Question

Hello Rabbi,
This question has been bothering me for a long time, about the fit between life in our age and some of the messages of the Torah, and I would be glad if you could put my mind at ease about it.
There are details in certain areas of Jewish law where there is no doubt that the Torah advanced the world morally. On the issue of slavery, for example, the treatment of and concern for women, and so on. Over the generations, the world has indeed become more refined and adopted these moral ideas, which led to a situation that is seemingly more corrected than the one to which Jewish law originally related. Human trafficking is considered something abhorrent today, and so too the betrothal of minor girls, marrying several wives, etc. This is admittedly not true of all humanity, but it is certainly not acceptable or proper today in the world of Jewish morality, and likewise in most of the “Judeo-Christian” Western advanced civilization. When we study the Jewish laws that speak about the morally ancient world, aren’t we taking the world backward? For example, “the laws of slaves” / “the betrothal of a minor girl,” etc. — isn’t there in them a moral regression of humanity? To me it is clear that we do not want to ‘go backward.’ After all, we have no aspiration to bring back slavery, or the situation in which one must betroth off a little girl, or for a king to have 18 wives. It is true that the Jewish law would be relevant, assuming human culture as a whole were to regress morally and savage slavery were to return. But that does not seem to be the trend. Teaching that, in principle, it is possible to buy a person from captivity and sell his offspring to another master — doesn’t that undermine the absoluteness of the moral claim that trafficking in human beings is abhorrent? In short, Torah study is supposed to advance us, not take us backward…
What does the Rabbi think about this?
 
With blessings, M.