The weekly Torah portion of Ki Teitzei contains an important prohibition: “No Ammonite or Moabite shall enter the congregation of the Almighty. Even their tenth generation shall not enter the congregation of the Almighty, forever.” (Devarim 23:4).
The prohibition applies to male converts from Moab or Ammon and their descendants through the male line. By comparison, regarding the descendants of Egyptians, it says that the third generation of Egyptians who have converted may marry into the “congregation of the Almighty.”
Why is the prohibition concerning Moabites and Ammonites so absolute? The Torah explains this in the next verse: “Because they did not meet you with bread and water on the road when you came out of Egypt.”
Thus, the reason is their ingratitude.
Their ancestor, Lot, owed so much to our forefather, Abraham! They were simply expected to bring bread and water when we were coming from Egypt and needed food and drink.
Yet this undemanding gesture revealed the most unpleasant traits of their national character. The very existence of these nations depended on the fact that many years earlier Abraham had saved Lot from death—and now their descendants were utterly indifferent to the descendants of their rescuer. We see how much importance the Torah attaches to gratitude, hakarat hatov: nations that lack this quality are subject to a far harsher law than those who enslaved our people in Egypt!
The Oral Torah, however, clarifies (Yevamot 69a): this law (the prohibition on marriage) applies only to men (ammoni), not to women (ammonit); to moavi, not to moavit.
Indeed, the “mother of the royal line,” the great-grandmother of the great King David, was Ruth—a Moabite woman who converted.
Why does this law make such an enormous distinction between men and women?
The Talmud (Yevamot 76) draws our attention to the division of social roles. Men generally represent their people, and it was the men who should have come out to the road to greet the Jews with bread and water, while the women remained at home in accordance with the laws of modesty.
The Talmud raises a question: why, then, in keeping with these same laws of modesty, did the Moabite men not greet the Jewish men, and the Moabite women the Jewish women? The Gemara discusses this question in detail and concludes: “kol kevudah bat melech penimah” (Tehillim 45:14, see there)—the true greatness of the “king’s daughter” lies within the home, and it was not fitting for Moabite women to greet others in public—even women.
Shemen HaTov, however, questions whether the standards of modesty for “daughters of the king” apply to Moabite women.
After all, these are the very women of whom the weekly Torah portion of Balak says: “And Israel dwelled in Shittim, and the people began to sin with the daughters of Moab” (Bamidbar 25:1). Nothing in common with the pupils of Sarah Schenirer, founder of the Bais Yaakov school network, in Krakow, Poland! We are talking about women who sold themselves so that the Jewish nation would fall spiritually—and, as a consequence, physically!
How can the principle of kol kevudah bat melech penimah shield such women from the charge of ingratitude?
Shemen HaTov explains that these women went out to seduce Jewish men against their will. They were forced to do so “for their country,” following the advice of the wicked Balaam. They can be compared to the women in “national service” under orders from Japan’s government during World War II, when women were forcibly conscripted into special battalions to “service” soldiers. This was not their personal choice—they did it against their will because “the Motherland ordered it.”
When Balak ordered the Moabite women to undermine the Jewish men’s spirituality, they could not refuse simply because it went against their moral principles.
One could say that every woman’s “spiritual nature” is to be modest.
The Sages say that Eve was created from a concealed part of Adam’s body because this is what a woman was meant to be according to the Divine plan—concealed and modest in her very essence. It is this “built-in” modesty that absolves the Moabite women of the charge of ingratitude for not coming out to greet the Jews with bread and water—even if they were to greet only Jewish women.