A Thought on Parshas Ki Taetzae

"...lo yavo Amoni u'Moavi...lo kidmu eschem...sachar alecha Bilaam..." "...an Amonite and a Moabite may not enter the nation... they did not greet you... they hired Bilaam to curse you..." (23:4-5) Among the restrictions involving marriage are the bans on marrying those who convert to Judaism from the nations of Amon and Moab. The Torah gives here some "rationale" for not integrating those who come to Judaism from these two peoples. The Torah writes that on our exodus from Egypt, they were inhospitable, refusing to greet our ragtag group of former slaves with bread and water. Moreover, they sought to destroy us, hiring Bilaam in the hope that he would succeed at cursing us and arousing Divine wrath against us. Now, we know from later history that a descendant of Moab was in fact welcomed into our nation. Ruth the Moabite woman became the progenitor of King David himself, and this spawned the Davidic dynasty which produced our kings and will lead us to the Moshiach ben David! The dispensation for this comes from the fact that the "rationale" for excluding the Moabites is "they did not greet us with bread and water". Our sages observe that it is not seemly for women to go out to the border and offer food to travelers; it was the type of gesture that men would do, alert to the possibility of attack by the wayfarers. Therefore, since a woman could not be expected to serve traveling strangers in that way, there would be no ban on accepting female Moabite converts into the fold. However, our sages add that this nuance was a source of dispute for centuries. Although the inference as to its veracity can be read into the verse, as I explained above, there were those who contested that inference, even questioning whether Kind David himself was entitled to be included in the fold, in that he came from a female Moabite ancestor. I have often tried to make sense of that halachic dispute. When we make a drasha (Moavi no; Moavit yes) - when the Torah offers us such a derivation - we seldom find debate as to its validity. How is it that great learned scholars contested the derived halacha for ages? The Gan introduces a thought this week which has helped me shed light on the matter. Notice how the verse above seems to indict the Amonites and the Moabites on two counts - failing to greet us, and hiring an adversary against us? Now - the Gan writes that there seems to be a problem from the Torah itself here. Earlier in Devarim (2:29), the Torah relates that when we sought passage through the Wilderness of Kedaimos en route to Israel, we petitioned the locals to sell us food "as the Moabites did for us." Now, unless we find some way to take that phrase out of context, it says clearly that the Moabites did greet us with food and water. How could our own verse indict the Moabites for not greeting us, when that earlier verse asserts that they did in fact take care of our needs in the desert?