Q&A: How Can One Know What Jewish Law Is?
How Can One Know What Jewish Law Is?
Question
The Sages interpreted the Torah according to their world thousands of years ago.
The reality of our time is completely different, and we are basically in an entirely different world now: medical services, technology, life expectancy, fast transportation, developed countries, education, science, forms of housing, accessible food, different hygiene, and so on and so on.
No one can know how the Sages would have interpreted the Torah had they lived in our time, and no one today is on their level to interpret the Torah right now. There is no way to know whether they would have found new principles that would have changed existing ones, or whether existing principles would themselves have changed. For example, on the Sabbath—what counted as creating in the past is not what creating is today. Cooking in the past is not like cooking today. Relations between husband and wife in the past are not what they are today, for many different reasons: contraception, meeting countless members of the opposite sex whereas in the past people lived in the same village all their lives, etc.
Based on that, all of Jewish law is basically inventions / guesses / at best inaccurate things. How can a person live a lifestyle based on inventions in the worse case, and on major inaccuracies in the better case? There is no logic in that.
Answer
That is too general a question. There are things that have not changed and things that have. There are changes that are relevant to Jewish law and changes that are not. And among the things that do call for change, there are things that can be changed and things that cannot—mainly because of issues of authority. But the picture you described is far too sweeping and greatly exaggerated.
If you have a specific question, raise it and we can discuss it. In general, the theory of halakhic change is discussed at length in my book Walking Among the Standing (the third in the trilogy).
Discussion on Answer
Shimon, you’re forgetting something important. The most important thing.
The Torah came to protect human beings from the slavery they are drawn to, like a mouse drawn to a mousetrap.
All the technological apps you mentioned turn a person back into a slave. A good and efficient slave. One who can serve his masters with greater efficiency and transparency.
Shimon, I too know how to say what changes have taken place from ancient times until today. 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 Jewish law, which itself is also not unequivocal. I can read several different shades of the question into what you wrote. That is not serious. Give one specific example, and then it will be possible to discuss it.
If you want to read about mechanisms for change in Jewish law in light of changing circumstances, I explained this in detail in the sixth part of the third book in my trilogy.
Thank you for the reply.
My question is a general one: I want to observe Jewish law. In this generation there is no one on the level of the Sages who can interpret the Torah, and therefore, technically speaking, there is simply no way to know the Creator’s will in a world that is very different from the world of thousands of years ago. All the laws are based on the words of the Sages, who interpreted the Torah according to a world very different from our own, as I said, with all the examples above and many other changes.
So how can one even begin to observe something—maybe it is all mistakes? Why should someone refrain from very many things and in many respects live a very closed life—keeping kosher alone, for example, creates an enormous separation and affects many aspects of one’s lifestyle, both in everyday routine and when stepping outside it—on the basis of things that in the worst case may not be correct at all, and in the less bad case are inaccurate in various ways?
Continuation—after all, if the Sages had lived in our time, maybe they would have interpreted things completely differently in every single area. Maybe there would have been other principles that did not exist in the past, and so on.
Thanks for the answer.
I wrote a few examples in the question—everything connected to the laws of the Sabbath. It is possible that the concepts of the past have changed. For example, fast communication used to be 14.4 kilobytes per second and that would have been considered an open miracle, whereas today if someone dared say such a speed he’d get slapped—it’s considered almost nothing.
Everything connected to laws of relations between husband and wife was built around a world without contraception, without abortions, with childbirth complications and the deaths of many babies, and many other things that in our day are radically different.
And so in every area you can find sweeping changes, to the point that it is simply impossible to know how they would have interpreted the Torah given such changes.
Besides all that, you could also say that because in our era there are sweeping changes like the ones I mentioned in the question—for example medical services, technology, life expectancy, fast transportation, developed countries, education, science, forms of housing, accessible food, different hygiene, etc.—it may be that there are all kinds of principles that simply change the entire form of Jewish law, principles people never even thought about in the past. For example, maybe the principle of integrating into the world—academia, culture, and the like—overrides the principles of Jewish law. After all, if people had kept Jewish law as it is, Zuckerberg, Gal Gadot, the founders of WhatsApp and Google, etc. etc. would not have gotten where they got. So you can argue: then they wouldn’t have gotten there, so what? But that’s not accurate—each one of them, along with countless others, brought enormous and far-reaching changes to the world. So to say that keeping the Sabbath and keeping kosher is a greater value than changes on that scale, which reshape everything and affect billions? There’s no logic in that. There are countless businesspeople in Israel and around the world who founded tech companies and other companies that affect almost every single person in the world—Waze, for example—and if they had kept Jewish law, they simply would not have gotten there. Can someone really argue that keeping Jewish law overrides the value of Waze, which every day helps hundreds of millions of people get where they want to go? Or that this app brought huge sums into the State of Israel in taxes, and so on and so on in so many areas?