LEV247 The duty to ransom Jewish captives is perhaps the most graphic illustration of this thick sense of community. It is as if the body has been dismembered, and it cannot rest until the last member has been reattached. Jewish law gives priority to the legal requirement to ransom captives over everything else, a vivid illustration and a direct implication of Judaism’s extensive community. “Redeeming captives takes precedence over sustaining the poor and clothing them, and there is no commandment more important than redeeming captives. Therefore, for everything commanded for which the community collected money they may change its usage for the sake of redeeming captives. Even if they collected it for the sake of building a synagogue, and even if they bought the wood and stones and designated them for building the synagogue, such that it is forbidden to sell them for another commanded purpose, it is nevertheless permitted to sell them for the sake of redeeming captives. But if they built it already, they should not sell it... Every moment that one delays redeeming captives where it is possible to do so quickly, one is like a person who sheds blood (Shulchan Arukh, Yoreh De’ah 252:1, 3).” Following mishnaic and talmudic sources, the Shulchan Arukh (Yoreh De’ah 252:8) maintains that the community should redeem a woman before a man because even though both are in danger of torture or even death, the woman is also at risk for being raped by her male captors. On the other hand, if the captors are known to rape men as well, we must redeem men first because the Rabbis, who were all men, thought that as bad as rape of a woman is, rape of a man through forced anal sexual penetration was worse because it did not even follow the form of what in other circumstances is loving, consensual sex. (The Rabbis and--at least until recently--the rest of the Jewish tradition condemned anal penetration of one male by another as an “abomination,” following Leviticus 18:22.) This rule, with this exception, indicates that the one who is at greatest risk, and who therefore needs our help most, gets it. (Continued at [[LEV1070]] Leviticus 25:36 you DORFFWITO 135).