When Captivating Women Are Captive In Wartime
There is something quite unique about the beauty of humans, writes the young narrator of Marcel Proust’s “Within a Budding Grove,” as he glimpses a young woman through the window of a fast-moving carriage. This girl’s individuality—indifferent to him, with its own consciousness and free will—is vague, unknown. It evokes in him a sudden wish to become part of her dreams, to take possession of her heart. And it grieves him that he must let the girl pass without forcing her mind to become aware of him. How is it possible for such passion to arise for someone who flashes before his eyes in an instant?
“Love arises from within ourselves as an imaginative act, a creative synthesis that aims to fulfill our deepest longings, our oldest dreams, that allows us both to renew and transform ourselves,” writes psychiatrist Ethel Spector Person. Perhaps, then, the heart we ultimately wish to possess is our own.
These Proustian fantasies seem far removed from the lust coursing through a soldier’s heart, in the heat of battle, when he has gone out to war and captures an enemy woman. The Torah prevents violence committed against women in wartime by setting restrictions on immediate sexual gratification. But if this is only an injunction against physical brutality, why does the Torah [Deut. 21:11]—V’raitha bashiyya eshet yifat to’ar, v’choshakta vo… and (if) you see a woman of beautiful countenance and desire her”—also raise the issues of beauty and desire?
The Talmud [Kedushin 21b] flatly dismisses the idea of beauty, stating that the Torah, in this case, is only providing for human passions by allowing soldiers to bring a captive woman home. It suggests that the enemy woman may not even be beautiful. For Ibn Ezra, v’raitha—“and you see”—is an indication that beauty is only in the eye of the beholder. Can this novelty, glimpsed abroad, stand the test of time?
Proust’s narrator ultimately admits that even if he’d had the chance to speak with the girl, he would have been disillusioned by something as minute as a skin blemish that could not be seen from the carriage. “Beauty,” he writes, “is a sequence of hypotheses which ugliness cuts short when it bars the way that we could already see opening into the unknown.”
Rashi has no doubt that after the month-long waiting period prescribed in the Torah, a man will find the alien woman unattractive. The returned soldier will see her over time, without her once-attractive clothes, as she cries for her parents, with the Sifre describing her like a pumpkin shell. This is when the daughter of Israel, by contrast, will have the opportunity to put on her adornments and rejoice. Perhaps the Sifre is presenting us not with two women, but two alternatives. As the alien becomes more ordinary, the everyday becomes more ravishing. A young man’s bubble of emotion can burst like a blister; a warrior’s burning heart can cool at the sight of “widow’s weeds.”
Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezeritch, sees earthly beauty as an opening to something beyond. Asking how Rachel could hope to attract Jacob with mere physical beauty, he quotes the Midrash, which says that Rachel’s earthly beauty was a projection of something higher. And while Joseph may have been tempted by Potiphar’s wife, what he longed for, in fact, was tiferet, (spiritual) splendor. That Joseph “fled and went outside” suggests he was searching for inspiration beyond this world.
While the Maggid holds that one should not be obsessed with physical beauty, he recommends that if one were to stumble across it, he should use the encounter as a means to the divine.
In “Mating in Captivity,” Esther Perel writes that to “sustain an élan toward the other, there must be a synapse to cross.” The erotic needs the exotic; something new, out of the ordinary—a sense of distance that should enable us to see internal longings in clearer view, and allow them to flourish. The Torah shows sublime understanding for both the subtlety and bluntness in human desire. When we “go out to war,” armed with the means to transcend our lowest urges, we can transform what is inside us to something beautiful.
— David Koral on Ki Teitzei, Deuteronomy (21:10-25:19).The Jewish Week, August 24, 2007