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Thursday

guilt and responsibility

what does a perplexing ritual that happens in the wake of an unsolved murder tell us about leadership, community, and responsibility?

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

• 10 min read
guilt and responsibility
It's the biblical mystery reboot that everybody's been streaming! (Opening image for Murder, she wrote, but it says Murder, she expiated by breaking a heifer's neck at a wadi (like you do). Did you know that this font is called Landsbury, now, in honor of Angela Landsbury? I'm just going to decide that you all get my cultural references and that I'm not hopelessly old ok

This is Life as a Sacred Text šŸŒ±, an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives. Itā€˜s run on a nonprofit, so itā€™s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:

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Today we're going to look at a biblical murder mystery. If you've been working with a hevruta/study partner, this is a good one to read together, as you go.
(If you haven't been, and want one, there will be a chance to re-up very soon!)

Butler Tim Curry asks, "What do you mean, murder?" as the rest of the cast of the movie Clue (six other expensively-dressed white actors) look on.
"If... someone slain is found lying in the open, and the identity of the slayer is not known, your elders and magistrates will go out and measure the distances from the corpse to the nearby towns. The elders of the town nearest to the corpse shall then take a heifer which has never been worked, which has never pulled in a yoke; and the elders of that town shall bring the heifer down to an everflowing wadi [ravine], which is not tilled or sown. There, in the wadi, they shall break the heiferā€™s neck. And they shall make this declaration: 'Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it done... ' Thus you will remove from your midst guilt for the blood of the innocent." (Deuteronomy 21:1-9, abridged)

Dead body, check. No smoking gunā€“ got it. Nearest elders break a heifer's neck and say something about not knowing what happened: OK, then.

Because... this will somehow fix everything? What is this ritualā€“ known as the egla arufa, the heifer whose neck is brokenā€“ really about?