The Banality of Good -- Parashat Ki Teitzei 5786

I’ve been thinking lately about Spider-Man. Apparently, given that Spider-Man: Brand New Day has made approximately a bajillion dollars at the box office, I’m not alone.

And if you haven’t seen the new movie yet, don’t worry -- no spoilers. Everything I am about to say comes from its basic premise and the earlier films.

Like so many Spider-Man stories before it, the new movie asks what responsibility comes with power. It is a question Tom Holland’s Peter Parker has been wrestling with from his very first appearance in the MCU.

In Captain America: Civil War, Tony Stark asks fifteen-year-old Peter why he does what he does. Peter never uses the familiar words “With great power comes great responsibility,” but he expresses their logic in his own way: “When you can do the things that I can, but you don’t, and then the bad things happen? They happen because of you.”

It is a memorable -- and demanding -- idea. Peter’s point is that possessing the power to prevent harm makes him responsible for what he does with that power.

But Peter Parker can stop a bus with his bare hands. Most of us, I assume, cannot. And so, even as we affirm that great power carries great responsibility, we may quietly conclude that ordinary power creates no responsibility at all.

We tend to imagine moral life in superhero terms: evil as the work of monsters, goodness as the work of heroes, and the rest of us merely bystanders. It is a comforting story, in its way. If evil is the exclusive province of people fundamentally different from you and me -- people uniquely cruel, uniquely hateful, uniquely depraved -- then we can reassure ourselves that we are nowhere near becoming evil or contributing to it. And if goodness requires heroic courage or superhuman power, then we can admire superheros without asking what our own, more ordinary power, requires of us.

The twentieth-century German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt challenged the first half of that story in her reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who helped organize the deportation of millions of Jews to ghettos and death camps. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt observed that Eichmann did not present himself as a fanatical monster. He appeared to be an alarmingly ordinary functionary, more concerned with career advancement and procedural correctness than with the moral meaning of his actions.

From this observation, Arendt coined the controversial phrase “the banality of evil.” By "banality of evil," Arendt did not mean that evil is banal, or trivial. Rather, she meant that extraordinary evil is often carried out by terribly ordinary people: people who do the job in front of them, follow the accepted procedures, repeat the approved language, protect their own interests, and decline to confront what their actions make possible.

Tyrants may design systems of oppression, but they cannot build or maintain those systems by themselves. Ordinary people become the infrastructure upon which evil is built, the scaffolding that supports its weight.

But if Arendt taught us that evil does not require monsters, Spider-Man leaves us with a question about goodness: If great power carries great responsibility, what responsibility comes with ordinary power? In other words, if evil can be banal – perpetrated by ordinary people, rather than monsters, for commonplace reasons, rather than nefarious designs – perhaps goodness can be banal as well -- enacted by regular people who refuse to surrender whatever moral agency remains in their hands.

That, I believe, is the question at the heart of Parashat Ki Teitzei.

The portion begins, Ki teitzei la-milhamah al oyvekha — “When you go out to war against your enemies.” Notice the Torah’s perspective. It does not begin with the king who declares the war or the general who determines its strategy. It addresses the ordinary person caught up in it.

And the first moral problem the Torah raises is not how to win the battle. It is what this person will do with the power war has placed in his hands. He sees among the captives a woman he desires and wants to take her as his wife. War has stripped her of her freedom, torn her from her family and home, and placed her entirely at his mercy.

The Torah imposes restraints: He may not simply treat her as plunder. He must bring her into his home and permit her a month to mourn her parents. If he ultimately rejects her, he may not sell or enslave her. The rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud acknowledge that this law is no moral ideal. The Torah, they say, is speaking only k’neged yetzer hara — in response to the evil impulse. It recognizes what war can unleash in a person and attempts to contain it. 

Of course, while the law may have placed limits on conduct that was commonplace in the ancient world, many of the text’s troubling features still survive that interpretation. For starters, the captive woman is unable to consent, either to her captivity or to potentially marrying her captor. Whatever protections this law may have offered relative to its surrounding culture, it still permits a powerful man to take possession of an exceedingly vulnerable woman.

Is limited goodness in the midst of systemic evil merely a way for us to feel decent while remaining part of something fundamentally indecent? “The banality of evil” is about ordinary people performing ordinary tasks without confronting the evil those tasks sustain. But is it any better to perform small acts of decency without confronting the evils that enable and sustain those acts? Indeed, don’t those small acts simply become an alibi? We can treat one person kindly while refusing to confront the system that keeps hurting people. We perform the good that is easy and visible while hiding from the good that would actually cost us something. We return one lost garment, raise one fallen animal, place one restraint upon cruelty — and then point to those decent acts as proof that we have done enough.

Ki Teitzei itself seems to sharpen this problem. This is a parashah filled with violent, dangerous, and morally compromised realities, and the Torah repeatedly responds with particular interventions. It does not abolish war; it restricts what may be done to a captive. It does not abolish capital punishment; it insists that even the body of the condemned may not be left hanging overnight. It does not promise that no one will ever fall; it commands us to build a parapet around our roofs so that preventable bloodshed does not take place in our homes. It tells us to return what has been lost and to help raise an animal that has collapsed beneath its burden.

Again and again, the Torah seems to say: You may not be able to make the whole situation right. But you must do the particular right that has become yours to do.

The most precise expression of this idea appears in the mitzvah of returning lost property:

"V’khen ta’aseh l’khol aveidat ahikha asher tovad mimenu u-m’tzatah; lo tukhal l’hit’alem. / And so shall you do with anything your fellow loses, which is lost from him and found by you: you may not hide yourself.”

The phrase asher tovad mimenu — “which is lost from him” — seems unnecessary. If I find my neighbor’s lost property, then obviously it has been lost from him. Why does the Torah need to say so?

Rabbi Levi ben Gershon — the fourteenth-century Provençal philosopher and biblical commentator better known by the acronym Ralbag or Gersonides — explains that these words establish boundaries around the mitzvah. The object must actually be lost, not deliberately discarded. And it must not be irretrievably lost to everyone, like something swept away by the sea or carried off by a raging river. In such a case, it is not merely “lost from him.” It is lost from everyone.

At first, this interpretation can sound like an escape clause. The Torah commands us to act when a problem is manageable but releases us precisely when the loss is most desperate. Surely what is most terribly lost should summon our greatest concern.

Ralbag’s own concern is narrower: he is defining the legal boundaries of the mitzvah. But his interpretation draws our attention to a larger moral insight about the relationship between responsibility and agency.

Listen again to the Torah’s words: asher tovad mimenu u-m’tzatah — it is lost from him, but found by you. For its owner, the object is out of reach. For you, it is right there. You did not make the animal wander away. You did not cause the garment to fall. You may not even know the person who lost it. But what is beyond his reach has entered yours. And that fact creates an obligation. The Torah does not ask only, “Who caused this loss?” It also asks, “Into whose hands has the possibility of repair now fallen?”

Those questions may have different answers. Guilt follows causation and culpability. And similarly, power – not just “great” power, but any and all power – carries responsibility. 

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the twentieth-century Polish-born American Jewish theologian and civil-rights activist, famously taught, “In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.” That line can be unsettling. “All are responsible” may sound as though Heschel is assigning the same burden to the powerful and the powerless, to the person who gives an order and the person who can barely influence what happens next.

But Heschel doesn’t say all are guilty. He affirms that some are indeed guilty. But one person’s guilt does not absolve the rest of us. Each and every one of us plays a role in enabling and sustaining the broken systems that lead to harm; each and every one of us has power, however limited, to mitigate the harms others experience, to provide some measure of relief when harm occurs, to repair what is broken systemically. The more influence we possess, the greater our obligation. The question therefore is not, “Am I equally to blame?” The question is, “What portion of this loss has come within my reach?”

That is why the verse concludes, lo tukhal l’hit’alem. It is usually translated, “You may not ignore it.” But the Hebrew is more evocative: You may not hide yourself. Rashi — Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, the great eleventh-century biblical and Talmudic commentator from northern France — reads the phrase plainly: once you have seen what has been lost, you may not make yourself as though you had not seen it.

The passerby has already seen the lost object. Ignoring it therefore requires a second act: suppressing what one knows, making oneself absent from the scene, persuading oneself that this is somebody else’s problem.

Most of us do not actively choose cruelty. More often, we hide ourselves from what we have seen. We normalize it. We rationalize it. We tell ourselves that everyone participates, that nothing we do will matter, that the people being harmed are not our concern. We assign the whole problem to the people we blame, declare ourselves powerless, and keep walking.

The Torah protects us from two opposite moral errors. The first says: I did not cause this, so it is not my responsibility. The second says: Unless I can solve the whole thing, nothing I do matters. The first produces indifference. The second produces despair. Both end in the same place: inaction.

The Torah rejects both postures. We are not commanded to retrieve what has been swept beyond everyone’s reach. We are not personally responsible for every dimension of every catastrophe. Humility requires us to recognize the limits of our power. But helplessness can masquerade as humility. The fact that I cannot do everything does not mean that nothing has come into my hands. 

That brings us back to the captive woman from the beginning of the parashah. The Torah’s restrictions do not make the war righteous. They do not restore what has been taken from her. Nor should we pretend that the law is morally adequate. It is not.

But its inadequacy does not make restraint meaningless. It means restraint cannot be the end of our responsibility. The Torah tells the person inside a compromised reality: You may not use the enormity of the evil as permission to commit the particular evil that lies within your power to prevent. And then you must keep asking what more has come within your power to protect, to restore, and to change.

Call this “the banality of good.” The banality of good can be structural: For instance, building a parapet around one’s roof changes the conditions so that the next person does not fall. It places a barrier between danger and the vulnerable before anyone gets hurt. Often, the banality of good is smaller and more intimate: returning a lost object, even if we restore all lost objects or can’t prevent all loss in the first place; helping to raise an animal that has fallen beneath a burden, even if we can’t help all animals in pain or eradicate the suffering of all creatures. None of this is particularly cinematic. That may be the point.

Hashev t’shivem — return, you shall return. Hakem takim imo — raise, you shall raise with him. The Talmud understands these doubled verbs to mean: again and again, even one hundred times. Goodness is not usually one grand heroic gesture. It is the unglamorous decision to return again, to raise again, to build another restraint, to ask another question, to refuse again to make ourselves unseen.

The banality of evil begins when ordinary people say: I am only one person. I did not create this. I am simply doing what everyone else does. On the other hand, the banality of good begins when ordinary people say: I am only one person. I did not create this. I cannot repair it all. But this has come into my hands.

Systems of cruelty depend upon ordinary people repeatedly surrendering their moral agency. A more humane world is built when ordinary people repeatedly reclaim it.

May we become the ordinary infrastructure of mercy, the scaffolding upon which a more just and compassionate world can rise.

May we resist the temptation to hide – restoring what has been lost, raising what has fallen, and repairing what is broken. 

May we maintain our commitment to protecting all who are vulnerable, refusing to regard any person as beyond our concern, and doing all we can, whenever we can, wherever we can to make of this world a sanctuary of peace for all creation.

So may it be God’s will. Amen.