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Back to Question of the Week Q: There are so many commandments in Torah. How do we know which ones to keep and which ones not to. Sidney |
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A: Although I am going to answer this question (or one very similar to it), I think I should start by disagreeing with what seems to be its basic premise: That the sheer number of commandments in the Torah makes it impossible to keep them all. I disagree. If one wanted to, I'm sure that one could (eventually) keep all the (applicable) (I'll explain what I mean by "applicable" in a bit) commandments almost all the time (with some room for inevitable human imperfection and mistakes). In fact, although I am a Reconstructionist/Reform rabbi, I have no problem affirming that a significant percentage of Orthodox Jews keep all the applicable commandments in the Torah, (according to the Orthodox rabbinic interpretation of those commandments, of course) almost all the time. How is this possible? First of all, let's talk about "applicable." Rabbinic tradition considers there to be 613 commandments in the Torah. A whole slew of these are commandments regarding sacrifices at the central shrine which has not existed for 1,928 years. So you don't have to worry about those. They're not applicable. If you happen to live outside the land of Israel, there's a whole other crop of commandments you can basically ignore; they only apply to the land of Israel. Then there's a group of commandments that deals with idolaters and certain idolatrous peoples. Those certain peoples no longer exist. And most halakhic authorities do not consider our main neighbours -- Christians and Muslims -- to be true idolaters, but worshipers of the one, true God (although we obviously have disagreements about the proper method of worship). So the laws about idolaters pretty much don't apply either. Unfortunately for you, Sidney, you're a man; otherwise, if you were Orthodox, we could lop off another category of commandments: positive commandments that are time-dependent (with certain exceptions). So we've seen that some large number -- I have no idea how many; let's say a few hundred -- commandments in the Torah are not applicable. Of those that are left, there's a bunch of good ethical "thou-shalt-not"s, like Thou shalt not murder, steal, commit adultery, oppress the stranger, widow, poor, and orphan. I hope you can manage to follow these. In the "thou-shalt"s, there's a bunch of life-cycle and year-cycle commandments that you just make a little extra effort when their time comes. What a lot of people find daunting are all the rules of keeping kosher and keeping Shabbat in an Orthodox/Conservative fashion. But (a) people do it, and (b) a very small portion of those rules are actually in the Torah (they're later rabbinic developments), and you asked about Torah. And now that I've brought up historical development, it's time to talk about two good reasons not to keep all the commandments in the Torah, and the resultant requirement of making a decision about which to keep. First is the possibility that God might not actually want us to keep all the commandments in the Torah. The Talmudic rabbis of blessed memory decided already 1500 years ago that God didn't really want them to follow the literal words of the Torah in certain instances, such as "an eye for an eye" or capital punishment for rebellious children. Their moral intuition told them that these could not really be God's desire, and they used that intuition to guide their interpretation of the Torah's commandments. This issue becomes even more complicated if you accept, as I do, the conclusions of modern critical scholars that see Torah as a record of human strivings toward God, rather than as a miraculous, literal revelation of God's word and desires. Even if you view the human authors of Torah as divinely inspired, if there was any imperfection in their receptivity to the divine message, you're left with a real problem of choice. If the Torah is not a perfect record of God's wishes, how do we know which commandments God would actually like us to keep? There's no simple answer to this problem. It certainly won't do to simply assume the Torah is only right when it agrees with us, nor to assume that we are only right when we agree with Torah. There must be some form of honest dialogue between us, our ancestors, and Torah, in search for God's truth. But I don't know that anyone has (or can) give a completely satisfactory set of rules for that dialogue. My guess, though, is that your question stems from something else. You would like to observe more Jewish practice, but from where you are in your life, the prospect is daunting. Although I said before that it is possible to do everything, if that requires large changes in one's lifestyle, it is certainly legitimate to feel intimidated, and it is sensible not to take on everything one might want to take on at once. So "How to choose?" really means "where to start." As a generic Web answer, I can say: start where the smallest change will have the greatest effect on your spiritual life. For most people, this means one or both of: engaging in regular Jewish learning, or beginning/deepening the practice of Shabbat. Learning will give you the necessary tools to make Jewish choices. Finding a teacher is the best idea, but if you want to start with books, I would recommend checking out these two: Living a Jewish Life by Diamant and Cooper; and It's a Mitzvah by Artson. Both are good guides to informed Jewish choice, one from a tradition-friendly liberal/Reform perspective and one from a choice-friendly, liberal, Conservative perspective. "It's a Mitzvah" is mis-titled; it's not actually a schmaltzy book. Beginning Shabbat practice might mean nothing more than candles, wine (with brief blessings), a nice dinner, and no TV on Friday nights. And once you start either of these, you'll want more. written by Rabbi Jeremy Schwartz |
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