Sefer Devarim

Parshat Ki Teitzei:
On Precautions to Preserve Life


Parshat Ki Teitzei, which means “when you go out,” 1 consists entirely of a long list of laws, such as the obligation to return someone’s lost property, the commandment to help a neighbor’s animal up when it falls down, and, peculiarly, a kind of building-safety code.

In Deuteronomy chapter 22, Moshe tells us: 

When you build a new house, you shall make a fence for your roof, so that you do not bring bloodguilt on your house if anyone should fall from it. 2

Rashi comments 3 that perhaps someone trespassing on your roof, for example a burglar, would “deserve” to fall. Nevertheless, Rashi says, “his death should not be occasioned by your agency, for meritorious things are brought about through the agency of good men and bad things only through the agency of evil men.” 4

The point here is that we are obligated to go out of our way to make our homes safe. According to Maimonides, this means we must also build fences around our swimming pools. He writes in his Mishneh Torah: 

There is no difference between a roof or anything else that is dangerous and likely to cause death to a person who might stumble. If, for instance, one has a well or a pit in his courtyard — he must build an enclosing ring ten handbreadths high, or put a cover over it, so that a person should not fall into it and die. So too, any obstruction that is a danger to life must be removed as a matter of positive duty and extremely necessary caution. 5

Fans of the show Curb Your Enthusiasm might recall the most recent season, in which a man burglarizing Larry David’s house falls into Larry’s pool and drowns, and Larry is threatened with legal action because he didn’t have a fence around the pool. Jewish tradition and halachah, here, would have to side against Larry David; as Maimonides says, a pool needs a fence for the preservation of life, and, as Rashi says, it doesn’t matter that the man was there for nefarious reasons. 

So we have this Torah teaching that we must take precautionary steps to preserve life regarding the safety of our property, starting with our roofs and our pools. The Talmud applies this law to owning a “vicious dog” or an “unstable ladder.” 6

The next application, in my opinion, needs to be about gun safety. 

According to the organization Everytown for Gun Safety, from 2015 through 2020, a minimum of 2,070 accidental shootings by children took place in the United States. These caused 1,366 injuries and 765 deaths. 7

The same study found that: 

Seven in ten of the unintentional child shootings occurred in homes, whether in the home of the shooter, the victim, a relative’s house, or another home. Unintentional shootings occurred most frequently when children were likely to be home: over the weekend, in the summer, and during school holidays. 8

Here we see the close relationship between the Torah commandment to keep a safe home and our duty to keep firearms out of the hands of children. 

Of course, the Jewish tradition also provides people with the right to defend themselves. The Book of Exodus teaches:

If a thief is found breaking in during the night and he is beaten by the owner of the house so that he dies, the owner is not subject to the death penalty since he acted in self-defense. 9

Virtually all values, though, live in tension with other rights and responsibilities.

Rabbi Yosef Karo, author of the Shulhan Aruch, writes: 10 

One has a positive duty to remove and guard oneself from any life-threatening obstacle, as it is said “beware and guard your soul.” 11 If one did not remove said obstacles, one has cancelled a positive commandment and transgressed “do not bring bloodguilt.” 12


The main solution proposed by Everytown Gun Safety is secure-storage practices. Just as a roof and a swimming pool need a protective fence, guns need to be stored safely. Secure storage, according to the organization, means guns should be unloaded, locked, and stored in boxes separately from the ammunition. 13


Beyond personal practices, we should be advocating on a political level for safe-storage laws, which are deeply inadequate, especially in my hometown of Arizona. 14 A step further, of course, would be the laws necessary to reduce gun violence overall, such as better background checks and banning assault weapons that can kill large numbers of people at once. 

At minimum, though, this one Torah mitzvah demands that we make our homes secure places for all—and this, Judaism teaches, especially includes taking precautions for risks that might seem remote. 

And, to really embody what this commandment means, each of us should be thinking about “What are ways that I might be indirectly harming others or indirectly putting others at risk?” 

Just as we build guardrails around our roofs, our swimming pools, and even the Torah itself, 15 we must build sturdy fences around the Jewish value of the preservation of life.

Sources

  1.  The parshah opens with the laws of going out to war.
  2.  Deuteronomy 22:8
  3. Rashi on Deuteronomy 22:8:3
  4. Midrash SifrI, Devarim 229:7
  5. Mishneh Torah, Murderer and the Preservation of Life 11:4
  6. Babylonian Talmud, Bava Kamma 15b
  7.  Everytown for Gun Safety: Preventable Tragedies, “Findings from the #NotAnAccident Index” (2021)
  8. ibid.
  9. Exodus 22:1
  10.  Shulhan Aruch, Hoshen Mishpat 427:8
  11. Deuteronomy 4:15
  12. Deuteronomy 22:8
  13. Everytown for Gun Safety: Preventable Tragedies, “Findings from the #NotAnAccident Index” (2021)
  14. Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence: “Safe Storage in Arizona” (2021)
  15.  Pirkei Avot 1:1 Building a fence around the Torah refers to taking extra precaution to ensure against transgressing a negative command.