(Delivered August 30, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

This week’s Torah portion, Parshat Shoftim, closes with a bizarre and confusing passage concerning a ritual that came to be known as עֶגְלָה עֲרוּפָה—a broken-necked calf. As I mentioned before, this ritual was prescribed in cases in which there was an unsolved murder out in the open (the assumption being that if the murder was in town it was much less likely to be unsolved). In such a situation, elders and judges from the area would painstakingly measure the distance from the corpse to each of the nearby towns. Whichever town was closest would then take on the responsibility of attending to the ritual, in which a young calf that had never been worked would be taken to a flooded ravine that had never been plowed. Once there, the elders would break the calf’s neck and, as they washed their hands in the flowing waters, they would recite the formula:

יָדֵינוּ לֹא שָׁפְכוּ אֶת־הַדָּם הַזֶּה וְעֵינֵינוּ לֹא רָאוּ׃
Our hands did not shed this blood, and our eyes didn’t see.

They would go on to say: Adonai, absolve Your people Israel, whom You redeemed, and do not permit innocent blood among Your people Israel. (Deut. 21:7-8)

To me, this ritual feels barbaric, in the way that it answers senseless violence with more senseless violence, all wrapped up in a veneer of religious practice. My dismay is compounded all the more so when I look at how the Rabbis of the Talmud treat it. Perhaps it’s just the Sages doing what Sages do, but it’s hard to stomach their exacting discussion of various aspects of the case: If the person was decapitated did the head roll away from the body, and if so, is the distance measured from the head or from the body? Supposing the body is still twitching? If the corpse was found hanging from a tree—in other words, not lying in the field as specified in the original verse—does the practice apply? The Talmudic approach to the ritual is grisly but precise, sparing no effort in the pursuit of certainty. 

The possibilities are endless…and gruesome. It’s all too easy to imagine the Rabbis investing in the minutiae with cold hearts, having somehow left behind the reality of a person who went missing and was found dead, a person who at one time meant the world to someone.

And yet, our ancestors lived in a time of intense uncertainty. They didn’t have rapid communication systems or forensic investigators, much less DNA testing. When a dead body was discovered, it was cause for even more anxiety. An unwitnessed, unmourned murder represented a threat; a killer was out there. Performing עֶגְלָה עֲרוּפָה assigns responsibility where none can actually be ascertained, and in doing so protects a semblance of social order. Communal atonement and protection seem possible, even as the killer does remain out there.

All these centuries later, the attempted creation of black and white where only grey exists reads to me like a container for doubt, a strategy for managing the sense of danger and anxiety that bubbles to the surface with an unsolved crime. The era of Rabbinic Judaism was barely more than a century after the destruction of the Second Temple, and it seems to me that the exactitude the Rabbis brought to the matter served a psychological purpose. For a people who had lost everything—twice—the need to manage uncertainty must have been profound. Their precision was the best tool they had for facing the existential dread that accompanied them day by day. I imagine them telling themselves, “If we know what to do, we can hold on.” Ritual filled the void when uncertainty grew unbearable. The Sages of the Talmud reached into every corner where a question might lurk, no matter how revolting or far-fetched.

Yet questions and doubts, innocent blood and senseless violence, and devastating questions of social order are again the topic of the day, and whether or not a killer’s identity is known, the very act of murder remains a mystery in and of itself. This week, a twenty-three-year-old opened fire on Annunciation Catholic school, killing two children as they prayed at Mass, and injuring at least 18 others. This horrific burst of violence—one in a too-long stream of similar events—forces us yet again to confront the darkness that persists in human nature, millennia after the Torah tried to locate an answer where none could exist.

And yet … about some things there is no doubt, no mystery. There is no doubt that we live in a society where weapons of war are available to private consumers; where red flags such as hateful social media posts are ignored or explained away; where cruelty has become part of the currency for much communication, particularly online; and where mass shooting after mass shooting after mass shooting gets met with hand-wringing and “thoughts and prayers” and an attitude of voluntary inevitability. There is no mystery, other than how and why inertia feeds on itself as more and more innocent people are murdered simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Ironically, Parshat Shoftim also contains the famous phrase

צֶדֶק צֶדֶק תִּרְדֹּף
Justice, justice shall you pursue

We are tragically far from that ideal; day by day, the pursuit of justice is entangled in the snares of polarization, a warped definition of liberty, a dogged commitment to the wrong rights, and sheer exhaustion on the part of those of us who might make a change. Fletcher Merkel and Harper Moyski, the two children who were murdered this week, are just the most recent casualties of this uniquely American repetition compulsion. While we all go through the well-practiced motions of outrage and defensiveness and red herrings and legislative entropy, more and more will die.

This is not a dvar Torah with an easy answer. As obvious as the circumstances are, there seems to be no solution to this modern-day plague that pokes with too much regularity at the holes in our society. As we agonize and wait and advocate for change, let us learn from our ancestors about managing unbearable confusion and pain. Let us invest in ritual and the divine comfort we heard in today’s haftarah and in the blessing of community. And may we never know such sorrow again.