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Does the Torah only refer to the religious aspect?

שו”תCategory: Meta HalachaDoes the Torah only refer to the religious aspect?
asked 5 years ago

Good week,
I am now reading your third book in the trilogy (by the way, the book is written in a very neat and clear way, I really enjoy the order and coherence on every page).
So in the first part you make your claim that the Torah teaches laws only on the religious level and does not address the moral questions involved.
You support this position on the strength of the immoral laws found in the Torah (a priest’s wife who was raped, etc.).
You raised two more approaches and rejected them, the first approach claims that all laws promote morality, and we may not notice this, and the second approach denies morality. It is clear that you rejected both of them.
I ask why a fourth approach that you did not bring up does not belong here. This approach says that the Torah does indeed address all questions, both moral and religious, and is decisive between them. I am still not saying that the halakha should always be preserved. Let’s say that at the time of the giving of the Torah, the psychological damage to a priest’s wife who was raped and to his family was much less than the religious value that requires the woman’s expulsion (and in our time, the halakha should be abolished).
According to this approach, it is certainly possible that there will be conflicts between religious and moral values, just as your approach suggests that there may be such conflicts.
But just as we ultimately decide these conflicts (such as the soldier and the lonely grandmother) because we will actually have to do one of the two, then the Torah decided for us, we can even add a twist to this and say that it is in God’s hands to know what is ultimately better, His intuition is stronger. But you don’t need to worry about this twist if you think it has a flaw.
I hope my question was clear.
 
And again, I really enjoyed reading the book on Saturday.


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מיכי Staff answered 5 years ago
Chen Chen. I wrote there that we need to distinguish between an inherent contradiction and an accidental contradiction. For an action that by its very definition involves a moral problem in all cases (such as the killing of Amalekian babies, or the separation of a priest’s wife who was raped from her husband), it is reasonable to see the Torah’s teaching as a decision that the halakha here prevails over morality. In accidental conflicts (when not every observance of the halakha involves an immoral matter, such as the Pikku and Shabbat, for example), then the decision is left to us. Admittedly, in situations, circumstances, or periods in which the moral problem is more serious, there is room to reconsider the Torah’s decision as well.

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