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From the Rabbi:
Like all the parshiot of Elul, Ki Tetzei is all about Teshuva. It may be jam-packed full of mitzvot, but the underlying theme of all these mitzvot is remaining present to Divine love in particular when it's most difficult. Life is full of difficult moments in which it would be easiest and most convenient to "check out", not feel our feelings and shuck our inner responsibilities so as to pretend everything is ok. But these mitzvot all require of us to hold our seat and deal with cleaning up the mess made when 'the sh!t hits the fan'.
Yet there's another deeper layer of teshuva being described here which goes way beyond cleaning up the mess made by our misdeeds. The Ba'al Shem Tov and the traditions which follow him see this Parsha, and in particular the mitzvah of the 'beautiful war- captive" for which it's named as the very paradigm of Teshuvah from love and the dynamic of "raising the Holy Sparks". While not obvious at first, if you loosen your metaphorical imagination, it's perfectly summarized in the opening lines of the Parsha.
כִּי־תֵצֵא לַמִּלְחָמָה עַל־אֹיְבֶיךָ וּנְתָנוֹ יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּיָדֶךָ וְשָׁבִיתָ שִׁבְיוֹ׃
וְרָאִיתָ בַּשִּׁבְיָה אֵשֶׁת יְפַת־תֹּאַר וְחָשַׁקְתָּ בָהּ וְלָקַחְתָּ לְךָ לְאִשָּׁה׃
When you go out to battle against your enemies
and Hashem your God gives them into your hand, and you take-captive their captives,
and you see among the captives a beautiful woman,
and you desire her,
and would take her for yourself as a wife:
The main linguistic shift that opens this passage to interpretation is understanding that the word used for "taking prisoner" שב also is the root of the word 'Teshuvah'. So if we re-read the passages with that in mind, we end up with something along the lines of "when you go out to war against your enemies and Hashem gives them into your hand... then you do Teshuvah and in doing Teshuvah you realize [your enemy] was actually a beautiful woman... and you fall in love and want to keep her."
What an amazing picture of Teshuvah! You thought it was a war, but it turns out you fell in love. That's really what the deepest Teshuvah is all about, letting go of our inner conflict and re-dis-covering with the love which is lingering inside of us.
The difficulty is often that our innermost love doesn't come out fully aligned with our Godly self. We may come to desire to do things which conflict with our moral and halachic commitments. All too often we then label those desires as "yetzer hara" our 'inclination towards evil' and fight against those urges. We tell ourselves wer have to be good little boys and girls and obey the rules. We can do everything right and 'go out to war against our enemy'. But in this Parsha Hashem is telling us the secret that hidden within our darkest desires there is actually something Godly, because HE is hidden within us.
When our desires are experienced on the "to me" level it feels like something external gripping us. We want to get rid of that feeling, either by fulfilling the desire or banishing it from our consciousness. At the "by me" level it gets really pernicious and we can come to feel ashamed of our desires and think that we are bad for feeling them. On those levels, it can indeed feel like we need to wage a war against our enemy. However, when we can raise our awareness to a "through me" or "as me", the desire itself is coming from God, and if so, feeling that desire (not necessarily acting upon it) becomes a place of meeting with The Divine. That being the case, rather than wanting to rid ourselves of the desire by fulfilling it or purging it, we want to open ourselves to feel it more. To be closer to God by embracing His Desire.
If our desires are from God, why then should they be for something prohibited? The answer is that at the core, the desire isn't really about the object of the desire at all, but rather an invitation to cling to the Source of Desire who has shared the experience of His desire with us. What does God desire? Us! (See Deut. 7:7) When we neglect to lift desire to it's source, that disconnect manifests in the desires being for prohibited actions.
We experience desires as being for something external when we think of God as external. That can lead to desires which aren't aligned with our Divine Soul. But, if we can locate Divine Desire as happening in us, through us and as us our desires aren't really about food, money, sex etc. We are the object of the desire! So instead of fighting the desire we can sublimate it and realize that it was planted in us, that "Hashem has given in into your hand". Then we can 'raise up that spark' to recognize that we ourselves are the object of God's desire. Our soul is the 'beautiful woman' which God wants to bring home. And the various desires we feel are sparks of God's primordial love for us and longing to be close to us.
This path of sublimation of desire and raising desire itself from an externally driven objectification up to an internal yearning for Union with God is the hallmark of Chassidic Spirituality. It is a difficult path to walk because it requires us to open ourselves completely to God's love, but ultimately would you rather be perennially going out to war against our inner enemy or might we feel more whole by lifting our awareness and allowing ourselves be the object of Devine Desire.
Shabbat Shalom,
Reb Shlomo
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