by Rabbi Seth Grauer
One of the more difficult passages to understand in the entire Torah is that of the Ben Sorer Umoreh – the wayward and rebellious son. The Torah instructs parents that if they have a son who at an early age exhibits certain very specific character traits and tendencies, the parents have the obligation to bring him to the gates of the city and declare that their son a wayward child and ultimately the child is stoned.
The Gemara asks: is it fair to kill this child at such a young age just because he has done certain acts which in and of themselves are not even necessarily so horrible? The Gemara tells us – ימות זכאי ואל ימות חייב – he should die innocent and not die guilty. Meaning we stone him while he is still young and innocent, before he has a chance to commit even worse sins and be liable to death based on those sins.
The Gemara tells us: הגיע תורה לסוף דעתו של בן סורר ומורה – the Torah tells us exactly what will happen to this child – so we should take heed and follow the instructions of the Torah before it is too late and the child has caused much greater problems.
This is very difficult to understand and accept. Don’t we believe that we can always turn around and our future is never set in stone? Doesn’t every individual have free will and we can always change our ways? We are in Elul and getting very close to Rosh Hashana – what about teshuva?
This year in our Gemara shiurim at Or Chaim we will be learning Mesechet Sanhedrin. Right after the topic of Ben Soreh Umoreh is discussed, the sugya of Ba Bemachteret is found. A Ba Bemachteret is an individual who is tunneling into a home to rob the people in the house. The Gemara tells us that it is permissible to kill that burglar because he is נידון על שם סופו – he is judged based on what will eventually happen. The Talmud tells us that in order to complete his burglary he may have to kill the members of the family who will undoubtedly try to protect their possessions. We therefore treat this thief as a murderer and one is allowed to kill him to stop him from committing this crime. Again, we see that we are judging this individual based on what he might eventually do.
A number of years ago Steven Spielberg directed a film starring Tom Cruise called Minority Report. The movie was staged in 2054 in Washington D.C. in which the United States Justice Department had created a full proof system to eliminate all murders from ever happening. The Justice Department had found a way to use three genetically altered humans with special powers to see into the future and predict crimes before they actually happened. The police were able to then arrest people based on the crimes they were about to commit and send them to jail for a crime they did not actually commit, but that they were only moments away from committing. This was all based on the presumption that these genetically altered humans were never wrong. In the movie, Tom Cruise is accused of a murder he is supposedly about to commit and he needs to go out and prove his innocence and thereby prove that these genetically altered humans could be wrong and the whole project needed to be scrapped.
I don’t know but I wonder if Steven Spielberg knew that the Gemara discussed the exact same issue in the sugya of Ben Sorer Umoreh – can we kill someone based on the sins that one day he will commit?
This question and issue is really dealt with in other areas of the Torah. The Midrash tells us that after Yishmael was kicked out of the house by Sarah, the Torah tells us that Hashem heard the voice of Yishmael crying and Hashem decided to save Yishmael by creating a well for him to drink from. The Midrash tells us that the angels came to H”KBH and said “Hashem- what are you doing: are you going to bring a well for an individual who will one day kill your children?” Hashem responds to the angels: איני דן את האדם אלא בשעתו – I only judge people at the moment they are in and at this moment he is still righteous.
There are many answers and suggestions that have been offered for this difficulty with Ben Sorer Umoreh in the Torah, but I would like to suggest a unique thought that is perhaps less an answer and more a lesson and take-home message that I believe is vital for our children to think about and hear.
We have all likely experienced situations in life in which people made assumptions about our intentions based on circumstantial evidence, societal norms and social environments that we likely felt were unfair and completely mistaken. To put it simply, my mother always used to tell me that “life isn’t fair.”
Part of life is experiencing injustice and recognizing that injustice happens. Martin Luther King Jr. once famously said that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”, but the reality of life is that injustice does exist and we could either allow that fact to depress us and create paralysis in our actions or we could work hard to minimize the injustice and lesson its impact.
To see injustice in this world one need look no further than antisemitism in the world. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once said that:
Antisemitism is best understood as a virus. It has no logic. Jews were hated because they were rich and because they were poor; because they were capitalists and because they were communists; because they held tenaciously to an ancient faith and because they were rootless cosmopolitans, believing nothing. Hate needs no logic. It is a sickness of the soul.
The hate that Rabbi Sacks is discussing is not just a sickness of the soul, but an injustice that has existed for the history of the world. But one does not need to think so globally and grandiose to see injustice. Injustice and what we call unfairness exists every day in our lives in small ways and big ways and there is often nothing we can do about it.
In our gradewide opening orientations, I shared with many of our students that we need to be so careful to avoid placing ourselves in situations, environments and opportunities where our actions can be misinterpreted or misunderstood, where we can find ourselves being judged and ultimately in trouble even if our intentions were good. I explained that we live in a world in which people make assumptions and judge us all the time and instead of fighting that, we need to embrace that and figure out how to succeed and rise above that.
Perhaps an important message (even if the message is a bit depressing) of the Ben Sorer Umoreh is that life isn’t fair and people don’t always get a second chance. Hashem may be able to teach us to judge our Ben Sorer Umoreh based on a guarantee of what He knows is to come for this young child and perhaps in this case Teshuva simply isn’t possible, but maybe we can all also learn a lesson that ‘life isn’t always fair’ and the more we are able to rise above this reality, persevere and demonstrate resiliency in the face of that unfortunate reality, the more successful we will ultimately be in life.
Let me close with one last thought to think about. Last week we all started saying Tehhilim Chapter 27. In it we say:כִּי-אָבִי וְאִמִּי עֲזָבוּנִי- וַק’ יַאַסְפֵנִי – David Hamelech tells us that it is theoretically possible, however unlikely, for one’s parents to reject them as children, however, Hashem will gather them in. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once wrote that while it is true that there is no specific reference or parallel drawn between this verse in Tehilim and the case of Ben Sorer Umoreh, one cannot help but think about the message behind it. Parents may in a very rare case, one that hopefully we will never witness, reject a child, but our ultimate Father in heaven will never rejects us. We can always turn back towards H”KBH.
May we use these weeks to prepare for Rosh Hashana and do our best to do teshuva, because it is never too late for us to turn around – וַק’ יַאַסְפֵנִי – Hashem will always gather us in.
Seth N. Grauer is the Rosh Yeshiva / Head of School at Bnei Akiva Schools of Toronto.
