This is a fair point. But there are quite a few more laws that Orthodox Jews follow that appear at first glance to be technical workarounds. The Eruv, as discussed. The string around a neighborhood that technically makes it your own private domain, so that you can do the things that god forbid you from doing in public, because it’s no longer “in public” - does that not strike you as a workaround for the rules? A way of merely technically complying with a law? What if Orthodox Jews came up with a plan to tie a string around the north and south poles so now the whole world is your private space now and so you can forget the prohibitions that the Eruv is designed to get around. Assuming that holds up logically, would that not be a violation of the spirit of the law by essentially erasing it? What about being unable to shave with a standard razor, but being able to shave with an electric razor? Does god want you unshaven, or does he really just hate straight razors? Do I need to come up with more examples?
Can anyone just admit that it’s possible to ignore or violate the spirit of the rules by complying with the letter of the rules in a way that’s, at best, indifferent to the spirit of the rules, if not actively subversive to it?
In a way that is different from what you think. It is, as I said, day of separation from the other six days. You work on the other six days. You don’t on this one. The ceremony of starting Shabbat is called “kiddush” - “sanctification”. The ceremony of ending Shabbat is called “havdalah” - separation. Shabbat’s purpose is to be separate from the rest of the week.
Your underlying premise here, again, is that religion is bunk, and it is only useful if it serves some “societal purpose”. That premise is wrong and any arguments you build on this premise are fallacious.
Welcome to Judaism.
No, it’s because “spirit of the Law” is in God’s mind, and thus inherently unknowable. All we know is the letter.
If you obey the letter, you’re obeying the law. You cannot know what the reasoning for that law is. You can guess. But you cannot know.
Only if it’s man’s law. It is an axiom that the mind of God is unknowable. If you could know it, you’d be God.
Again, you are trying to understand God’s motivations. You cannot. It’s an axiom.
If I wanted to critique Orthodox Judaism, I’d choose another line of attack. This one isn’t going anywhere for you. “They ignore the spirit of the law” just doesn’t work, because it assumes you know what the “spirit of the law” is better than they do. Given you know next to nothing about Orthodox Judaism, and many Orthodox Jews spend their whole lives studying it, this is sort of like those guys who keep insisting quantum physics is “dumb” because of “common sense”.
There are tons of much better reasons to critique Orthodox Judaism, that don’t require arguing from ignorance. How about “Inflexible adherence to Orthodox traditions unnecessarily internalizes backward social mores - for example, concerning the relative status of women”? Then you can read up about (say) Reconstructionist Judaism (‘let’s keep the traditions but discard the sexism and inequality … oh, and that whole God thing is optional’).
I just have to comment on the oddness of the phrase “the spirit of the law” in this context. In a literal sense, the “spirit” of The Law to the Orthodox is God. The spirit’s intention is for them to follow the rules as written with human minds figuring out (arguing over) how to interpret them for changing times and circumstances. Now you may be so arrogant as to assume to know what God’s true intentions were, but Jewish scholars do not presume such knowledge … although they argue mightily if the exact phrasing and word choice, even letter choice, implies one interpretation of the law over the other. Talmud records many of these argument and while they can sometimes be models of the absurd they in no way are based on “how can we get around what God clearly means?”; they are based on figuring out how to implement what God means and to avoid accidentally doing something other than what God instructed. Maybe the “intent” was create the circumstances in which they had to argue amongst ourselves over how to interpret? Doesn’t matter to them. The goal is to do what the spirit of law, God, instructed, as best as we can figure as applies to current circumstances.
The law says stop at a red light until it turns green and SB would reasonably say the intent is to avoid accidents; if there is no traffic coming for many many blocks, and there are no enforcers present, you should just go. The Orthodox would stay stopped and not question what the spirit of the law was. Whether they though they would get a ticket or not.
So then, as I’ve asked before, do you believe it’s impossible to technically comply with the law in a way that is probably not what god intended when creating the rule?
If god says “You may not leave your home when there’s no sun in the sky”, and as a response, one faction of that religion wrapped a fishing line over the entire city and claimed this city is now my house, it’s connected!" and another faction instead made a cardboard cutout of a mock sun with orange construction paper and hung it up from a water tower and said “now there’s a sun in the sky! we can go out at night”, would you not see either of those things as an attempt to subvert god’s rules by making a rather ridiculous justification for your technical compliance with the rule? Those two factions are equally attempting to follow God’s wishes as a third faction that never left their homes at night?
If that example doesn’t work for you, is there anything you can possibly conceive of, in which someone’s technical compliance with the law, no matter how flimsy or ridiculous, or how obviously outside of what one could reasonably expect to be the intention of the rule, would qualify as attempting to get around the intended effect of god’s law in order to serve their own interests?
Fyi, the rule is that you can travel within a walled city, but not in the wilderness, on the Sabbath. At the time, the “known world” pretty much consisted of walled cities and wilderness. I think it is fairly reasonable to claim that if you can find an unbroken wire around a chunk of your city, it is not wilderness.
Many of the “technical compliance” cases you might think of are similarly less bizarre if you look at them more carefully.
I say this as a non-observant Reform Jew who thinks most of these laws are outdated, and some are damaging. But the criticisms I’ve read here all seem weak.
Sure, that’s why I choose to not be an Orthodox Jew.
But I appreciate the fact that the so-called work arounds are not spontaneous ideas that individuals just think of. The get debated and discussed by the Rabbinical leaders, Torah scholars and the community, to come to some determination if there is scriptural support for the decision or not. You can make up ridiculous examples all you want, but the truth is the “workarounds” have basis in in Torah and are subject to serious discussion (often for decades if not centuries).
I personally don’t agree with it, but I can certainly tell the difference between something internally consistent and something inherently illogical. Plus, my knee-jerk reaction if I don’t understand is not “Boy they must be stupid”.
I would say that for the Orthodox, yes, it is impossible. Technically complying with the law IS what God intended, end of discussion.
In your example, the process would be that scholars would argue (and argue) and any group that tried to claim that an orange cut out of the sun in the sky was technically the same as the sun in the sky would be roundly mocked. No, a cardboard cut out is not “technically” the same as the sun. Unless the actual words stated “or representation of the sun.” Then it would be, shall we say, kosher.
puzzlegal’s post should help reduce your ignorance (if there actually is any desire to have it reduced). The precise words used, again the precise letters even, are considered important in these Talmudic rulings, and how to interpret them argued over in excruciating detail. Following the law as written as best as is possible is the goal for this group, not guessing what the intent of the law was and following that. If God didn’t mean it that way then God would not have written it that way is their take.
johnpost actually you illustrates the process. The argument would go on asking what the key passage, “walled city” - a thread counting as walled, or “wilderness” and if not a representation of a wall to demarcate how do you know where “wilderness” begins? Where streets stop? What counts as “wilderness”? Better (in their minds) to err on the side of caution - maybe it isn’t wilderness if there is still a sidewalk but better to be sure and stay inside a representative “walled city” and not break the rule by mistake. The interpretations usually went in those directions, not figuring out ways to get around the law but figuring out how to stay away from even accidentally breaking it.
Not my cup of chicken soup mind you (even though it comes with dang good kreplachs) but understand it before you criticize it.
And in the hypothetical I gave above, the fishing line around the city faction, and the cardboard cutout sun faction may also have spent time debating those rules with their most senior church authorities. So what? Debate and tradition don’t absolve something of being absurd.
You probably think the religious beliefs of scientology are absurd even if they’re been vetted by debate and the wisest of their community.
So what’s the difference? Scientology is a new and obviously sham religion, so it’s not afforded the special privilege from scrutiny that our old, established religions are. Somehow I’m an asshole for thinking some of the practices of Orthodox Judaism are absurd, but if I made a thread about scientology being absurd I suspect I wouldn’t get the same backlash as to why I’m some raving mad militant atheist who can’t understand the beauty and significance and wonderfulness of these religious beliefs because I’m just too ignorant.
I think there is some value to something that stands the test of time, as to its success. If scientology is still around in some form in 5000 years like Judaism is and managed to evolve with the time, then I think we’d be on poor ground to call it a “sham”. I’d disagree with its principles (like I do with Christianity- I don’t believe Jesus was any messiah) but that doesn’t make it sham any more than a capitalist disagreeing with socialism does. But it’s not there yet, and the person who started it openly admitted he was making something up, so for now it’s in its own class. People who believe in a god can do so all they want, but I would hope if someone unearthed texts tomorrow that said Moses admitted to making the whole thing up, we’d keep the fun stuff and lose the rest.
I’m an atheist, so I don’t believe in any of the god stuff, but I practice aspects of Judaism because I enjoy the ritual, going to synagogue (Not church. I’m sure you can get at least that right) is meditative for me (I don’t believe anyone is listening, but the act of expressing gratitude in prayer is nice), my parents are Holocaust survivors so I feel connected to all the family who was murdered by performing some of the same rituals they did and it’s my culture.
We all get it. You think religion is D-U-M dumb. You will view ANY explanation through that lens, with the preconceived idea that the answer is inherently dumb. That is certainly your prerogative, but it makes for a decidedly unsatisfying conversation.
To be clear, the latter half of that last post was directed at my general thought about the absurdity of religious practices. My secondary criticism on top of that - that these particular practices are even more absurd because they’re not even in line with the rules set within that religion, and hence, internally inconsistent, are refutable because we’re arguing about the specifics of a mythology. I find the idea of “you can still cook food, so long as you don’t touch an on/off button” to be really silly, and tragic when someone dies from complications stemming from that tradition, but I may be incorrect as far as how internally inconsistent that is.
I can say that I’m not comfortable with the idea of following rules for which you don’t understand the spirit or intention of the rules. Given that you have a limited amount of information about the rules (since it’s a fixed amount of words in a holy book with no updates), it would seem that you would have to try to understand the intent behind them to apply them in scenarios that aren’t covered under the text of the rules.
That’s a fair enough criticism, but you may just not appreciate how much study and thought went into interpretation of the rules. The Torah is one set of books (five in all). There is an entire additional set of books (almost like case law) in which Rabbi’s discuss and debate implementation of the Torah’s words and even contradictory points of view are added (the Talmud Talmud - Wikipedia). Much of the initial analysis was done in the first half of the first century CE, and have further debate and discussion ever since. It’s very much like the Constitutional scholars- some are literalists who do not try to deduce intent and others do.
You are more than allowed to disagree with the interpretations (as I generally do), but it isn’t capricious or just made up. Judaism is a legalistic religion, and like law depends heavily of discussion and logic, not just what “feels right”.
Catholics hold midnight mass on Christmas eve that many adherants think is their Christian duty to attend. Driving around late at night on Chrsitmas eve is dangerous given that the number of drunk drivers out at this time is higher than normal.
Many here think some, nay many, of the practices of Orthodox Judaism (and many other strict and/or literalist religious belief systems) are absurd.
You are an asshole basing your critique on complete (and willful) ignorance of the belief system and for exploiting tragic deaths in pursuit of your wanting to find things to blame on the religion. You are an asshole for your need to insult others who have beliefs that you personally believe to be absurd.
What you believe doesn’t matter much to me. It is what you do that makes you an asshole.
Driving isn’t stupid. Leaving a hotplate on is stupid. And leaving a hotplate in order to subvert a rule the creator of the universe laid down, because you’d rather have a hot breakfast is supremely stupid.
Since driving isn’t as inherently stupid as leaving a hot plate on, in order to satisfy an absurd need to not flip switches on the better part of the weekend, I’d say less so.
I think there is a lot of victim blaming going on here. The lady was trying to feed her kids warm food, and simultaneously obey an objectively stupid religious order by using a life-hack. She and her kids are victims of the stupid, ignorant religion that shudders along with bailing wire and tape in order to conform to modern life. No, a string around you neighborhood isn’t intelligent or clever. It’s nonsense that small, delusional men made up when looking at a rule that makes their lives harder, and stretching like Mr. Fantastic to come up with a kludge that they can rationalize to themselves. All in order to feel like they’re still obeying the rules, while having a comfortable existence.
And piously looking into the sky and intoning about how, “It’s so you can feel the law in every day… blah blah blah…” is nothing more than shining a turd.
Fanatical Judaism is just as stupid as any of the world’s great religions. And the world we be a better place when people view it as an oddity like Odin worship.
SenorBeef, you are free to start your own sect of Judaism which assumes there is a spirit of the law to follow. You will probably get followers. It’s just not what these people believe, they believe that the spirit of the law is to follow the letter of the law. And in actuality the Reform and Conservative movements do not believe that the letter of the law is so greatly important, that the laws which reflect what you might call the spirit are more important than the detailed minutia.
I don’t think anyone you are arguing with considers the ritual of not turning on a hotplate to be anything but absurd, but the motives of the followers have nothing to do with fooling God or ignoring some spirit of the law which does not exist for them.
Driving is inherently very dangerous; it’s responsible for far more deaths than inappropriate use of electrical appliances.
If we were being rational and consistent here, we’d have to argue that driving for no other purpose than absurd-religion-mandated-blah-blah-blah (such as driving to attend a midnight mass service) is inherently much stupider than risky use of a hotplate for no other purpose than absurd-religion-mandated-blah-blah-blah.
It’s always fun to see how frenziedly irrational the diehard atheists can get in the religion-bashing threads (and I say that as a lifelong atheist myself).
Many, many poor people don’t have smoke alarms. It’s not stupidity, so much as being poor.
As I said before, most times you leave a hotplate on, it’s probably not gonna kill you. And she was no doubt aware of hundreds or thousands of times it had been used by her, or similarly poor folk under the same set of delusions.
Consider, that she believed hard enough to think that it was a good thing to do. As to whether it falls into the, “eat bacon if you’re gonna die” clause, is a matter of judgement. And newflash, religious people have shitty judgement when God is involved.
Religious people aren’t reasonable when it comes to their religion.
It obviously wasn’t that clear in her mind. And from the Wiki page on it, it seems like there is a lot of question where the line is. When something is open to judgement, and the person is a fanatic, you can’t trust their assessment.
I disagree. And the goofy nature of the rules-lawyering makes it especially, well goofy.
Yeah, thinking that a woman who was a religious fanatic, and who did something unwise because of her devotion to the religion, is reason to blame the religion… seems not to rise to that level.