I counted this week. Seventy-four. That’s how many commandments Jewish tradition counts in Ki Tetze, more than in any other weekly Torah portion, and I would love to tell you I read every one of them slowly and devotionally with a candle lit.
What actually happened is I read about the captive woman, put my coffee down, picked it back up, read about the mother bird, and said out loud to nobody, “How is this even the same chapter?” Then the ox and the donkey. Then the guardrail on your roof. Then the fringes. Then a man who decides he hates his new wife. It reads like somebody emptied a kitchen drawer onto the table and said, here, sort that.
So I went looking for a frame, and I had the book The Mussar Torah Commentary on my bookshelf so I grabbed it, and Rabbi Bonnie Koppell gave me a commentary on this portionthat I just had to use. She says this whole portion is a long argument between two Hebrew words. Tzedek. Rachamim. Justice and mercy. And then she asks the question I didn’t know I needed: when is it one, and when is it the other?¹
I spent most of my life as a believer assuming mercy was the upgrade. Law was the old model. Grace was the new one. Justice was what the Old Testament did before Jesus came and fixed it. I don’t believe that anymore, and I hadn’t gotten three verses into Deuteronomy 21 before the text itself started arguing with me.
Because here is a soldier, and here is a woman he has captured, and the Torah doesn’t say “be kind to her.” It gives her thirty days, and a legal status, and a clause that says you may not sell her. Mercy shows up in this passage.
And Yeshua won’t let us separate the two either. When He goes after the Torah scholars and Pharisees in Matthew 23, the charge isn’t that they cared about Torah too much:
Woe to you, Torah scholars and Pharisees, hypocrites! You tithe mint and dill and cumin, yet you have neglected the weightier matters of Torah—justice and mercy and faithfulness. It is necessary to do these things without neglecting the others. - Matthew 23:23 TLV
Justice and mercy, the weightier matters of Torah. He didn’t import mercy into Moses from somewhere else. He found it there, called it weighty, and expected His disciples to notice. So that’s our frame.
I want to do something a little different this week. Walking through Ki Tetze front to back would take us until Sukkot, so instead I’m going to follow those two words, tzedek and rachamim, all the way through and see where they take us. Then we’ll go to the haftarah, Isaiah 54, where God says He hid His face for a moment and will gather with great compassion. Then John 21. A charcoal fire on a beach. Peter, who deserved one thing but got another, and found out the other one cost more.
Word Study: Tzedek and Rachamim
Two words. Let me take them one at a time, because I think we don’t really do them justice (no pun intended).
Tzedek (צֶדֶק) is the one you’ve met if you were with me in Shoftim last week.
Justice, justice you must pursue, so that you may live and possess the land that Adonai your God is giving you. - Deuteronomy 16:20 TLV
It’s a noun. The same root gives us tzaddik, a righteous person, and tzedakah, which is the word Jewish people use for giving to the poor. That last one should make you pick up your pen and take notes. Giving to the poor gets filed under justice. It’s owed. Tzedek is rightness. Things as they ought to be. The scales level. The judge refusing the bribe. The stone in your bag weighing exactly what it claims to weigh, which, as it happens, is a law in this very portion (Deuteronomy 25:13–16).
Rachamim (רַחֲמִים) is softer on the ear, fun to say, and harder to pin down. English Bibles give you compassion or mercy or tender mercies, and all three are trying to get there…they really are.. It’s plural in form, which Hebrew does with abstractions sometimes, and nearly every Hebrew teacher I’ve ever had (I have had four!) will tell you it shares a root with rechem (רֶחֶם), womb.²
I used to think that was a great sermon illustration. And I still don’t want an etymology to carry the whole weight of a word; a shared root is a family resemblance, not a definition. But Scripture itself uses that image. In Isaiah 49:15 God asks whether a woman can forget her nursing child. I love that! Rachamim is compassion with a body to it. A ruling comes from the bench but this comes from somewhere deep down.
So here is the tension Rabbi Koppell names, and I think she’s right to call it a conflict and not a misunderstanding. I want to be cautious here, because what I’m going to give you is a teaching frame, not a dictionary. I am not that smart!
Tzedek in the Bible is kind of a broad word: righteousness, justice, right order, even vindication. Rachamim is compassion, mercy. But for this study I’m going to let Koppel give us two questions to ask through the portion. Tzedek asks: what does rightness require? Rachamim asks: what does compassion require? Most of the time those two questions get the same answer. But, sometimes they don’t. And the Torah, in Ki Tetze, seems perfectly willing to sit them down at the same table and let them argue.
One more thing before we go in. When God describes Himself to Moses in the cleft of the rock, this is the order He chooses:
Then Adonai passed before him, and proclaimed, “Adonai, Adonai, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, and abundant in lovingkindness and truth, showing mercy to a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means leaving the guilty unpunished, but bringing the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, to the third and fourth generation.” - Exodus 34:6–7 TLV
Among the first attributes He proclaims after the Name is rachum, compassionate. Same root as rachamim. And then, in the very same breath, He says He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished. Both. One sentence. I’ve come to think that it is the whole of Ki Tetze compressed into two verses, and the seventy-four commandments are just God showing His work.
Torah: Deuteronomy 21:10–25:19
The Captive Woman
The portion opens in a place none of us wants to go. A soldier, a war, a woman among the captives. I’m not going to pretend this passage is comfortable, and I’d be suspicious of any teacher who softened it just to make the people in the seats more comfy.
Then you are to bring her into your house, and she must shave her head, trim her nails, and remove her captive’s clothing, then sit in your house and weep for her father and mother a full month. After that, you may go to her and become her husband and she will be your wife. Now if you are not pleased with her, then you may send her off wherever she wishes. But you must certainly not sell her for silver—you may not treat her as merchandise, since you have humiliated her. - Deuteronomy 21:12–14 TLV
Here’s what I think we can say without pretending the passage is kinder than it is. The law puts real restrictions on the Israelite captor. The woman gets a full month to mourn. If he later rejects her, he cannot sell her or treat her as merchandise; he has to let her go.
Those restrictions matter and the text gives its reason clearly: since you have humiliated her. The Torah names what he did to her as humiliation. That’s not nothing. But the text never gives us her voice or records her consent, and that matters too.
Scholars disagree about whether this law is best read as holding back the sexual violence common in ancient warfare, or as writing a coercive form of captive marriage into law, and even the head-shaving gets read very differently, from mourning, to stripping away what made her desirable, to a ritual of entering enslaved status.¹⁵ I don’t want to resolve that tension by just looking through the soldier’s eyes.
Rabbi Koppell reads this as the Torah working the way Mussar (the Jewish discipline of cultivating Godly character…we have it as part of the Chavurah membership) works, gradually, against a yetzer hara (an evil impulse) that a flat out prohibition wouldn’t have touched in that world. Her argument, drawing on Sefer HaChinuch, is that the month is a brake, a space in which the man might be moved toward mercy by watching her grieve.³
I think that reading is pretty persuasive, and I also want to be honest that it’s a reading…a perspective. The text gives us the law. What it doesn’t do is narrate the soldier’s heart. What I can say with confidence is that the legal restrictions here fall overwhelmingly on what the Israelite man may do to her, while the provisions concerning her create time for mourning and prevent him from treating her as disposable property. The law keeps moving in one direction: restricting what the Israelite man can do with the woman in his power.
Justice and mercy both, then, and neither one fully satisfied. A woman is still taken, and the text still doesn’t give us her consent. Yet the law refuses to give the Israelite man unlimited power over what happens next. She’s given time to mourn. She cannot be resold. That is rachamim shoving its way into a situation the surrounding world would have called settled.
The Wife Nobody Loves
The very next case, and this one makes me sad. A man with two wives, one loved and one, the TLV says outright, unloved. The Hebrew word there is even harsher; it’s the word for hated. And the firstborn son belongs to the wife he hates.
Rather, he must acknowledge the firstborn, the son of the hated one, by giving him a double portion of all that he has. For he is the first of his vigor—the right of the firstborn is his.
- Deuteronomy 21:17 TLV
This is tzedek. The right of the firstborn is his. Full stop. A father’s feelings don’t get a vote. But read it again and notice who else is protected. The woman he hates cannot watch her son’s firstborn status get erased because the father’s affection lies elsewhere.
The law doesn’t let a father’s favoritism rewrite inheritance. Rabbi Koppell puts it this way: justice demands the firstborn be treated as the firstborn, and compassion is extended to the less loved wife and her child.⁴ Both at once. If you’re hearing Leah in the background of this law, I am too. Though, once again, that is my interpretation and not the text’s claim.
A Drawer Full of Mercy
Then chapter 22 opens and the whole tone shifts. Your brother’s ox wanders off. You bring it back. His donkey collapses on the road. You help him lift it. You find a bird’s nest:
If there happens to be a bird’s nest in front of you along the road, in any tree or on the ground, with young ones or eggs and the hen sitting on the young or on the eggs, you are not to take the hen with the young. You must certainly let the hen go, but the young you may take for yourself so that it may go well with you and you may prolong your days. - Deuteronomy 22:6–7 TLV
I love that this is in the Bible. I love that the God who parted the sea legislates even what Israel can do when it comes upon a mother bird and her young. Now, I’ll be honest with you… the text doesn’t tell us why. Many readers across the centuries have heard compassion in this command, and I hear it too, but the rabbis themselves were cautious about stating that as the reason.
The Mishnah actually rules against praying “Your mercy extends to a bird’s nest,” precisely because it turns a mitzvah into a claim about God’s motives.¹³ What we CAN say is what the text says, and look at the reward attached: that it may go well with you and you may prolong your days. That’s the same promise attached to honoring your father and mother (compare Deuteronomy 5:16). The Torah is putting the mother bird in serious company.
Then the guardrail. When you build a house, you build a railing on the roof so no one falls (22:8). Then don’t plow an ox and a donkey together (22:10), which some interpreters, Jewish and Gentile both, have read as concern for the unequal burden on the weaker animal. But the text itself doesn’t give a reason. Then we have don’t muzzle the ox while it’s threshing (25:4), a verse Paul picks up twice, in 1 Corinthians 9:9 and 1 Timothy 5:18, and turns toward those who labor in ministry and in the Word. The animal gets to eat while it works. So does the one who feeds the flock.
None of these are about crime. Nobody’s being punished. This is the Torah teaching a people to have a merciful reflex, and doing it through their livestock and their rooflines and their birds’ nests. Rabbi Koppell calls these precepts designed to reinforce our merciful impulse, and I can’t improve on that phrase.⁵
When Compassion Overrules
Now the case that, I think, tips the whole argument.
You are not to hand over to his master a slave who seeks refuge with you from his master. Let him dwell with you in your midst, in the place he chooses within one of your town gates—the one that is good for him. You are not to mistreat him. - Deuteronomy 23:16–17 TLV
Under laws like Hammurabi’s, where a slave counted as property, a runaway had to be returned to his owner, and harboring him could get you killed.¹⁶ Deuteronomy refuses that norm. The fugitive is not handed back. He lives where he chooses. Israel cannot mistreat him.
And I want to be careful how I say the next part, because it matters for this whole study: the Torah defines Israel’s obligation from the ground up, on its own terms, instead of decorating somebody else’s definition of justice with a little compassion. What the surrounding world called the owner’s right, Deuteronomy refuses to recognize as a right at all. You don’t hand him back. He lives where he chooses. You don’t mistreat him.
Rabbi Koppell puts it in her own terms: in this case, compassion overrides justice; justice may be blind, but compassion calls on us to see the other with open hearts.⁶ I’d say it a little differently, as you’ve just heard, but we’re pointing at the same thing.
Now, I know I have said this ad nauseum, but the text doesn’t give a reason for this particular law. But a chapter later, a reason appears for the first time and it won’t be the last. First in 24:18, right after the command not to twist justice for the outsider or orphan or take a widow’s clothing as collateral, and then again here:
You are to remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt. Therefore I am commanding you to do this thing. - Deuteronomy 24:22 TLV
That’s what’s driving the whole back half of the portion. Israel’s compassion is supposed to come from memory. You were the one with no rights. You were the one someone could have sent back. So rachamim for the outsider, for the orphan, for the widow, comes to Israel as a family resemblance, something they carry in them from Egypt, rather than a feeling they have to work up.
The Talmud, in a line Rabbi Koppell sets at the head of her chapter, goes so far as to say that whoever is compassionate to others is surely of the seed of Abraham, and whoever is not, is not.⁷ That is a rabbinic saying, not a verse, so take it as such. But Yeshua says something very close when He tells His disciples to be merciful as their Father is merciful (Luke 6:36).
The Poor Man’s Coat
Chapter 24 is where the portion gets a bit more tender. If you lend to your neighbor, you stand outside and let him bring the pledge to you. You don’t walk into his house and take it. And then:
If he is a poor man, you are not to sleep with his pledge. You must certainly restore the pledge to him when the sun sets, so that he may sleep in his coat and bless you—and it is to be righteousness for you before Adonai your God. - Deuteronomy 24:12–13 TLV
Read that last clause again. The word translated righteousness there is tzedakah. Giving the poor man back his coat so he’s warm at night is called tzedakah. Not kindness. Righteousness. Now, to be exact, the verse uses tzedakah and not rachamim; the connection is mine to point out, not a two-word phrase in the Hebrew. But here a materially compassionate act is explicitly named righteousness. What we would instinctively call mercy is what Torah calls tzedakah. The categories meet in practice.
Then pay the hired man the same day he works, because he’s poor and his heart is set on it (24:15). Don’t take a widow’s clothing as collateral (24:17). Leave the forgotten sheaf, leave what’s left on the olive branches, don’t go back over the vineyard (24:19–21). Ruth 2 gives these gleaning laws a human face, by the way, alongside Leviticus 19:9–10. Boaz is obeying Ki Tetze.
Even the Guilty
I want to show you one more, because I think it surprised me most.
He may strike him 40 times but no more. Otherwise he would beat him with too many a wound beyond these, and your brother would be degraded in your eyes. - Deuteronomy 25:3 TLV
This is a man who has been found guilty. He’s being flogged. And even here there’s a floor. Forty and no more, because past that your brother would be degraded. Your brother. The guilty man is still called your brother! Justice goes all the way to punishment, and mercy goes right there with it and says, this far… and not one stroke further.
The dominant rabbinic practice became thirty-nine, which is the number Paul says he received five times in 2 Corinthians 11:24, though the Mishnah records a dissenting view that held to forty.¹⁷ The reasoning has to do with how the phrase is read but whatever the legal logic, the concern to keep punishment inside the Torah’s boundary is unmistakable. Punishment does not erase his humanity.
What I’m Not Going to Smooth Over
Deuteronomy 22:13–29 is in this portion, and it deals with accusations of infidelity and with rape, and I’m not going to skip it or try to clean it up. Rabbi Koppell, a military chaplain for thirty-eight years, doesn’t either. She says that judging by modern standards of justice and mercy, we may be appalled, and she means it.⁸
Here is what I can say honestly. In the one case where the text is sure the woman was forced, the field, where she cried out and no one could hear, the Torah says this:
But to the young woman you are to do nothing—there is no sin in the young woman deserving of death. For this matter is the same as when a man rises against his neighbor and kills him—for he found her in the field, the engaged woman cried out, and there was no one to save her. - Deuteronomy 22:26–27 TLV
The attack is compared to murder and the woman is innocent. That is tzedek speaking clearly on her behalf, and I don’t want it lost. Then come verses 28 and 29, the notoriously difficult case of an unbetrothed young woman whom a man “grabs” and lies with.
Ok I have to tread lightly here, because the Hebrew doesn’t settle what most English readers assume. The verb in verse 25, the field case, is chazaq, to overpower, and the context is unmistakably force. The verb in verse 28 is taphas, to seize or take hold of, and whether that describes rape, seduction, or some other illicit union is debated among scholars (shocker.. I know) and has been for a long time. The vocabulary contributes to the question; the verb difference by itself doesn’t settle it.
What the law requires is clear enough: the man pays the bride-price, marries her, and permanently loses his right to divorce her. In a world where a woman’s future depended on being able to marry, losing that possibility could leave her without support, and that helps explain why the financial and marital obligations land on the man. It doesn’t give us her voice, and it doesn’t erase the coercive possibilities in the law. Rabbi Koppell names it precisely: considered merciful then, and we cannot help but be appalled now.⁹
The parallel in Exodus 22:16–17 explicitly concerns seduction and gives the father the right to refuse the marriage; some read that alongside Deuteronomy 22, others aren’t sure the two passages are meant to be read together.
I’ll leave that debate where it is. And for anyone reading this who has survived sexual assault, I want to say it plainly: your discomfort here is not weak faith, and Scripture never asks us to make the vulnerable disappear in order to defend Scripture. What I will offer, and I’ll mark it as a theological lens and not something Deuteronomy 22 says about itself, is this. Scripture sometimes regulates realities shaped by human sin and hardness of heart instead of treating every regulation as God’s ideal design.
Yeshua Himself makes that clear when He’s asked about Mosaic divorce law in Matthew 19:8. I find it a faithful way to hold a passage like this without either excusing it or tossing it out. Our discomfort may be the Torah doing its job.
Amalek
The portion ends with a command to remember and a command to blot out.
Remember what Amalek did to you along the way as you came out from Egypt— how he happened upon you along the way and attacked those among you in the rear, all the stragglers behind you, when you were tired and weary—he did not fear God.
- Deuteronomy 25:17–18 TLV
I used to read this as the justice end of the portion, the hard ending. Now I think it’s the same thing from the other side. What was Amalek’s crime? He attacked the stragglers, the tired, the weary, the ones at the back. The very people this entire portion has been teaching Israel to protect. Amalek is what a people looks like with no rachamim at all, and the Torah’s verdict is that such a people does not fear God.
That’s the text. Devotionally, here’s what I hear in it: justice, here, works as compassion’s bodyguard. And one caveat, because this passage has a long and ugly history of misuse: nothing here is permission to label the people we fear or resent “Amalek” and turn Torah into a warrant for hatred. Yeshua tells us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44), and Paul reminds us our struggle is not against flesh and blood (Ephesians 6:12).
Blotting out Amalek is God’s business. Protecting the stragglers is ours.
Haftarah: Isaiah 54:1–10
This is the fifth of the seven haftarot of consolation, the readings that carry us from Tisha B’Av toward Rosh Hashanah. And if you wanted to choose a passage where God Himself shows you the proportion between His justice and His mercy, you couldn’t do much better.
“For a brief moment I deserted you, but I will regather you with great compassion. In a surge of anger I hid My face from you a moment, but with everlasting kindness I will have compassion on you,” says Adonai your Redeemer. - Isaiah 54:7–8 TLV
Look at the nouns. A brief moment. A surge. A moment. That’s the justice side, and God doesn’t deny it; the exile was real, the hidden face was real. But set against it? Great compassion. Everlasting kindness. The Hebrew behind great compassion is rachamim gedolim, our word with an adjective. And in verse 8, with everlasting kindness I will have compassion on you, is chesed olam, covenant love that doesn’t expire, joined to the verb form of rachamim. Then verse 10 closes the section with the phrase one more time:
Though the mountains depart and the hills be shaken, My love will not depart from you, nor will My covenant of peace be shaken, says Adonai who has compassion on you.
-Isaiah 54:10 TLV
Three times across these verses the language of rachamim, the root ר־ח־ם, returns. God is, in effect, quoting Himself. This is Exodus 34:6 again. And look at the proportion: the anger, which is real, is described as a moment; the compassion is wrapped inside everlasting chesed and a covenant of peace that will not be shaken.
One more thing I just can’t stop thinking about. Isaiah 54:6 describes Israel as a wife deserted, the wife of one’s youth that is rejected, and God calls her back. In our Torah portion, Deuteronomy 24:1–4 lays out a specific case: a man divorces his wife, she marries another, that second marriage ends by divorce or death, and the first husband may not take her back.
Jeremiah 3:1 deliberately presses the marriage metaphor against that exact boundary. Israel has gone after many lovers; under the law Jeremiah is pointing back to, the situation looks closed. And God’s word is still, return to Me. I’m connecting the dots to Isaiah myself; the haftarah doesn’t cite Deuteronomy.
But I think the prophets are doing something deliberate: using Torah’s own fence to make covenant mercy feel as astonishing as it actually is. Not God breaking His Torah. God’s faithfulness outrunning what any case law could have prepared us for. Isaiah 54 gives that return its language: the wife of youth called back, and chesed that will not depart.
Besorah: John 21:1–25
Seven disciples in a boat. A long night and empty nets. And then a man on the shore at dawn calling out:
So Yeshua said to them, “Boys, you don’t happen to have any fish, do you?” “No,” they answered Him. - John 21:5 TLV
I’m SO glad the TLV kept “Boys.” There’s affection in it and I low-key love the humanity in it. Then the net, the 153 fish, Peter throwing himself into the water in his clothes, and this:
So when they got out onto the land, they saw a charcoal fire with fish placed on it, and bread.
- John 21:9 TLV
A charcoal fire. The Greek word is anthrakia, and John uses it exactly twice in his Gospel. Here, and in 18:18, where Peter stands warming himself in the high priest’s courtyard and denies Yeshua three times.¹⁰ I’ve said many times that John is not a careless writer, and I’ll own this as my reading of his intent: I think he wants you to smell the same smoke.
So now watch what Yeshua does with Peter, because I think it’s the tzedek and rachamim of Ki Tetze done to one man, by the Messiah, in person. And I want you to know this restoration didn’t start on the beach. Before Peter ever denied Him, at the seder table, Yeshua had already said:
But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith will not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers. - Luke 22:32 TLV
So when we get to John 21, Yeshua already knows how this ends. He brings Peter’s failure into the light and hands the restored disciple exactly the work He’d said would be waiting for him.
When they had finished breakfast, Yeshua said to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love Me more than these?” “Yes, Lord,” he said to Him, “You know that I love you.” He said to him, “Feed My lambs!” He said to him again a second time, “Simon, son of John, do you love Me?” “Yes, Lord,” he said, “You know that I love You.” He said to him, “Take care of My sheep!” He said to him a third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love Me?” Peter was grieved because He said to him for a third time, “Do you love Me?” And he said to Him, “Lord, You know everything! You know that I love You!” Yeshua said to him, “Feed My sheep!” -
John 21:15–17 TLV
He doesn’t wave it off. That’s what I notice. He could have. He’d risen from the dead; He was entitled to skip the awkward part. Instead He walks Peter back through it, three questions for three denials, beside the same kind of fire, and John tells us Peter was grieved. Mercy doesn’t require pretending the denial never happened. Yeshua brings the wound out into the open, and then, inside that honesty, He restores Peter to love and responsibility and costly discipleship. Feed My lambs. Take care of My sheep. Feed My sheep. The restoration comes with a job.
Peter gets restored and recommissioned in the same breath, and nobody sends him home to think about what he did. Yeshua never actually says the word forgiven. Instead, the restoration becomes visible in the commission: Feed My lambs. Take care of My sheep. Feed My sheep. And then, almost immediately, Yeshua tells him how he’s going to die (21:18–19). Restored, commissioned, and warned, all before the fish are cold.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say Peter walks away from that beach having tasted, in one life, the shape Isaiah 54 gives to Israel’s story, and I say shape, not prophecy; Isaiah is speaking to Zion, and she gets to keep her own haftarah. A moment of the hidden face, and then great compassion with a future attached. Peter couldn’t claim that as something he’d earned. He received it as grace, and the grace didn’t leave him unchanged, and it included being told the truth.
Pulling It Together
Ok, this was a long one and here is where I end up.
The Torah legislates mercy inside justice. It doesn’t hold mercy off to the side as the exception. The poor man’s coat is tzedakah. The forty lashes stop because he’s your brother. The runaway slave stays, and the reason given a chapter later for so many of these laws is that you were a slave. The mother bird goes free and the reward is long life. Ki Tetze never asks Israel to choose between the two words. It asks Israel to get good at hearing which one a given moment needs, and it trains that ear on oxen and birds’ nests and sheaves before it ever trusts it with a person.
Isaiah shows us the proportion in God Himself. A moment of anger. Compassion folded into everlasting chesed. Don’t picture a God who is sometimes just and sometimes merciful, as if one attribute clocks out when the other clocks in. Exodus 34 gives us one God who forgives sin and refuses to call evil good. His compassion and His righteousness come from the same holy character, and He put compassion at the front of the sentence.
And John shows us the Messiah doing it to one man on one morning. Not skipping the justice but not stopping at it either.
Rabbi Koppell ends her chapter with a daring line from the Talmud, a rabbinic picture of God Himself praying: may it be My will that My mercy should conquer My anger and prevail over all My other middot.¹¹
That’s rabbinic imagination, not scripture, and not a doctrine about competing parts inside God; I want to be SO clear about that. But I don’t have to turn it into doctrine to hear its challenge. She says it’s a good prayer for us, too, and I find I’ve been praying my own version of it: Lord, by Your Spirit, make me merciful as You are merciful, and don’t let my anger win over truth or love or justice.
My Final Thoughts
I know which one comes more naturally to me. I’ll spare you the details, but if you polled the people who live with me, I’m fairly certain no one would need time to think about their answer.
What Ki Tetze did to me was take away my excuse. I’d always filed justice and mercy as temperaments. Some people are justice people. Some people are mercy people. God made us different, bless us all. And then I read a portion where the same God, in the same chapter, protects the rights of the firstborn and frees a mother bird and puts a ceiling on a flogging and hands a runaway slave his freedom, and I realized the Torah is describing one kind of God and asking His people to grow into both of His hands. The two-kinds-of-people thing was mine.
The Mussar teachers would say this is middot work, character work, and that it’s slow. Character work is always a process. My Mussar students would likely agree. Rabbi Koppell says change must be gradual and the traits must be continually practiced.¹² I’m inclined to believe her, partly because she spent thirty-eight years as a chaplain watching soldiers learn and unlearn the humanity of the people across from them, and partly because I’ve tried the fast version and it doesn’t stick.
So this week I’m not asking myself to become a more merciful person. I’m asking myself, in each actual situation, which question does this moment need? What does rightness require, or what does compassion require? And then I’m trying to answer the one I’d rather skip.
One more thing before we get to the letter. None of us is ancient Israel standing at the Jordan, and I’m not giving you Deuteronomy as a civil code. But believers receive these texts as Scripture, and so we ask what they show us about God’s character, about human dignity, about justice and mercy and a life shaped by Messiah. And Messiah Himself told us justice and mercy are the weightier matters of Torah.
Then He showed Peter what that looks like with skin on. He didn’t pretend the denial never happened. He didn’t make Peter earn his way back either. He told the truth, restored the man, and gave him sheep to feed. So maybe the question I’m carrying out of Ki Tetze is bigger than am I a justice person or a mercy person. Yeshua won’t let me hide inside either label.
The question is whether the God who is righteous and compassionate is forming both in me, and whether I’ll follow Him when He refuses to let me pick the easier half.
Hebrew Letter Lesson: Vav
ו
The Letter. Vav (ו) is the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, with a numerical value of six. It’s one of the simplest letters to draw, a single vertical stroke with a small hook at the top, and its name is the same Hebrew word used for a hook or fastening. In Exodus 26:32 and 27:10, the gold and silver hooks that held up the curtains of the tabernacle are called vavim. The letter shares its name with the thing that fastens.
The Function. Vav is the letter Hebrew most often uses for “and.” It does other grammatical work too, depending on where it sits in a sentence, so I’m not going to tell you it only ever means one thing. But attach it to the front of a word and, most of the time, you’ve joined that word to whatever came before. Open a Hebrew Bible and the page is full of them, verse after verse beginning with vav, and this happened, and this, and this. The whole story is stitched together with hooks.
The Lesson. What follows is a devotional picture, not a grammar lesson, so take it as that. I like thinking of the vav as the little hook that joins what might otherwise stand apart. And Ki Tetze keeps refusing my urge to separate justice from mercy, which makes the vav a fitting little picture for this portion: justice and mercy, held together without pretending they’re the same thing. Seventy-four commandments showing you what the and looks like in a field, a house, a courtroom, a marriage, a battlefield.
A Little Nugget
In the tabernacle, the vavim were the hooks that held the curtains to the pillars. Take the hooks out and the curtains fall; the dwelling place comes apart. I think that’s a fair picture of what happens when a community keeps justice but loses mercy, or keeps mercy but loses justice. The structure doesn’t stand. The vav is small. Nobody looks at a tabernacle and admires the hooks. But it’s the thing in between that lets the pillar and the curtain hold each other up.
Application
Notice this week where you tend to write “or” in your head: justice or mercy, truth or kindness, accountability or grace. Ask what it would look like to write “and” instead, and what it would cost you.
The vav is the letter that connects what came before to what comes next. Think about one relationship where a past wrong is still standing between you and someone else, and ask whether justice and mercy together might build a hook where right now there’s only a gap.
When you read your Bible this week, watch for the word “and” at the start of a verse. Often there’s a vav underneath it, though Hebrew vav does more than one kind of connecting and English doesn’t reproduce every one.
Let the rabbinic image prompt your own prayer: Lord, by Your Spirit, make me merciful as You are merciful. Keep my anger from outrunning truth, love, or justice.
Weekly Practice
This one’s borrowed from the Mussar tradition, and it’s simple on purpose, because Rabbi Koppell is right that the big swings don’t last.
Each day this week, before bed, write down two things in your notebook. One moment when you did what was owed, tzedek. One moment when you did what was needed, rachamim. Just the moment, one line each. No grading yourself.
By the end of the week, look at the two columns. You’ll see a pattern. One column will be longer, or easier to fill, or will have come more naturally. That’s your starting place. Not a verdict on your character. Just the place where the next bit of growth lives. Mussar calls this a cheshbon hanefesh, an accounting of the soul, and the point is never shame. The point is to see clearly enough to take the next small step.
And on Shabbat, rest from the columns. This practice is discernment, not a scorecard for earning God’s favor. He already has compassion on you.
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Bible Study Questions
1. Read Deuteronomy 21:10–14 slowly. List every restriction placed on the soldier. What does each one protect? What does the text say the soldier has done to her in verse 14, and why do you think the Torah names it that way?
2. Compare Deuteronomy 23:16–17 with what you know (or can find) about how other ancient law codes treated runaway slaves. What does it tell you about God that His law goes the other direction? How might the repeated memory in chapter 24, “you were a slave in Egypt,” help us hear this command within the larger moral world of Deuteronomy?
3. Look at Deuteronomy 24:13 and the word “righteousness” (tzedakah). Why do you think the Torah names returning a poor man’s coat as righteousness? What changes if mercy toward the poor is something owed rather than something given?
4. In Isaiah 54:7–10, make two columns: the words describing God’s anger or absence, and the words describing His compassion. What do you notice about this proportion? How does Exodus 34:6–7 help you read this?
5. John 21:9 and John 18:18 are the only two places John mentions a charcoal fire. Read both passages back to back. Why do you think John wants us to connect them? What does Yeshua’s threefold question accomplish that a single “you’re forgiven” would not?
Reflection Questions
6. Rabbi Koppell asks, “When is it justice? When is it compassion?” Think of a situation in your own life right now where you’re not sure which one the moment needs. What would it look like to ask both questions, what is owed and what is needed, before you act?
7. Which of the two words, tzedek or rachamim, comes more naturally to you? Be honest. Who in your life would confirm your answer? What would it cost you to grow in the other one?
8. The Torah trains compassion on birds’ nests and oxen and rooflines before it trusts it with people. Where are the small, low-stakes places in your week where you could practice a merciful reflex?
9. Peter was restored and commissioned in the same conversation, and then warned about his death. Have you ever received mercy that came with a job attached? How was that different from mercy that let you off the hook and nothing more?
A pastoral note before the challenges. Mercy does not require you to stay in danger, hide abuse, decline appropriate legal help, restore trust before it’s safe, or reconcile with someone who keeps harming you. Sometimes justice and mercy together look like telling the truth, setting a boundary, bringing in wise pastoral or professional help, or letting the authorities do the work entrusted to them (Psalm 82:3–4; Matthew 18:15–17; Romans 13:1–4). Forgiveness, reconciliation, restored access, and restored trust are related questions. They’r not the same question. Please read what follows with that in mind.
Action Challenges
10. Do the Weekly Practice. Two lines a night, tzedek and rachamim, in your notebook. At the end of the week, read both columns and tell one trusted person what you noticed.
11. Identify one ordinary debt you are owed, an apology, a repayment, an acknowledgment, and ask God whether this is a moment for tzedek or for rachamim. Then act on the answer, even if it isn’t the one you wanted. (If the situation involves abuse or ongoing harm, see the pastoral note above; that is not what this challenge is about.)
12. Find one concrete way this week to do the Deuteronomy 24 thing: pay someone promptly, return something you’ve been holding, leave something for someone who has less. Don’t announce it. Call it tzedakah, because that’s what it is.
Before You Go
If this study made you look sideways at your own “or” where God has been writing “and,” share it with a friend who’s been carrying a justice-and-mercy tension of their own, the one who can’t decide whether to hold the line or let it go.
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About the Author
Diane Ferreira is a Jewish believer in Yeshua, a published author, speaker, seminary student, wife, and proud mom. She is the founder of She’s So Scripture and She Opens Her Bible. She is the author of several books, including The Proverbs 31-ish Woman, which debuted as Amazon’s #1 New Release in Religious Humor, as well as Holy, Hormonal and Holding On.
She is currently pursuing her graduate degree in Jewish Studies in seminary, with her favorite topics being the early church and Biblical Hebrew. Diane writes and teaches from a unique perspective, bridging her Jewish heritage with vibrant faith in the Messiah to bring clarity, depth, and devotion to everyday believers.
When she’s not writing, studying, or teaching, you’ll find her curled up with a good book, crocheting something cozy, traveling, or playing her favorite video games.
Tree of Life (TLV) – Scripture taken from the Holy Scriptures, Tree of Life Version*. Copyright © 2014,2016 by the Tree of Life Bible Society. Used by permission of the Tree of Life Bible Society.
Notes
1. Rabbi Bonnie Koppell, “Ki Teitzei: Tzedek/Rachamim: A Conflict of Values,” in The Mussar Torah Commentary: A Spiritual Path to Living a Meaningful and Ethical Life, ed. Rabbi Barry H. Block (New York: CCAR Press, 2020), 307–311.
2. For rachamim and rechem sharing the root ר־ח־ם, see the standard lexica (BDB, HALOT) under רחם. Koppell, 311, also notes the womb connection in her study questions.
4. Koppell, 308.|
5. Koppell, 308.
6. Koppell, 307–308.
7. Babylonian Talmud, Beitzah 32b, as quoted in Koppell, 307. Translation hers.
8. Koppell, 309–310.
9. Koppell, 310.
10. Anthrakia (ἀνθρακιά) appears in the New Testament only at John 18:18 and 21:9.
11. Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 7a, as quoted in Koppell, 311.
12. Koppell, 309.
13. Mishnah Berakhot 5:3.
14. Scripture quotations are taken from the Tree of Life Version. Copyright © 2014 by the Messianic Jewish Family Bible Society. Used by permission.
15. For the range of scholarly readings of the captive woman, see Caryn A. Reeder, “Deuteronomy 21.10–14 and/as Wartime Rape,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 41 (2017): 313–336; and Mónica Isabel Rey, “Head Shaving as a Ritual of Enslavement in Deuteronomy 21:10–14,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 93, no. 4 (December 2025): 643–658.
16. Code of Hammurabi §§15–20, on fugitive slaves and the penalty for harboring them.
17. Mishnah Makkot 3:10, where the majority sets the count at thirty-nine and Rabbi Judah holds to forty.