Q&A: Questions About Belonging to the World of Jewish Law
Questions About Belonging to the World of Jewish Law
Question
Hello Rabbi,
For quite some time I’ve been reading some of the Rabbi’s articles, and they really nourish my soul,
even if I don’t agree with everything / often I agree with the conclusion.
But because of that, a few questions have come up for me:
Most of the articles the Rabbi writes are against things that are accepted in the religious public, both Haredi and Religious Zionist,
assuming that what he says is indeed correct, precise, true, and real.
- Why don’t Jewish law / the rabbis / the mainstream say this? If the Torah is true?
- Why belong at all to that same religious community? One that doesn’t believe, rule, or practice as the Rabbi says? Why not be secular with those values, or even keep some of these commandments while still being “secular”?
{I’m asking because of a discussion I had with a friend who left religion over this issue—
we came to the conclusion that we both agree on most things, and then you could say he was gently asking:
why are you still there? The answer I gave myself is that this is the Torah I stand for, and part of that is keeping the commandments.
But I notice that there are many things where I disagree with the accepted approach (of course I’m not an authority to disagree, only expressing my humble opinion).
Still, the doubt has seeped in, because it seems one could say that my approach, and maybe also the Rabbi’s approach and that of a few other rabbis I’ve heard,
is exceptional and really does not represent the accepted world of Torah or Jewish law today. So why belong to it? }
3. If Jewish law is supposed to be God’s word, balanced and advancing reality (since halakhah comes from the language of “walking”), how is it that today Jewish law seems to hold reality back a bit? (As far as I understand, things weren’t always this way—at least not in the communities of the Jews from Islamic lands, where things used to flow much more smoothly. I once heard that those communities were kind of like Conservatives, just not openly, so in the past the situation was better.)
4. Maybe my questions also stem from the idea that the Torah is supposed to teach us morality, and from time to time I hear rabbis say that it isn’t, so then what is it? That’s how my teachers in the past explained the beginning of Genesis to me—that the Torah did not come to teach us science or history but morality… Could it be that my basic assumption is mistaken?
5. Why doesn’t the Rabbi relate to explanations of the commandments such as keeping milk and meat separate = “Have you murdered and also inherited?” And I’ve heard all kinds of claims from rabbis that, for example, women can do such-and-such… but I was taught that women don’t belong to that by virtue of their greatness, and therefore don’t need to do it, and I haven’t heard the Rabbi talk about that. Perhaps the Rabbi disagrees with that statement? Or with the nice explanations given for various commandments?
Thank you, Barak.
Answer
For some reason I missed this question. I’ll answer now.
1. Anyone who doesn’t say what I say—you should ask him for his view. It’s not my job to defend him.
2. Belonging to a community is a personal, subjective matter, so do what you think is right. What you do should reflect your own position, or the position of a rabbi you have chosen for yourself. If some community doesn’t appeal to you—don’t belong to it. If you want to belong and practice differently—good for you.
If you believe the Torah was given and that there is an obligation to keep it, then you are a religious person. The content—what to keep and how—is subject to various disputes, and each person has to decide where he stands. I don’t understand why, if you don’t think like the accepted approach, you are supposed to abandon everything. It reminds me of people who came to speak with me about questions of faith; some of them had already abandoned everything, and when I presented them with answers and positions of my own, they told me that this is not what they learned in cheder, and therefore they did not accept what I said. The god they chose not to believe in is not my God. You too are basically saying something similar: I do not believe in way X of serving God, and whoever believes in it is mistaken. I believe in God in way Y. But serving God is by way X (because that’s what I learned in cheder, even though I don’t believe it), and therefore I’m leaving everything.
3. Leave the word games aside. Halakhah is not “walking,” and it neither advances nor holds back. Jewish law is an obligation that must be kept regardless of what it does to you or to the world, and certainly regardless of what you imagine it does to you or the world.
4. There is no connection at all between Jewish law and Torah on the one hand and morality on the other. Morality is a universal matter. There is no Jewish morality and some other morality. There is right morality and wrong morality. And we do not learn it from the Torah (perhaps in the past people did learn it from there, but today we do not need that). Nowadays nobody learns from the Torah even a single moral detail. It’s all cheap little sermonizing. There are good reasons for this, and I’ve elaborated on them in the series on morality and Jewish law and at the beginning of the third book in the trilogy. Indeed, the Torah generally does not teach us science or history, but today at least it also does not teach us morality.
5. Nice explanations given for various commandments are usually cheap little sermonizing. And the “greatness of women” is one of the most banal, repulsive, false, and apologetic things I have ever heard. Commitment to Jewish law does not depend on explanations and understandings. In general, in Jewish law we do not derive practice from the “reason for the verse.”
Discussion on Answer
1. The question is not well-defined. The question is not which Jewish law is better, but what you think Jewish law says. If you want to decide for yourself, you need to study and reach a good enough level to be able to do that. If not—you need to choose a rabbi according to your understanding, and from that point on consult with him.
2. It does not cause negative things. Sometimes it has negative costs. In order to be saved, you sometimes have to kill people. In order to achieve religious goals, you sometimes have to compromise moral values. I’ve elaborated on this, and this is not the place.
3. First of all, it is a command of the Holy One, blessed be He, and there is an obligation to keep it. Beyond that, I understand that it has one or another spiritual benefit, even if we do not know what that is. Observing Jewish law as a means of achieving other goals is not serving God for its own sake.
4. In my view that is an unreasonable claim, because if that were the consideration, I do not see why it would apply specifically to time-bound commandments. But in principle, such claims are certainly possible and acceptable.
Thank you very much for your answer.
1. Regarding belonging to a community—to be honest, a bit before your answer I had the metaphor in mind that it’s like on the road: there have to be laws and speed limits, but in practice everyone drives a little faster or a little slower—but that lasts only until the police officer sees you and you get a ticket…
Is the metaphor correct?
And really my question is: how do you determine whose Jewish law is better?
Today one rabbi says one thing and another says the opposite, and then it always gets dragged into an argument over who relies on the greater rabbi, or everyone just stays with his own opinion because that’s the Torah, and the other person becomes a heretic or irrelevant to the discussion…
(It’s happened to me more than once with Haredim.)
2. You said that “Jewish law is an obligation that must be kept regardless of what it does to the world or to me,” but I don’t understand the claim—if it causes negative things, should we still hold on to it? For example, what you said about women in answer 5: if now I exclude women because that’s the Jewish law, is that a good thing??
3. What does the Rabbi see in the Torah as giving us something today, if not morality, science, or history? Other than the fact that it is from Heaven and therefore must be observed…
4. So you do not accept the claim that women do not perform time-bound commandments and so on because they do not need them, but rather because they were uneducated in the past and therefore they were not obligated in them? And consequently, today, since they are not uneducated, should most of the laws concerning them be corrected?