Quote:
Originally Posted by Willravel
I don't see it as a matter of what it would hurt/not hurt, but rather as simply a question of modern interpretation. I've read the OT more than a few times and there are some rather dated requests which may have seemed pragmatic at the time, but are now entirely out of date. Circumcision used to prevent dangerous infection, but modern practices of hygiene would prevent that. Growing different crops next to each other could have caused pollination problems, but we're genetically engineering super-crops now. I'm pretty sure we can grow corn in the Sahara (and that it'd be subsidized). Women that are menstruating are no longer prone to infections, in fact we have pills that reduce the frequency of periods to 4 times a year or even less. I've postulated here on TFP in the past that the Sabbath was the first instance of worker's rights, but we have labor laws now.
It's not that the passages of the Torah are wrong, in fact there may have been a time when these directives saved lives. It's a question of whether these were divine mandates intended to be carried out for all time or simply some very clever men that took down what at the time were very important rules. If it's the former, it seems to be 100% an act of faith. If it's the latter, I'll buy you a plate of shrimp.
|
The thing is, Will, you're trying to rationalize what might not be rational. Circumcision because of hygienic reasons: modern medicine=no more need for snippy-snip. But what if that wasn't the reason for circumcision? We can call it by any number of fancy terms, and over the years, our rabbis have come up with some dandy ones. And if you ask Orthodox rabbis for reasons, either they won't give them to you, or they will simply put the full stop where Xazy did, and say "God told us to," or perhaps at best will give you some pleasant-sounding reinterpretive language that makes this all more palatable for the rationalist ear.
But in the end, it's a blood oath. A blood binding ritual, to use the classical magical terminology. It is a profoundly arational act, based not in an incomplete and ineffective scientific paradigm, but in an extensive and much more elusive paradigm of mysticism. You were a fellow
Buffy watcher, if I recall right: remember the Season Five finale, when Xander asks, jokingly, "Why does it always have to be blood...?!" And Spike retorts, "Because it's always gotta be blood.... Blood is life, lackbrain.... It's what keeps you going, makes you warm, makes you hard, makes you other than dead." And the thing of it is, Spike is right. From a magical/mystical perspective, the unbreakable bond is wrought in blood. That's why we are forbidden to eat the blood of even kosher animals. That's why blood conveys spiritual impurity according to our ancient purity codes. That's why when Jewish women finish menstruating, they go dip themselves into a pool of living water (i.e., rainwater or melted and warmed glacier water; or if a natural body of water, a fresh-fed lake or the ocean): only living water, free of stagnation, is free of magic, and neutralizes the powerful energies associated with blood. Blood is Life. This covenant that God and Israel have is a covenant bound for life. It must be sealed in blood, nothing else will do. And it can't be a ritual drop from just anyplace. It is a covenant for all generations, a covenant to elevate all the mundane, everywhere, all the time, into the holy. It must be from the sexual organ, symbolizing its eventual passage to the next generation, and it must be there, permanently marked in us, to remind us, even at the moment we are most wrapped up in the worldly, that even this can be sacred. Even in that profoundly personal moment, we are still bound in our covenant to God.
Shabbat may or may not be good labor law. It may or may not be good civil rights. But it is a spiritual necessity. Spiritual development demands focus, silence, cessation of the worldly, and an immersion in the holy, on a regular basis. If, as we think, God gave us Torah in order to facilitate (among other things) our spiritual development, Shabbat is an absolute necessity.
Kilayim (the sowing of mixed crops) may or may not be good agriculture. But it is a reminder to someone whose life is spent measuring and working the utter pragmatics of earth and seed and harvest that their crop is not just some junk they put in the ground in hopes they can scrounge enough to eat next winter: each kind of grain and grass is different from every other, and we should pay attention even in those utterly routine moments of sowing seed to think about the wondrousness of the Creator's work, who doesn't just give us Plant and Animal, but the incredible, bewildering, breathtaking explosion of different kinds of life on our world, each kind completely different, with its own qualities and admirable traits.
Maybe kashrut was just an early kind of hygiene and sanitation system, but maybe it isn't. Maybe in the end, it's designed to teach us something. Maybe about how we are permitted to eat only grazing animals and foraging birds, putting us only one remove from vegetarianism, rather than consuming predators or scavengers putting us at one or two further removes from vegetarianism, signifying that while we are designed to be omnivorous, we should be careful of how we treat the higher lifeforms we are going to eat, and select only those that cause the least distancing from a plant-based life. Or maybe it's to teach us something else entirely. Or perhaps, the consumption of other kinds of animals has an effect on our energy that is unsuitable to the rest of the Jewish lifestyle. They say that you are what you eat: perhaps we are forbidden to eat predators and scavengers lest we become them, in spirit or in mind....
But that's the thing. There are so many lessons that the commandments do teach, or can be revealed to teach with just a little investigation; and so many facets of mystical or magical life that can be found to be somehow affected or tied into them, that one cannot simply declare cavalierly that such and such a commandment has just outlived its day. If such a thing ever comes about, that we are forced to put a commandment into abeyance, it would require more than just a penchant for rationalism to justify it. I contemplate putting the commandment about shunning male-on-male intercourse into abeyance, not because I cannot fathom it teaching anything, but because I cannot fathom anything it teaching outweighing the daily suffering of the gay Jews I know, who are merely trying to exist as God created them, and trying to live good Jewish lives as best they can according to who they are. To relieve the suffering of my brothers in the Jewish community, I might act radically to change the halakhah. But just because someone offers me shrimp, or tells me circumcision is unnecessary now that we have showers and soapy washcloths? Not so much.
Judaism is a religion of laws-- which are rational, according to their own framework-- but not only laws. It is a religion of story, of symbolism, and at heart, like any good religion, a religion of spirit. And all of those realms are realms of the arational, and to attempt to rationalize them is to strip the most important parts away. Or, if you like, think of it this way: if I gave you the choice between three gorgeously cooked, succulent dishes for your breakfast, lunch, and dinner, on condition that they be savored accordingly, or, alternatively, the option to take the perfect balance of the day's nutrition and energy needs in the form of a single capsule to be taken in the morning with a glass of water-- thus giving you considerable extra time, saving you cost, and effort, and optimizing your experience for the scientifically-calculated mean efficiency of your body's blood and enzyme systems...which would you choose? From a purely rational point of view, the capsule has to win every time, but I'd be willing to bet the majority of people would take the food.
Torah is more than just social rules. Every passage in Torah has levels, shades and nuances of meaning that have nothing to do with the mundane details of life. And in the end, it doesn't matter whether the words came directly, intact, verbatim from God, and we've messed up the transmission or misunderstood the message, or whether the words represent a bunch of people's efforts to try and put words into nonverbal messages from God. In either case, the Torah has been given already. It is no longer in Heaven, for God to tell us how it should be interpreted, but here on Earth, where it is the job of rabbis and scholars of halakhah to interpret it as best they can to achieve the goal of binding God and Israel ever closer.