The Patient Who Cannot Be Discharged
Clinical medicine licenses access to the body and the interior life that would be intolerable in any other setting. It has developed elaborate procedural safeguards around that licence, and almost no vocabulary for what the licence does to the person who holds it or for what is owed afterward. This paper reads that problem through a paradox in Deuteronomic law. Two coerced women appear in consecutive chapters with inverted dispositions: the captive of war must be released — ve-shillaḥtah le-nafshah,"you shall send her away to her own soul" (Deut 21:14) — while the violated na'arah may never be released — lo yukhal shallḥah kol yamav (Deut 22:29). Both verses are marked by the same term for the harm done. I trace how the exegetical tradition handles this asymmetry: the Ramban indexing permission to the pathology it concedes; the Netziv (R. Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, 1816–1893) developing an account of the temporal asymmetry of coercion and a categorical refusal of victim-blaming; and the Ra'aya Meheimna at Zohar III 277a–b converting the irrevocable bond into a theology of divine nonabandonment by means of the mashal, which it names as its own method.