told that on this day of

judgment, "the books of the living and the books of the dead are open before God. This

is usually interpreted to mean that on this day God judges who should live and who should

die" meaning those who are alive are judged for whether they will die in the coming year.

But he says that it can also be read that the books of the living refers to judgment of those

alive now, and the books of the dead refers to judgment of those who have already died.

He understands this to mean that we are judged for our actions whenever they reach a

result, which in the case of parents and children often occurs many years later, even

after the death of the actor. In that case, the actor is re-judged for what his surviving son

or grandson may do years later due to the father's wrong behavior.

We are called to account in the heavenly court for our wrongs that we have not made

right, even after death. But the human courts do not have the ability to do this.