Q&A: The Spirit of Jewish Law
The Spirit of Jewish Law
Question
Hello Rabbi,
There are all kinds of situations for which there is no explicit Jewish law about what is forbidden and what is permitted, for example: not going in shorts to a study hall, or not cursing, and so on. In practice, it comes out that people assume there is some kind of internal principle, which I call “the spirit of Jewish law,” and that principle causes us to act in accordance with Jewish law even when it is not written explicitly.
Still, it is not clear to me where we derive it from. Is there some source that teaches us what the spirit of Jewish law is?
Note: at first I wanted to say that this is a moral issue, but when I thought about it more deeply it did not seem reasonable to me that a moral issue would dictate the spirit of Jewish law. What does the Rabbi think?
Answer
The spirit of Jewish law can stem from interpretation of the law itself. For example, someone who separates food from waste on the Sabbath may perhaps be violating the spirit of Jewish law. But there are statements of this kind that are unrelated to Jewish law, just a general sense that “it’s not appropriate.” There I really think there is no real basis for it.
Shorts in a synagogue are not connected to the spirit of Jewish law. There is a straightforward law requiring respectable dress; the question of what counts as respectable and what does not is, of course, a matter of circumstances and social norms. But all this is not connected to the spirit of Jewish law.
See my comments in Column 275.