It's Time To Build...A Parapet
The Torah's Call For Moderation
“When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet [maakeh] for your roof…” (Deuteronomy 22:8)”
“Our predicament is not the difficulty of attaining happiness, but the difficulty of avoiding the misery to which the pursuit of happiness exposes us.”—Michael Oakeshott
The word maakeh, translated as parapet or fence, only appears once in the Torah, and it is in the verse quoted above, which appears in this week’s parasha, Ki Teitzei. It is what’s called by Biblical scholars a hapax legomenon, a singularity. One-use words are the most difficult to define since we can’t track their meanings across contexts. Presumably, these words are the oldest in the Torah, vestiges of a bygone epoch.
The word maakeh, then, is itself a kind of parapet, a kind of guardrail on the roof of the text, at once adorning it and keeping us from falling off into the abyss. What would we fall into? Old routine? Boredom? Certainty? Doubt? No matter. The strange word is needed to protect and enclose us, to offer us a view, to help us access the depths of pre-conscious memory.
Or else, the verse offers us not simply a command, but instruction about how to “build a new house,” in the broad sense. If you want to make something new, build a parapet. It is this add-on, that will make it yours, that will differentiate it. The maakeh is an old word, but it refers to something new, something contemporary.
Alternatively, the parapet is more original than the home it completes. Sof maaseh b’machshava t’chila, goes the saying (“the end of the deed is already in the thought of the beginning.”) The idea of home presupposes the fence, the look-out, the boundary, the fear of falling. The parapet is both the oldest and newest part of home. It is both the telos and the afterthought of building.
You might say this is all a bit silly—the verse says what it says; the law is what it is. It just means “Don’t be negligent. Make your roof safe.” But why the emphasis on “new house”? Surely, old houses also need guardrails? And not just houses. All buildings. Rashi asks a version of this question. His answer, following the Midrash, is that the commandment to make a parapet is not the same as the commandment to protect people from falling from the roof. The latter can’t be commanded. If a person is destined to fall from a roof, the parapet won’t protect him. But it’s a way for the owner to say “I’ve done my part.” All buildings need parapets, but it is the act of placing one on my own building that makes me a responsible home-owner.
Maimonides agrees with Rashi and the Midrash, but makes a philosophical argument: the fact that the we are commanded to make a parapet even though God knows in advance who will fall off the roof is “proof” that providence and omniscience don’t conflict with freedom. Anticipating quantum physics, in a way, Maimonides suggests the world can be both predictable (from God’s point of view) and free. The future exists only as possibility even though, in God’s mind, as it were, it is also already a reality.
Whether or not you agree with this view or not, you might say that for the Midrash, the parapet is more of a symbol than an effective intervention in public safety. Making a parapet is a form of “virtue signaling.” For Rashi, the maakeh serves a purpose but at the same time does not. Its purpose is both functional and ornamental. The maakeh is ambiguous, at once a legal requirement and a baroque flourish, an excess at the extremity, a building’s fingernail. In a Maimonidean framework, the maakeh represents free will and agency in a universe that can often feel deterministic, the chutzpah to create even when it seems futile, insignificant.
The verse says “when you build,” implying that act of making a parapet serves the maker more than it serves the visitors or guests. It is a fundamentally creative act, a virtuous one, a mindful one to place a fence on one’s roof. It follows the verse commanding one to shoo away the mother bird before taking her eggs. There is a parallel: two acts of taking come with stipulations; two acts of conquest and pride involve empathy for the vulnerable.
The Meor Einayim interiorizes the command to build a parapet and translates it as follows: when you find yourself irritated you can correct yourself and the source of your irritation by connecting to something higher. His reading turns on a pun or speculative connection between maakeh (fence) and meikim (irritations). The parapet on the roof represents the opening to transcendence needed to free one from the burdens of the self. The home, he says, is a site of judgment, but the roof opens to something more spacious, a horizon in which judgment is tempered.
Fences and boundaries close us up. From a mystical point of view, they can make us irritable as they require us to “grow up”—but when we place them on the roof, we make a compromise. There is a difference between a fence that lies on the ground to keep out the neighbors and a fence in the air whose purpose is hospitality. The first kind of fence bars trespass; the second kind seeks welcome. The placement determines what kind of fence something is. The closer it is to heaven, as it were, the more a boundary becomes a means to connection rather than an obstacle to it.
For non-Hasidic readers that kind of allegorical read may seem far-fetched, yet if we assume, as a matter of principle, that the Torah doesn’t state the obvious, Meor Einayim offers a good solution to our question, namely, why does the text use weird locution to tell us something it could have told us more directly? Many elements of a house can be hazardous, but the text singles out the roof.
We noted the symbolism of the roof as opening to the higher things in life; but the roof can also be the place where we feel most proud, even hubristic, a reading offered by the Shnei Luchot Habrit. The parapet might be a way of saying to oneself that height (achievement) does not protect one from responsibility and/or vulnerability. The higher the home, the more stories it has, the more important the parapet. The Torah says the maakeh serves to prevent others from falling off the roof, but perhaps this is (also) metaphorical—you can’t pursue a life focused on achievement (“getting to the top”) while being indifferent to the wellbeing of others. In Kabbalistic terms, the act of building and innovation is one of hesed (creativity), but the need for a guardrail is a requirement to balance out that energy with gevurah (constraint, regulation).
Hannah Arendt writes, “The notion that there exist dangerous thoughts is mistaken for the simple reason that thinking itself is dangerous to all creeds, convictions, and opinions.” If the roof is the place of thought, akin to the mind, the parapet is a constraint on thought in the name of other values. Without thinking we are lost, but too much thinking and we may “fall off,” loose our minds. The maakeh is a figure of moderation in the midst of change—and the text highlights this by contrasting it with the fact the house is new. Great changes require the greatest care. Revolutions and interventions are most prone to backfiring catastrophe. All houses need parapets, but new ones especially.
The laws of Ki Teitzei, in which the law of the maakeh appears, are laws for those entering the land for the first time. The parapet thus becomes a symbol not just for one’s personal home, but for the collective one as well. Arrival is not the time to relax, but the time to be vigilant. And the fact that we cannot stop tragedy does not exempt us from trying to prevent it. Moments of glory require humility, moments of messianic zeal require attentive realism. So long as we live in this world we need to make for ourselves a parapet.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
If you appreciate this work and feel moved to support it, you can make a tax deductible donation here.
You may also enjoy my daily question newsletter, What is Called Thinking?