Q&A: The Authority of Jewish Law and the Torah
The Authority of Jewish Law and the Torah
Question
You wrote the following in your latest column:
"It is hard to deny that Jewish law requires coercion. On that I would say a few things: First, it is not true that it requires coercion against people who do not think that way. My claim is that halakhic coercion is directed only toward deliberate transgressors who know their Master and rebel against Him, and not toward someone who thinks differently."
First question: where do you find support for this position of yours in the Torah (the Pentateuch)?
And a second question: assuming you agree with me that Jewish law relies on the Torah (again, I mean the Pentateuch), I will ask the same question (this time in that context): do you have any support from the Torah that it obligates only "people who think that way"?
Answer
As you already know, I do not find anything from Jewish law in the Torah itself. In fact, I do not find almost anything in the Torah at all, even apart from Jewish law.
My claim regarding coercion is based on reasoning. In the Talmud one finds the category of someone who says, "It is permitted," whose parameters are quite tangled.
Well, as you know, I think your claim does not hold water. If there is one thing learned from the Torah, which testifies about itself that it was given from Heaven, it is that it is an absolute source of authority. Of course, one can qualify that absoluteness (for example, it may be true that the Torah does not claim to determine scientific truths), but there is no doubt that it sharply distinguishes itself from all existing or possible bodies of knowledge. I hope at least that much you accept.
In that sense, your claim that it does not impose itself on "someone who thinks differently" is contradicted, in my view, by the Torah's self-declared divine status. In the Torah's view, someone who thinks differently (on this matter) is mistaken. At most, the Torah may agree to be lenient with him in terms of exacting the full penalty (and even about that I'm not convinced it is so generous…), but in any case an error is an error. By its own lights.
As for Jewish law itself: you are presumably right that laws established by human beings (the Sages, say) are not absolute in themselves. But in the case of religious Jewish law, unlike, for example, state law, behind the law stands a meta-legal principle that claims to have absolute validity. That principle is the Torah itself. In that respect, Jewish law too has an unconditional foundation. This is true both in the Torah's own view and by the power of human reason reflecting on the relationship between Torah and Jewish law.
Needless to say, this is the common Jewish view throughout history (though that is not my reason for thinking it correct).