Question

In Column 222, the preface to the trilogy, you wrote about the need nowadays to bring into alignment what is true and what exists—in the realm of Jewish thought and the motivation for religiosity—when there is no guarantee of anything.
A painful thought often comes to me about the inability of the religious public to cope with the findings of the ancient Near East. But here I am not speaking about faith or a purely biblical issue. Here I am speaking about the correspondence between the laws of the Bible and the laws of the ancient Near East. Discussions of this subject have very important practical implications for the question of the essential connection between revelation and Torah, and between Torah and morality. But even more than this relates to the question of revelation and the question of morality (where to a large extent, regarding Torah and morality, you hold what seems to me the most coherent position), there is here an essential position about Torah (the Written Torah!) that is dependent on its period, influenced by its period, changing, a Torah that is not eternal, which this discussion brings out.
Perhaps a discussion of correct belief regarding religion—as merely practical commandments—is necessary, but a discussion and correct belief about the practical commandments themselves is no less necessary, and perhaps even more so. And today, sadly, there is no religious figure who speaks about this. The subject is silenced (or almost silenced—if I count “Created Equal”), and this subject is essential for a “correct” belief about the status, standing, and attitude toward the practical commandments.