If you haven’t yet heard our heart for Israel and our heart for learning more about the so called “Old Testament”, we will now take a quick trip back in time. The year is 2015. It’s a regular old Shabbat (Sabbath) and a guy (who would later become our dear friend) is giving the Torah portion overview. He starts to explain that the particular reading for the week is his “birth portion” and that really piques my interest. He talks about the blessing that his birth portion has been and how we all have a birth portion. I am on the edge of my seat. Lo and behold, you can find your birth portion with a simple internet search. I just can’t wait to find out what amazing message my birth portion will have for me… and before long I discover that my birth portion is Ki Tetze. I dive right in…
“When you go out to war against your enemies, and Adonai your God hands them over to you…” oh yeah, this is good stuff! God is going to hand my enemies over to me. Not that I have any right now, but this is a good morsel for later. I continue reading…
“and you take prisoners”… ok, I can kinda see that. I mean, we are fighting a spiritual war, right?
“and you see among the prisoners a woman who looks good to you, and you feel attracted to her and want her as your wife…” Wait a minute…
“you are to bring her home to your house where she will shave her head, cut her fingernails, and remove her prison clothing…” Huh – not what I expected. Well, we are in Deuteronomy and I already knew the whole portion may not apply to me. Let’s see what else is in here….
“If a man has two wives…” not in my lifetime!
“A woman is not to wear men’s clothing…” does that mean pants?
“When you build a new house, you must build a low wall around your roof…”
And the list goes on…
“You are not to sow two kinds of seed between your rows of vines…”
“You are not to wear clothing woven with two kinds of thread, wool and linen together…”
“Also, you are to have an area outside the camp to use as a latrine…”
Did you know that there’s a verse in the Torah that prohibits a man with crushed private parts from entering the temple? Give you one guess as to where that lovely sampling of Torah is located. You got it… my birth portion.
Someone call the police… I’ve been robbed. This is supposed to be a blessing – something that proves how much God loves me – at the very least I could use a good redemption story in here! Instead, it’s just a list of restrictive and overbearing rules for Israel to follow in their promised land. Nothing in here applies to my life. In fact, I’m quite sure this wasn’t meant for me at all. How could I have been born under this Torah portion? Is this what my life is going to be about – lots of meaningless, old rules? This is the worst Torah portion in the whole of Torah…
And on and on the enemy attacked. I spent a few years under this fog of severe dislike toward my birth portion.
I should mention here that it doesn’t shatter my world when things are broken. In fact, since I love a good redemption story, sometimes the part where things are a complete wreck is the best part because it gives you a milestone to look back at and to use for measuring progress. At some point over the past couple of years it occurred to me that, although Adonai is the miracle worker and deserves all the credit in any story of redemption, He often asks someone of faith to put in the grunt work to move the needle. He wants us to be just as invested in and thrilled about the results as He is. He revealed to me that He wants this Torah portion to be redeemed in my eyes. To become valued like a treasure in a field. So, I started to “dig in.” Over the past two years, I have looked forward to studying my birth portion again to see what else there is to discover. The first year, I discovered how this portion relates to Messiah – a message that I had never heard in all my years of attending church. That story will have to wait for another time, though.
This year, as we started scoping out what it would mean to spend a significant amount of time in Israel, we finally settled on a specific date. I decided to look it up and see what Torah portions were lining up with that timeframe, and no one was more surprised than I to see that the portion for the week we would leave is “Ki Tetze” which literally means “when you go out” and the portion for the week we would arrive is “Ki Tavo” which literally means “when you come in” (and is referencing entering the land of the promise.)
Another amazing piece of Ki Tetze speaks of what you should do when you find something that belongs to your neighbor. You are not to keep it or hide it from them, but rather you are required to restore it back to your neighbor’s possession. A book that I have fallen in love with does a beautiful work in describing how this verse applies to our present situation as the people Adonai loves and how this verse should play out in our lives as we restore Torah to its proper place, restore the Jewish people to their proper place, and where that leaves Gentile believers in the grand plan for Israel and indeed for the whole world. (If you wish to check it out, the book is called Restoration by D. Thomas Lancaster.) Therein lies the point of this portion – and definitely the point of my life and of yours! This portion serves as a handbook for how to funnel Adonai’s love through ourselves and to others.