A man was starving in Capri;
He moved his eyes and looked at me;
I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,
And knew his hunger as my own.
This parsha/Torah reading deals with appointing judges and magistrates in every Israelite city.
“Justice, justice shall you pursue” (Deut. 16:20), Moses commands the people, irrespective of class or
The most curious aspect of this parsha is the ritual of eglah arufah—the “cow whose neck is
broken” (Deut. 21:1-9). Should an anonymous corpse be discovered in a field between towns, the elders
and law-enforcement officials of both towns are to measure the distance from the crime scene to their
boundaries, in order to decide which municipality is responsible for the death. Then, the officials of that
town are to bring forth a cow, lead it into a ditch flowing with water, and there break its neck. After, they
are to wash their hands over it, to symbolically show that their hands are not guilty of the blood of the
murdered person.
According to the Talmud, this practice was, indeed, carried out until the 1st Century CE, when
political persecutions and internecine rivalries increased assassinations to an unmanageable level, and it
was abandoned, presumably because there were too many homicides and not enough cows to go
around—I am being ironic, here. The ceremony symbolizes that all of the human community is, indeed,
responsible for one another’s maintenance and welfare.
In our Digital Age, the world grows smaller and smaller, yet we fail to acknowledge our
responsibility for one another. Religious fanatics machine-gun civilians in the name of their dark, bloody
god; insane infants reduce to rubble the treasures of History. Desperate refugees take to the seas aboard
leaky vessels, after paying blood-ransom to human wolves.
People die, while we sip coffee, munch croissants, and speed off to work or play.
We are all one human family and should behave as such: in the words of Millay, “No hurt I did
not feel, no death/ That was not mine; mine each last breath/ That, crying, met an answering cry/ From the
compassion that was I.”
Scientists and philosophers call this interdependency the “Butterfly Effect,” after a 1952 science
fiction story of Ray Bradbury’s, “A Sound of Thunder.” In it, safari hunters from the year 2055 journey
back in time for the ultimate big-game experience: that of stalking and killing a Tyrannosaurus Rex, king
of dinosaurs. Eckels, the hapless big-game hunter, loses his nerve as the beast is charging, and fearfully
stumbles off the path; Travis, the experienced guide, kills it in his place. Shortly thereafter, a huge tree
falls on the T-Rex’s body, which was meant to happen: by shooting the animal shortly before the branch
falls, they have not altered the past in any way. Still, what of Eckels’s misstep?
On the way back, the hunters are horrified to discover a tiny butterfly mashed into the mud on
Eckels’s boot. They wonder what effect this will have on civilization, so far into the future. I will not ruin
the story’s conclusion for you—the story is available on the web, if you type in its title—but will say only
that every human action has consequences—“wheels within wheels, and fires within fires!” (Arthur
Miller, The Crucible)—and that we are all truly interdependent.
That is why it was so crucial for the strange, but seminal, ceremony of the eglah arufah to take
place: to show that all life—not just human—on this planet is holy, and that we are all interlinked, in far
more ways than we can ever comprehend. Or, perhaps, no cow is needed: we have human sacrifices
enough. Enough!
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