How can one know what the law is?
The Sages demanded the Torah according to their world thousands of years ago.
Today’s reality is completely different and we are in a completely different world (medical services, technology, life expectancy, rapid transportation, developed countries, education, science, forms of living, accessible food, different hygiene, etc., etc.).
No one can know how the sages would have demanded the Torah if they were living in our time, and no one is at their level to demand the Torah right now. It is impossible to know whether they would have found new principles that would have changed existing principles or whether existing principles would have changed. For example, on Shabbat – a creation of the past is not a creation as it is today. Cooking of the past is not the same as cooking of today. The relationship between the two of them of the past is not the same as it is today for many reasons (contraceptives, meeting countless people of the opposite sex when they once lived in the same village all their lives, etc.),
According to this – all Halacha is essentially inventions / guesses / things that are inaccurate at best. How can one live a lifestyle based on inventions at worst and significant inaccuracies at best? There is no logic to it.
This is too general a question. There are things that haven’t changed and there are things that have. There are changes that are relevant to the law and there are those that are not. Of what requires change, there are things that can be changed and there are things that can’t (mainly because of authority issues). But the picture you described is too comprehensive and very exaggerated.
If you have a specific question, bring it up and we can discuss it. In general, the theory of halakhic change is discussed in detail in my book “Moves Among the Standing” (the third in the trilogy).
Thanks for the answer.
I wrote a few examples in the question – Everything related to Shabbat laws. It is possible that the concepts of the past have changed. For example, once high-speed communication was 14.4 kilobits per second and it was considered an open miracle, and today if someone dares to say that such speed they will slap him, it is considered almost nothing.
Everything related to the laws between him and her is about a world without contraception, without abortions, with complications in childbirth and the death of many babies, and many other things that are completely different today.
Thus, in everything, one can find sweeping changes that it is simply impossible to know how the Torah would have required them, since there are such changes.
Apart from these things, one can also say that because in our time there are sweeping changes as I wrote in the question, for example – Medical services, technology, life expectancy, rapid transportation, developed countries, education, science, forms of living, accessible food, different hygiene, etc. So there may be all sorts of principles that simply change the entire form of Halacha, principles that were once not even thought about. For example, it may be that the principle of integrating into the world (academia, culture, etc.) outweighs the principles of Halacha. After all, if they had observed Halacha as it is, Zuckerberg, Gal Gadot, the founders of WhatsApp and Google, etc., etc., wouldn't have gotten where they have gotten. So you could argue, "Then they wouldn't have gotten where they are, so what?" But that's not accurate. Each of them, and countless others, brought enormous and sweeping changes to the world. So to say that keeping Shabbat and kosher is a greater value than these changes on both sides of everything that affect billions? That makes no sense. There are countless businessmen in Israel and around the world who have founded technology companies and other companies that influence almost everyone in the world (Waze, for example) that if they had observed Halacha, it simply wouldn't have gotten there. Can anyone argue that observing Halacha outweighs the value of Waze, which every day helps hundreds of millions of people get to where they want to go? That this app has brought in a huge amount of money for the State of Israel in taxes, etc., etc., regarding so many things.
Shimon, you are forgetting something important. The most important.
The Torah came to protect humans from the slavery to which they are drawn like a mouse drawn to a mousetrap.
All the technological applications you mentioned turn humans back into slaves. A good and efficient slave. One who can serve his masters more efficiently and transparently.
Shimon, I too can say what changes have occurred from ancient times to the present. The question is what is your halakhic argument. You describe in general terms a collection of many changes and then ask a general question about the halakhic law (which is also not unambiguous. I can read several different shades of the question there). That is not serious. Give one specific example and then we can discuss it.
If you want to read about mechanisms for changing halakhic law in light of changing circumstances, I elaborated on this in the sixth part of the third book in my trilogy.
Thanks for the answer.
My question is general - I want to observe the halacha. In this generation there is no one at the level of a sage who can interpret the Torah and therefore there is simply technically no way to know the will of the Creator in a world that is very different from the world of thousands of years ago. All the halacha are based on the words of the sages who interpreted the Torah according to a world that is very different from today's world as stated with all the examples above and many more changes.
So how can one begin to observe something, maybe it is all mistakes? Why would someone avoid so many things and be so closed off (just keeping kashrut, for example, causes a huge difference and many things in the way of life both in the normal day and in departures from the routine) based on things that may not be true at all in the worst case and inaccurate in all sorts of ways in the least bad case?
Continued – If Chazal were alive in our time, perhaps they would interpret things completely differently in every field. Perhaps there were other principles that didn't exist before, and so on.
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