Behar-Bechukotai: Valuations
After the list of curses in Bechukotai comes a brief discussion of what the Rabbis will come to term “Arachin:” dedicating the financial value of a person to the sacred — first the Mishkan and then later the Temple. A person can promise a donation to the Temple based on the value of a person, themselves or another, and these values are fixed. The pesukim read as follows:
וַיְדַבֵּר יְהוָה אֶל־מֹשֶׁה לֵּאמֹר׃
The LORD spoke to Moses, saying:
דַּבֵּר אֶל־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וְאָמַרְתָּ אֲלֵהֶם אִישׁ כִּי יַפְלִא נֶדֶר בְּעֶרְכְּךָ נְפָשֹׁת לַיהוָה׃
Speak to the Israelite people and say to them: When anyone explicitly vows to the LORD the equivalent for a human being,
וְהָיָה עֶרְכְּךָ הַזָּכָר מִבֶּן עֶשְׂרִים שָׁנָה וְעַד בֶּן־שִׁשִּׁים שָׁנָה וְהָיָה עֶרְכְּךָ חֲמִשִּׁים שֶׁקֶל כֶּסֶף בְּשֶׁקֶל הַקֹּדֶשׁ׃
the following scale shall apply: If it is a male from twenty to sixty years of age, the equivalent is fifty shekels of silver by the sanctuary weight;
וְאִם־נְקֵבָה הִוא וְהָיָה עֶרְכְּךָ שְׁלֹשִׁים שָׁקֶל׃
if it is a female, the equivalent is thirty shekels.
וְאִם מִבֶּן־חָמֵשׁ שָׁנִים וְעַד בֶּן־עֶשְׂרִים שָׁנָה וְהָיָה עֶרְכְּךָ הַזָּכָר עֶשְׂרִים שְׁקָלִים וְלַנְּקֵבָה עֲשֶׂרֶת שְׁקָלִים׃
If the age is from five years to twenty years, the equivalent is twenty shekels for a male and ten shekels for a female.
וְאִם מִבֶּן־חֹדֶשׁ וְעַד בֶּן־חָמֵשׁ שָׁנִים וְהָיָה עֶרְכְּךָ הַזָּכָר חֲמִשָּׁה שְׁקָלִים כָּסֶף וְלַנְּקֵבָה עֶרְכְּךָ שְׁלֹשֶׁת שְׁקָלִים כָּסֶף׃
If the age is from one month to five years, the equivalent for a male is five shekels of silver, and the equivalent for a female is three shekels of silver.
וְאִם מִבֶּן־שִׁשִּׁים שָׁנָה וָמַעְלָה אִם־זָכָר וְהָיָה עֶרְכְּךָ חֲמִשָּׁה עָשָׂר שָׁקֶל וְלַנְּקֵבָה עֲשָׂרָה שְׁקָלִים׃
If the age is sixty years or over, the equivalent is fifteen shekels in the case of a male and ten shekels for a female.
There are two axes by which the valuations are determined: age and gender. Women are always assigned a lower value than men in their age bracket, and those people between twenty and sixty years old have the highest number assigned to them.
Certainly, this age- and gender-based system of financial assessment can leave a bad taste in the mouth of the feminist reader. It rankles that age can make a person less worthy, and of course gender as well. But beyond those axes, this entire topic can be distressing. The project of assigning financial worth to a human life, even simply to sanctify it in order to give a monetary gift to the Temple, itself belittles the infinite value of each person.
This sentiment is expressed with force in the eighth perek of tractate Bava Kama, which deals with the monetary damages one person gives another for physically injuring them. “Perek HaChovel,” as it is known, begins with a discussion of how we know that the “eye for an eye” restitution commanded by the Bible is in fact about monetary compensation and not the removal of an actual eye. One of the places this command appears in the Torah is at the end of last week’s parsha, Emor, which decrees that “if anyone maims his fellow, as he has done so shall it be done to him: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. The injury he inflicted on another shall be inflicted on him,” (Vayikra 24:19-20).
After a lengthy analysis of proofs that conclude that yes “an eye for an eye” refers to monetary compensation, the sugya nevertheless offers a voice that is uncomfortable with the entire system of financial evaluates necessary to sustain this. Money is preferable to demanding an eye itself, but it can introduce new challenges. On Bava Kama 84a, we meet a character who takes issue with offering his son up to the court to be evaluated for damages:
ההוא חמרא דקטע ידא דינוקא...אמר להו אבוה דינוקא: לא בעינא, דזילא ביה מילתא. אמרו ליה: והא קא מחייבת ליה לינוקא! אמר להו: לכי גדיל מפייסנא ליה מדידי.
There was a certain donkey that severed the hand of a child….The father of the child said to them: I do not want my child to be appraised, because this matter would demean him. They said to the father: But you are acting to the detriment of the child, as he will not receive compensation for his injury. He said to them: When he matures, I will appease him with my own money.
The father here is willing to take on the financial burden of compensating his son for this injury out of his own pocket rather than allow the owner of the donkey who harmed him to pay. The son would need to be financially evaluated by the court to determine things like his future earnings and value as a worker, and the father rejects this as demeaning.
Though almost the entirety of the perek takes for granted that these monetary evaluations are important and necessary (though there is debate over if the one who is evaluated in most cases is the injured party or the injured one), this father’s voice stands out. Perhaps it is just not worth gaining financial compensation through the courts if the cost is reducing a human life to numbers on a page, a dollar amount. But perhaps we can better understand what is so objectionable about this evaluation in the father’s view through exploring Arachin.
The Tosfot, commenting on a slightly later sugya in the chapter (on 85b), draw a connection to Arachin. They note that here, in Bava Kamma, if a person is made Deaf, they are owed the entire value of their livelihood. This is as opposed to in most cases, where the person is owed the difference between what they could have made before their injury and the amount that they could make after it. The background assumption of the sugya is that a Deaf person is not able to work at all.
Tosfot are surprised by this statement of the sugya. They say:
ותימה, דמשמע הכא דחרש לא שוי מידי מדנותן לו דמי כולו, ובפ"ק דערכין (דף ב. ושם) תנן חש"ו נידרין ונערכין
And this is surprising, because it seems from here that a Deaf person[‘s labor] is not worth anything since [the injurer] gives him full compensation, and in the first chapter of Arachin it teaches that a Deaf person, a shoteh, and a minor can swear and be evaluated [to give their value to the Temple]! *
The Tosfot, as is their habit, are pointing out a contradiction. It seems that here, for the purposes of evaluating for payment for damages, if a person loses their hearing, they are owed the full value of their labor in damages, as they no longer have financial worth as a laborer. But in Arachin, when speaking about evaluations for the Temple, a Deaf person has financial worth that is implied to be equivalent to any other person!
Tosfot offer two technical solutions to the question they raise, but neither is deeply satisfying. Instead, I am pushed to ask: what is the difference between cases of nezikin, which deal with financial damages, and cases of arachin, which are about the sacred?
Tamar Kamionkowski, writing in her book Leviticus as part of the Wisdom Commentary series, is critical of the gender and age distinctions our parsha delineates for these body-based dedications to the sacred. This section, she says, “has little to commend it from a feminist perspective, except to affirm that, in the patriarchal environment in which these texts were composed, men were considered to be of greater worth than women,” (289-290).
Kamionkowski continues:
“Many commentaries have been eager to point out that the shekel designations do not measure a human being’s intrinsic worth but rather their monetary value as laborers. I find this distinction unconvincing and meaningless. The value of different kinds of skills and jobs is socially determined just as a human being’s worth is subjective and determined by a host of social, economic, and cultural factors….A female is worth less in this chapter because the society in which this text was produced reflected and further inscribed status to gender,” (290-291).
Kamionkowski is, of course, correct in pointing to the thoroughgoing sexism of this text. However, I see a kernel of hope in her rejection of the argument that the differences in valuations based in age and gender are determined by people’s “monetary value as laborers.”
Perhaps the system of arachin, these valuations, is not at all reliant on an understanding of human value based on labor. When Tosfot ask why, if a Deaf person has no earning power as a laborer, they nevertheless participate in the systems of arachin, they are getting at this. An answer to Tosfot’s question might be that labor value is simply irrelevant to arachin. These financial assessments are made using an entirely different rubric.
Jane Kanarek, writing for TheGemara.com, discusses the related rabbinic practice of “mishkal,” pledging one’s weight in gold to the Temple, which is part of a larger system of arachin-related donation schemas discussed in tractate Arachin. Kanarek analyzes two Rabbinic stories about this practice: one from the Sifra in which a mother would measure her son and give his weight in gold to the Beit Hamikdash each year and was then forced to eat her child during the siege of Jerusalem, and one from Mishnah Arachin in which “the mother of Yarmatyah” donates her daughter’s weight in gold to the Temple. Kanarek suggests that there is a “possibility that these stories preserve a memory of mishkal as a pious practice particularly associated with women, an aspect of a larger culture of female pilgrimage in the ancient Mediterranean.”
Kanarek argues that the two stories she discusses
“reveal mothers and children as a significant subject through which rabbinic literature conceptualized and preserved memories of the Jerusalem Temple. It is possible that the idea of a mother’s dedication to her child could heighten the sense of devotion that rabbinic literature sought to cultivate around the Temple.”
Kanarek’s analysis here might suggest that mishkal — and if you’ll permit me, perhaps we can extend it to the system of arachin writ large that it comes out of — is radically different from the financial assessments of HaChovel. Where the assessments for financial damages we find in Bava Kama center on a person’s productivity as a laborer, Arachin knows nothing of the sort. These values are dollar amounts, yes, but they cut against a framework wherein one’s value lies in their ability to work.
Arachin can teach us that our bodies are valuable to God, can be part of the holy, without needing to achieve anything at all. Even the most think-y of thought work requires a body, to focus and sit (or lie, or stand) and type (or dictate), and sometimes our bodies cannot do those things. Mitzvot, too, require a body; even tefillah in its most minimal forms requires speech and for our bodies to not be in too much pain or too distracting. But arachin, though it is pervaded by sexism, offers us a different model. Our bodies alone can be that which we bring.
The relationship I want to have with my body is one in which God dotes on me like a parent, caring about my wellbeing and my self aside from anything my body accomplishes — or can’t accomplish — in a given day.
I want to imagine God standing up in front of the court refusing to let me be assessed in this way, promising to take care of me Godself instead. And I want to be that person for others in my life.
*Thank you to Avital Morris for pointing me to this Tosfot originally and to David Fried for helping me unearth it again via Ask The Beit Midrash!