Why do we read הפטרות, in addition to the Torah reading? How did that practice come about?
According to the traditional explanation, there was once a time when the Roman Empire banned the reading of Torah scrolls in the Jewish community in Israel. Not wanting to abandon public readings on Shabbat morning altogether, חז״ל at the time instituted that the Jewish People read sections from נביאים, from the books of the Prophets, that were thematically related to what would have been the פרשת השבוע. Even after the גזירה, the decree, against Torah reading was lifted, it became the common practice to continue reading the appropriate chapters from נביא after the פרשה.
When you actually look at the הפטרות, it is incredible how many parallels חז״ל were able to find between the תורה and נביאים. This week, in particular, is particularly amazing. In both פרשת חוקת and in the story of יפתח, we find sending messages of peace to מואב and/or עמון, we read about wars in which the Jewish People are successful. In fact, יפתח even references the events of the פרשה, including the defeat of סיחון and the Emorites.
But perhaps most interesting is the parallel נדרים. Before they fight wars against סיחון and עוג, the two most powerful kings in the Canaanite area on eastern side of the Jordan River, the Jewish People are attacked by another Canaanite tribe from a place called ערד, who successfully take some Jews captive. In response, the Jewish People take a vow, a נדר, that if G-d enables them to defeat their attackers and rescue the captives, they will not take the spoils of war for themselves. The vow works and they are indeed successful at defeating the Canaanites.
Due the dire circumstances that Israel was facing after being attacked by עמון, they appointed יפתח, an outcast son of the previous leader, as the commander-in-chief, לראש ולקצין, due to his unequaled skill and charisma. As I mentioned, just as משה did many years earlier, יפתח does not immediately head into battle without first trying diplomacy. However, עמון's king paid no heed to יפתח's words and so he prepared the people for battle. Before the war began, though, יפתח imitated his ancestors by taking a vow that if the Ammonites are delivered into his hands and Israel wins the war, he will sacrifice a burnt offering to the רבש״ע.
The problem is, he expresses this vow in an unusual way:
וְהָיָה הַיּוֹצֵא אֲשֶׁר יֵצֵא מִדַּלְתֵי בֵיתִי לִקְרָאתִי בְּשׁוּבִי בְשָׁלוֹם מִבְּנֵי עַמּוֹן וְהָיָה לַה׳ וְהַעֲלִיתִיהוּ עֹלָה׃
then whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me on my safe return from the Ammonites shall be Hashem's and I shall offer it as a burnt offering."
He says that when he arrives home from the war, he will offer whatever greets him first from the doors of his house as a sacrifice. The גמרא in תענית points out that this is one of four vows, including the one found in פרשת חוקת, that are dangerously vague in formulation. After all, says the גמרא, he should have been concerned that the animal that would emerge from his home first upon his return would be a donkey or some other creature ineligible for sacrifice. But what actually occurs is even worse.
וַיָּבֹא יִפְתָּח הַמִּצְפָּה אֶל־בֵּיתוֹ וְהִנֵּה בִתּוֹ יֹצֵאת לִקְרָאתוֹ בְּתֻפִּים וּבִמְחֹלוֹת וְרַק הִיא יְחִידָה אֵין־לוֹ מִמֶּנּוּ בֵּן אוֹ־בַת׃
When Jephthah arrived at his home in Mizpah, there was his daughter coming out to meet him, with timbrel and dance! She was an only child; he had no other son or daughter.
When יפתח sees that it is his only child, his daughter, who first emerges from his home to greet him, יפתח immediately expresses grief and frustration that his daughter is now the subject of his vow:
וַיְהִי כִרְאוֹתוֹ אוֹתָהּ וַיִּקְרַע אֶת־בְּגָדָיו וַיֹּאמֶר אֲהָהּ בִּתִּי הַכְרֵעַ הִכְרַעְתִּנִי וְאַתְּ הָיִית בְּעֹכְרָי וְאָנֹכִי פָּצִיתִי פִי אֶל־ה׳ וְלֹא אוּכַל לָשׁוּב׃
On seeing her, he rent his clothes and said, "Alas, daughter! You have brought me low; you have become my troubler! For I have uttered a vow to Hashem and I cannot retract."
When יפתח says that he cannot take it back and must complete the vow, that he has to fulfill his vow and his daughter seems to affirm that her father is correct but asks for a two month delay in fulfillment. After she returns, the נביא says יפתח followed through with what he vowed to do.
The commentators debate how he could carry out a vow of bringing his daughter as a burnt offering. Some, such as אבן עזרא, explain that the vow meant she is dedicated for G-d and can never get married. יפתח must have built her a house deep into the countryside, away from society, where she lived out the rest of her days in isolation.
But others, including חז״ל, the rabbis, themselves, understood that יפתח did the unthinkable and murdered his own daughter, sacrificing her to הקב״ה as a burnt offering, precisely as he had said. This is certainly a tragedy and the נביא seems to present it that way.
The question is, where did יפתח make his mistake? How could this have been avoided?
Some, such as Dr. Yael Ziegler, suggest that this story highlights the danger in taking vows, that vows are inherently dangerous and often lead to sin of one kind or another, either through violation of the vow or through its fulfillment. The גמרא implies that יפתח's mistake was not in the fact that he made a vow but rather in the vague way that he phrased his commitment. By not specifying his vow clearly, he set himself and his family up for a disastrous ending.
Interestingly, there are those who say that יפתח's killing his daughter was not actually a mistake at all. Rabbi Michael Hattin, a teacher of Tanakh at the Pardes Institute in Israel, in his book on ספר שופטים, argues that יפתח knew exactly what would happen when he made that vow. Just listen to the way he phrases the vow:
"whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me on my safe return."
Even thousands of years ago, animals would not have any reason to be inside יפתח's house and they certainly would not come out to greet him.
In fact, Rabbi Hattin suggests that יפתח learned the wrong lesson from the story of עקידת יצחק. Just as אברהם was instructed to offer his only child from his first wife, so too would יפתח. Just as יצחק did not question his father's commitment to bringing him as an עולה, neither did יפתח's daughter. יפתח thought that he was following his ancestor's footsteps in rejecting idolatrous worship and making the ultimate sacrifice to the one true G-d, just as אברהם did so many years ago. What יפתח did not understand was that the whole point of עקידת יצחק was to show that although G-d demands total commitment, He would never want an actual human sacrifice, much less a child sacrifice.
In fact, the מדרש on פרשת בחוקותי makes exactly that point. It concludes that it is יפתח's ignorance of תורה and of the laws of ערכין, donating money in place of human bodies to the Temple that led to him unfortunately and immorally slaughtering his daughter. According Rabbi Hattin, יפתח was both illiterate and also heavily influenced by Canaanite culture, which embraced child sacrifice and the Molekh ritual, and his failure here shows how far the Jewish People have fallen under the influence of the land's inhabitants' ethical codes.
But there is another possibility. Dr. Ziegler points out that the vow that יפתח makes is phrased in terms of his own personal success. יפתח's motivation seems to be more about his ability to succeed and maintain power and prestige than it is about saving the Jewish People. Rav Yigal Ariel, a rabbi in the Golan Heights, argues that יפתח obviously meant to say he would offer the first human being to greet him as a human sacrifice. However, he didn't actually intend to carry it out. He made this vow as a public expression of his intense commitment to G-d but he expected that anyone who heard what he said would be sure to avoid being the subject of his words and stay away from his house or refrain from greeting him.
When his daughter came out to meet him, he had two choices. The first option he had was what he ultimately did – he could follow through with his vow and actually kill his daughter and burn her as a sacrifice. But he also could have sought out expert advice, someone who could free him from this commitment or explain to him why it doesn't apply.
One מדרש criticizes him for not rushing over to פנחס, the כהן גדול, for התרת נדרים, for a release from the vow, since he never meant to have to actually kill someone to fulfill the vow. Or perhaps פנחס could have told him that it would be halachically better for him not to kill his daughter, which is murder, and for him to just accept the consequences of violating a vow, the מצוה of לא יחל דברו.
According to another מדרש, it was יפתח's daughter herself who tried to defend herself, arguing based on פרשת ויקרא that sacrifices can only be animals and then using her two month delay to try to convince סנהדרין to save her. But יפתח himself was not interested in approaching rabbis for any leniency or halachic advice. This could have been due to political pressure and his feeling that the people now expected him to keep to his word and display the piety he publicly professed to have. Or perhaps יפתח was actually a fundamentalist, someone who only knew the bare minimum about the literal laws of vows and was unwilling to trust rabbinic leniencies and loopholes.
In other words, perhaps the mistake that יפתח made was not only in his ignorance of the law and carelessness in making a vow but also in his expression of fundamentalism, whether it was sincere or not. For whichever reason, he would not seek out the involvement of scholarship, of people who would weigh different factors and use creativity to make halacha work in a difficult situation. Instead, he blamed his daughter for the situation and insisted that there was nothing he could do other than end her life.
Just yesterday, those learning Daf Yomi finished מסכת יבמות. Throughout the tractate of גמרא, which deals with levirate marriage and woman who find themselves in situations where they are unsure whether their husbands are dead such that they can remarry, the גמרא repeatedly invokes various reasons to be lenient through creative interpretation of the law.
The מהרש״א, in his commentary, asks why the גמרא is willing to be so lenient with such serious laws with such serious consequences, often against the plain meaning of the text, based on values such as דרכיה דרכי נועם וכל נתיבותיה שלום, that the Torah must be pleasant and peaceful. Says the מהרש״א, when the rabbis use creative interpretation of the Torah to prevent suffering, it is not a violation of the Torah but rather it's fulfillment. Hashem gave us the intellectual and textual tools and the authority to do whatever is possible, while maintaining our integrity and fidelity to the law, to save people from עיגון, from being chained to a dead marriage or condemned to suffering.
That is exactly what יפתח did not understand. הלכה is not something that can only be read one way and that demands human sacrifice at every tragic circumstance. The reason הקב״ה, in His wisdom, gave us the ability to interpret the Torah is precisely to try to find ways to minimize pain, to save lives, to interpret the Torah in a way that creates נועם ושלום, pleasantness and peace.
As the country debates the role of judges and the law in our lives, as methods of interpretation are examined and disputed, perhaps our contribution should be precisely in this way. We are commanded to keep the Torah but we must also uphold דרכיה דרכי נועם וכל נתיבותיה שלום, the idea that the Torah is a source of peace and pleasantness, of making lives better, not worse. May we succeed in advocating that message and preventing further pain to others.
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