Don't Be Distracted by Distraction
Mystical Moralism in Ki Teitzei
“When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof, so that you do not bring bloodguilt on your house if anyone should fall from it.” (Deuteronomy 22:8)
If it were to happen that someone falls off that roof you could not have been the indirect cause, seeing you had put up a protective railing. Had you not done so, your family might bear part of the guilt for such a mishap. (Seforno)
[The language] suggests: this man deserved to fall to his death (on account of some crime he had committed), nevertheless his death should not be occasioned by your agency, for meritorious things are brought about through the agency of good men and bad things only through the agency of evil men. (Rashi)
We observe a custom that whenever we experience a pleasurable event we make a point to express our gratitude to God not only in our hearts but also with appropriate words. Such words usually contain quotations from the Torah songs extolling the virtues and Power of God, and are accompanied by special prayers. The roof of the house of which the Torah speaks, symbolizes that our joy is focused heavenwards. The numerical value of the word “your roof” is 26, i.e. equivalent to the numerical value of God’s principal name Y-H-W-H. The Torah reminds us that the new roof that we have over our heads is by grace of the Lord. (Kedushat Levi)
Now, when a person builds a house it arouses the judgments, particularly outside the Land [of Israel] where it is full of all the emptiness of the world, as is known, and it constricts their borders. Therefore the Torah said, When you build a new house, you shall make, which is the idiom of correction, a parapet [ma’akeh] from the idiom of irritations [me’ikim]; the things that irritate you will be corrected through your attaching yourself Above to the place of Thought, which is your “roof” as we have said. And then, if you attach your Thought to the Blessed Creator, then when the one who falls will fall (Deut. 22:8) – as our Sages of Blessed Memory interpreted, he was destined to fall – for the judgments were destined to fall since the six days of Creation as is known; all of which is to say that the judgments will fall away from you, and understand this. (Meor Eynayim)
The rule is apparently simple: When you build a new house in the land of Israel, make a parapet for it. And yet the odd phrasing and the specific placement of the verse yield wildly different readings. The Torah juxtaposes a roof with falling and guilt, leading to an evocative image. Does the parapet protect us from falling or does it imply and even cause us to fall? The simplest interpretation—protect your roof—raises the question: why is this a commandment in the land of Israel? Why is it a commandment specific to new homes? I.e., if you buy an extant home without a parapet, you don’t have to build one. Why are we talking about death at the precise moment of celebration and futurity: building a home?
In Rashi’s telling the parapet doesn’t actually protect anyone from dying. It simply protects us from liability. The man is going to die one way or another, but we shouldn’t be the caught in the middle. There’s a legal reading of this which hews to the mechanics of causation, but there’s also a spiritual reading: just because an outcome is just doesn’t mean the process by which it is achieved is just. Don’t bring about justice through injustice.
The Kedushat Levi focuses on the parapet less as a protection against falling and more as a beatification and symbol of gratitude. We should turn our words into parapets adorning the roof of consciousness and allowing us to experience the wonder. But why? Does beauty help us keep from falling? Does creativity shelter us from the mundane? Read allegorically, the parapet is the dvar Torah itself that protects us from tumbling off—getting distracted—and treating Torah study as mere intellectual exercise or mere technological tool. Remember, when you ascend the roof to stand in awe of what is above. The parapet reminds us where we are. It marks the border between earthly reach and heavenly expanse. Like the bridge in Heidegger’s thought, which gathers the river banks, the parapet conjoins the prayer of the human and the echoing answer of the divine. The parapet is, in other words, not a mere protection against physical falling, but a ritual expression of awe. It is the consciousness of God that keeps us from “descending” into normal life, the life of worry, the life of ego, the life of the wandering ex-slave who spends his days complaining. We are home now. But not so fast. Make a parapet.
The Meor Eynayim sees the parapet as a Tikkun or correction of our previous way of being in the world. Diaspora is not a place, but a mental state, and only the parapet can finally transform our home. For as the saying goes, you can take the person out of Diaspora, but not Diaspora out of the person. Rather than preventing any fall, though, the parapet simply helps us cope with the inevitability of fall. This must be a metaphor, but the Hasidic master assigns a fundamental destiny to the human condition that involves failure. In gymnastics, the goal is not to avoid falling, but to fall gracefully, to turn the fall into a spring. The parapet attunes us to the One who makes the world, thus allowing us to accept both our high moments and our low moments. It is the same God who blesses us with a house and makes the world in such a way that we fall.
The Meor Eynayim suggests that the parapet doesn’t prevent us from falling; it only prevents us from irritation. It can’t prevent pain, but it can soften the second order suffering that comes from assigning blame and shame to it. We can’t prevent the fall—only the guilt. How? Because when we acknowledge that God created us we must see the divine hand even in our own shortcomings and the shortcomings of others. We can be comforted in knowing that even when we fail we are fundamentally good, pure, holy.
On the other hand, and here Rashi helps, we should never let such a nondual approach lead us to moral relativism. Regarding ourselves non-judgmentally and acknowledging our fundamental goodness cannot become a pretext for avoiding tough introspection and acknowledging that, yes, we have fallen short. The dialectic is challenging, but is the crux of the days of Awe—in which we ask for mercy while simultaneously examining our deeds with consternation.
Mystics get flak for saying everything—both good and bad—is divine. They are accused of equalizing the roof and the floor, of removing accountability from those who could have been more careful. Moralists get flak for hypostasizing the demonic, for blaming the homeowner for things beyond their control. But these caricatures are imprecise. The parapet must be poetic and real, beautiful and legal, just as we must be both mystically open to and morally serious. We must transform — and not simply condemn — that which irritates us. A physical guardrail protects us functionally. But a poetic one protects us existentially. To combine the physical and the poetic into one guardrail is to complete the law. The parapet is a real and metaphorical expression of the meta-commandment: become holy.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins