You Cannot Look Away

Thursday morning, the kind of hot where August refuses to become September in Atlanta. Too much humidity. Not enough of whoever is at the control looking at the calendar.

I stopped for coffee at Crema and found a phone on a table outside — blue case, face-down, next to a half-finished iced coffee that wasn't mine. My first instinct, honestly, was to leave it. Someone would come back. Someone always comes back.

I sat down at the table with my coffee and waited. Ten minutes, maybe twelve. A kid came jogging around the corner, patting pockets, scanning the ground with that particular panic. I held it up. He grabbed it, said something between thank you and oh thank God, and took off. The whole thing lasted less than thirty seconds. If that.

It was nothing. A phone on a table. And I almost walked past it.

Parashat Ki Teitzei, the Torah portion for this Shabbat, contains seventy-four of the Torah's 613 commandments — more than any other portion in the entire Five Books.

They come fast: returning lost property, building a railing on your roof, the laws of marriage and divorce, honest weights in the marketplace, how to treat a worker and what you owe a stranger at harvest. The range is enormous. The scale is almost always small.

One of the earliest laws in the parsha is about exactly what happened on that bench:

לֹֽא־תִרְאֶה֩ אֶת־שׁ֨וֹר אָחִ֜יךָ א֤וֹ אֶת־שֵׂיוֹ֙ נִדָּחִ֔ים וְהִתְעַלַּמְתָּ֖ מֵהֶ֑ם הָשֵׁ֥ב תְּשִׁיבֵ֖ם לְאָחִֽיךָ׃

If you see your fellow Israelite’s ox or sheep gone astray, do not ignore it; you must take it back to your peer.

— Devarim 22:1

The commandment expands. If you don't know the owner, bring the animal home. Keep it safe. Wait. And the scope widens — the same rule applies to a donkey, a garment, anything your neighbor loses and you find. The verse that closes this sequence carries more weight than its three Hebrew words suggest: לֹא תוּכַל לְהִתְעַלֵּם — lo tuchal l'hitalem. You must not remain indifferent. Or, more literally: you cannot hide yourself.

You saw it. You can't unsee it. Now do something.

Ki Teitzei — the name means "when you go out" — assumes you will go out. Into the road, into the field, into the market. And when you do, you will encounter other people's losses, other people's needs.

The parsha doesn't wait for you to feel generous or ready. It tells you what to do when you arrive at the moment. I sat at the table for ten minutes because three thousand years ago somebody wrote a rule about an ox — and because it's the right thing to do.

A few verses later comes one of the Torah's most discussed small commandments — shiluach haken, the sending away of the mother bird:

כִּ֣י יִקָּרֵ֣א קַן־צִפּ֣וֹר ׀ לְפָנֶ֡יךָ בַּדֶּ֜רֶךְ בְּכׇל־עֵ֣ץ ׀ א֣וֹ עַל־הָאָ֗רֶץ אֶפְרֹחִים֙ א֣וֹ בֵיצִ֔ים וְהָאֵ֤ם רֹבֶ֙צֶת֙ עַל־הָֽאֶפְרֹחִ֔ים א֖וֹ עַל־הַבֵּיצִ֑ים לֹא־תִקַּ֥ח הָאֵ֖ם עַל־הַבָּנִֽים׃

If, along the road, you chance upon a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs and the mother sitting over the fledglings or on the eggs, do not take the mother together with her young.

שַׁלֵּ֤חַ תְּשַׁלַּח֙ אֶת־הָאֵ֔ם וְאֶת־הַבָּנִ֖ים תִּֽקַּֽח־לָ֑ךְ לְמַ֙עַן֙ יִ֣יטַב לָ֔ךְ וְהַאֲרַכְתָּ֖ יָמִֽים׃ {ס}        

Let the mother go, and take only the young, in order that you may fare well and have a long life.

— Devarim 22:6–7

The reward — "that you may fare well and have a long life" — is the same reward promised for honoring your parents, one of the Ten Commandments.

The rabbis noticed. Pirkei Avot puts it plainly: be as careful with a minor commandment as with a major one, for you do not know the reward for the mitzvot. The small ones and the great ones arrive on the same road.

The Torah doesn't rank them.

And that, I think, is the architecture of this whole parsha. Seventy-four laws. Some govern war and marriage. Some govern a railing on your roof and the honest scale at your market.

Ki Teitzei lines them up one after another and asks you to pay attention to all of it. The ox. The garment. The bird. The measure. Your neighbor's donkey stuck in a ditch. You cannot hide yourself from any of it.

This week, in Katowice, Poland, Israel's national basketball team beat France 82–69 and then Belgium 92–89 to reach the EuroBasket knockout round for the first time in over a decade. Deni Avdija — 24 years old, NBA forward, wearing blue and white in a Polish arena — put up 22 points against Belgium. Israel went out, showed up, and played. In Poland. Under the flag. And the arena had to watch.

Lo tuchal l'hitalem. You cannot look away.

Seventy-four commandments. Most of them fit in a single sentence. All of them assume you left the house this morning. That you will meet someone. That you will see something. And that when you do — when there is a phone left behind, or a bird in a tree, or a team wearing your flag in a country that once tried to erase you — you will not walk past it.

I almost did. The parsha says I can't.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham