Author Archive

Sure, Mercy and Justice Are Popular, But Halacha Is Necessary

I have made a principle, for these posts, of defining a Jewish religiosity that is unequivocal, unarguable, inescapable. A possible problem with that is that what we have found, especially the parts about seeking to perform acts of justice, kindness, and mercy within a relationship with God, might seem too general, not Jewish enough. After all, all sorts of religious people, Jews of all kinds as well as God-focused Christians or Moslems, strive for those goals.

I do not want to gloss over the value I see in the fact that so many people strive to perform acts of justice, kindness, and mercy within a relationship with God. Although I believe Judaism, and particularly Orthodoxy, articulates a different perspective of these ideals than they do, that should not obscure the importance of others’ acknowledging God’s existence and accepting their obligation to shape their lives as God would want them to. Vast as the chasm that separates us on important and necessary doctrinal issues, and daunting as it may be to try to find further common ground to build a more God-centered world, it is significantly smaller than the one between us and those who do not even accept those ideas as the organizing center of a human life.

Defining What God Wants of Us: The Vital Role of Halachic Process

That said, my concern here is to push further in discovering the set of core practices and beliefs that constitute the goals of Jewry as Orthodoxy understands them. The next key component is perhaps the defining characteristic of Orthodoxy as opposed to other denominations, its halachic process. As we have seen several times, the belief in a Revelation at Sinai—along with the giving of a Torah, Written and Oral—is explicit in the text, one of the events a Jew needs to be extremely careful to be sure not to forget.

Part of properly remembering the event is the need to properly understand the Torah God there and its demands. When the Torah says that Jews should take a פרי עץ הדר, the fruit of a ‘beautiful’ tree, on Sukkot, it is tradition that defines it as an etrog. Choosing another fruit, no matter how beautiful we consider the tree that produced it, would not be keeping the Torah. The same is true of a host of definitions and interpretations, as has been noted throughout Jewish history in defenses of the necessity of an Oral Law.

A similar, perhaps even more important, necessity is knowing how to apply the laws of that Torah in new situations, how to understand where the rules do and do not apply. While many laws are defined fully in the existing literature, and must simply be followed to the extent of each individual’s capabilities, the proper observance of other laws .necessarily entails understanding how that law is best applied to changed circumstances

Change of Circumstance and Change of Halacha

Beginning in the eleventh century, for example, the Tosafists began to recognize that the laws of how to deal with idol-worshippers either could not, did not, or should not apply to the Christians they knew in the same way as they did for the time of the Talmud. Part of the challenge of halacha is distinguishing situations of continuity from ones of meaningful and relevant change.

In addition, completely new situations can arise, and halachists need to determine which laws are relevant and how they should be applied. To take an obvious example, deciding the status of electricity on Shabbat is not a question of what modern rabbis think about Shabbat, it is their using the accumulated Written and Oral Law to best understand the Torah’s perspective of whether and when this qualifies as a prohibited form of creative activity.

These two functions, evaluating new situations for the applicability of existing laws and for whether to promulgate new ordinances, are primary rabbinic ones, as Rambam lays out in the beginning of הלכות ממרים, which deals with the powers of the Sanhedrin and the punishment of those who disobey it. Defining the legitimate decision process is, in other words, related to defining the system of halacha itself.

Since we have noted several times that the broad goals of Judaism— acting justly, charitably, humbly, and so on—are always couched as being part of a relationship with God, the definition of any of those terms depends on knowing what God wants, which is what halacha expresses. In that sense, the halachic process reveals to us what God has told us we should be doing, and the observance of halacha to the best of our abilities is itself a mission-shaping component of religiosity.

The next step in defining a mission of Judaism therefore becomes figuring out what constitutes halachic process, what are the valid means to interpreting and applying the Oral and Written laws in new times, places, and situations. Implicit in this search, admittedly, is the assumption that there are right and wrong ways of “doing” halacha, that not all interpretations are equally valid, even as the Talmud clearly recognizes that on many issues—but not all—there may be multiple, although not infinite, valid views.

Multiple Valid Views Is Not the Same as Infinite Valid Views

To take some simple examples, the definition of creative labor, מלאכה, is central to observance of Shabbat, since one of its most prominent commands is to refrain from such labor. Base definitions of those categories appear in the Mishna and Gemara, but applying them in practice—can we brush our teeth on Shabbat? Turn on or off lights? Take an elevator? Yom Tov?—depend on where the halachic process leads.

On the other hand, certain questions have been answered so unequivocally that there is no need, or even possibility, of an halachic process, such as in the question of whether a Jewish court would remove the eye of an assailant who had blinded his victim. That the assailant will only be fined monetarily is a settled question, and any other suggestion is outside the halachic process.

The sum total of the halachic process will produce the Jewish law its adherents try to observe; as we have said before, Jews are obligated to attempt to observe all of halacha, even though we have been trying to define the core components of that observance. But since keeping halacha properly is part of the definition of love of God, adhering to a legitimate process of determining that halacha is mission-shaping even if each particular observance might not be.

Indeed, many of Jewish history’s most divisive schisms have come from disagreements over these kinds of issues: the Sadducees and Pharisees, Rabbanites and Karaites, Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox diverged on many topics, but a fundamental one was their sense of halachic process, of how to decide issues of Jewish law in a manner consistent with the system as a whole.

Ideally, what I would do here is define that process in the same minimalist and unequivocal way I have until now. Unfortunately, that strategy breaks down in this instance, since the halachic process has not been even close to unequivocally defined, even in a most basic way. To take a clear example, proper halachic thinking and writing involves reading prior sources in a plausible way, but the word plausible is undefinable (or, at least, not amenable to unequivocal definition).

Blending Innovation and Tradition: Three Giants of 20th Century Psak

Some of this dilemma is captured by the defenses three of the most important halachists of the 20th century gave in introducing their works of responsa. Strikingly, R. Moshe Feinstein and R. Eliezer Waldenburg, ob”m, and–להבדיל בין החיים לבין החיים, to separate those who still live in the sense that the righteous are alive even in death from those still living in a physical body– R. Ovadya Yosef, all introduce their compositions with a defense of חידוש, of novel ideas. In their experience of their endeavor, the books they were producing contained new and innovative ideas that were nonetheless fully traditional. As I review a few of their expressions of this idea, we will see where it leaves room for intractable debate as to what constitutes an acceptable halachic process.

R. Moshe Feinstein, zt”l, in his introduction to the first volume of his Iggerot Moshe, raises the question of how he could have the temerity to rule on practical matters when it was clear (to him) that he would not have been considered worthy of doing so in a previous generation. He writes that the verse לא בשמים היא, the Torah is not in Heaven, teaches that the Torah is open to the interpretation of the (in my imperfect translation) “Sage, after he has looked properly to clarify the halachah in the Talmud and halachic decisors, according to his abilities, with a proper attitude and awe of God, and it seems to him that this is the ruling that is the truth…”

As long as one has done this, R. Moshe says, even if the Divine truth is otherwise (here and elsewhere, R. Moshe assumes there is a Divine truth, the Talmudic phraseאלו ואלו דברי אלוקים חיים notwithstanding; he would apparently align with those many rishonim who thought the Talmud only meant that both views in a debate were worthy of respect, not that both were right), the decisor has done his job correctly and has the right to rule according to his understanding.

R. Waldenburg comes to a similar idea from a different angle and point of interest (pp. 9-10 of the introduction to vol. 1 of Tsits Eliezer). He is discussing the Jewish people’s special connection to the Torah. For that purpose, he says, God separated the Torah into two parts, a Written and an Oral. According to R. Waldenburg, the Oral Torah, given only to Jews, includes our obligation to guard it by making protective laws to insure the observance of its essential ones, and novel ideas and derivations by sages using the hermeneutical principles by which the Torah can be expounded. This aspect of Torah, R. Waldenburg writes, was entrusted to the giants of the generations, the veteran students, and serves as a never-exhausted fountain flowing with both old and new ideas.

R. Ovadya Yosef, in the preface to the first volume of Responsa Yabia Omer, insists that proper rulings must start by consulting the Talmud, rishonim (who lived prior to about 1550), and even the very latest of the acharonim (paragraph 10), be grounded in proper comparisons, clear logic on how to compare one matter to another, understand the ramifications of a matter from its start, and use the hermeneutical principles by which the Torah is expounded (par. 5). He closes, though, with an impassioned defense of the right to disagree with other acharonim and, indeed, R. Dr. Benny Lau has noted that one significant aspect of R. Ovadya’s halachic career has been the attempt to dislodge rulings of the Ben Ish Chai from their hegemonic place in the Sephardic world of halachah.

All three, in other words, agree that legitimate halachic process will produce new ideas, sometimes startling ones, but there are right and wrong ways to do so. R. Moshe speaks of a hacham, a Sage, which implies some level of qualification; reading the sources, meaning there are rules of reading; to find the answer that seems to him the truth, which assumes truth and falsehood. For R. Waldenburg, the Oral Law is discovered by the correct application of certain rules, and that only by Jews, and generally only by the sages of each generation or the most veteran of students. For R. Ovadya Yosef, as well, there are clear principles of logic, not all fully defined in the Talmud and later writers, that have to be applied to the relevant literature—another equivocal term, since each of these three consulted a different set of sources as their necessary relevant literature—with the recognition that disagreement with earlier writers can arise and be legitimate.

To me, the key and notable common denominator of all three is that there is such a thing as legitimate halachic process, even as they each approached halacha in notably different ways. The challenge lies in its leaving us without any unequivocal way of differentiating valid from invalid processes. Instead, in coming posts I will offer questions whose answers seem to me to capture that line. While those questions leave room for disagreements, even vigorous ones– this is, after all, a Jewish endeavor– it also shows that those differences are meant to be from within a common framework, and that the framework is broadly definable, even if not exactly so. Next time, we begin building that framework of halachah.

What It’s Certainly Not About: Zionism

Last time, I finally offered my one-paragraph version of the mission. From here, there are really only three pieces of the project left: I want to deal with two aspects of Judaism that are clearly not vital to the mission and yet complicate our understanding of what we mean by Orthodoxy (or any other expression of Judaism) and then show how our understanding of the mission highlights ways in which Jews, as individuals and as communities, structure their lives so as to lose sight of the mission, of the central and focal aspects of what it means to be Jewish.

Before I get there, though, I need to deal with a complaint registered by readers of an earlier draft of these pieces. They noted that I have failed to include the obligation to live in Israel as part of the mission of Orthodoxy, an odd omission for someone with strong positive feelings towards both the Land and the State of Israel. For what we might call a card-carrying Zionist, wouldn’t living in Israel seem to be part of the mission?

To explain why my answer to that question is ‘no,’ let me start by noting that the historical phenomenon of Zionism has obscured an important unequivocal truth of the religion (although, as we will see, not necessarily a mission-shaping one). When Zionism began, some time in the late 19th century, many of its leading figures were nonobservant Jews, who came to their attachment to a Jewish homeland in ways that were not obviously or directly related to Torah and its values.

Even as some leaders of observant Jewry came to embrace the phenomenon despite its downsides, forming what we call Religious Zionism, many and probably most others felt that observant Jews should not join in this movement in any way. We can feel what we want about that—and my 20/20 hindsight can say what it wants, but I have no certainty as to what I would have done had I lived then—but that set of events and discussions is irrelevant to our sense of the Jewish importance of living in Israel.

None of those rabbis denied the great value Judaism places on living in Israel (as we will see today); the debate at the time—and continuing today, in a different way—was on whether it was the time to make a major push to go back to Israel, on the propriety of cooperating with the nonreligious, and other related issues. It is for that reason, for example, that the State of Israel today sees more and more “right-wing” Jews living there; now that the framework has been established, it becomes clearer all the time that an important part of a fully-lived Jewish life is residence in the Land.

Importance Need Not Indicate Mission

Let us review some of how we know about the value the religion places on living in Israel, so that my explanation of why I do not see it as unequivocally part of the mission of a Jewish life is not confused with devaluing the experience of living in Israel. Most prominently, it seems to me, is that the Torah revolves to a large degree around getting to the Land of Israel. Avraham is promised that his descendants will inherit the Land, the ultimate goal of the Jews’ travels after the Exodus is reaching the Land, and Moshe Rabbenu prays vigorously for the revoking of his punishment of exclusion from the Land.

There is also firm halachic evidence for the significance of living in Israel. In an example that is probably meant to stay theoretical, Ketubbot 110b and Shulchan Aruch Even haEzer 75;3-4 are clear that one spouse’s insistence on moving to Israel is grounds for a divorce with financial prejudice. That means, barring any sense that the partner pushing for aliyah is acting fraudulently, a wife can coerce the husband to divorce her and pay her ketubba if he refuses to go to Israel and vice verse, he can divorce her without paying it if she refuses to go. I stress again, this is only if the immigrating spouse is honestly interested in moving to Israel and that the Gemara is not necessarily espousing divorce for those purposes. Technically, though, that is a sufficient cause for divorce with financial prejudice.

If that is a version of the importance of Israel we would hope not to see put into practice, Ramban states the matter more simply. Noting that Rambam omits a mitzva to live in Israel from his list of 613 commandments, Ramban adds it in his collection of “forgotten obligations.” No. 4 reads, in relevant excerpts and my rough translation, “…it is a mitzva in all generations incumbent upon the individual even in a time of Exile.” As is well-known, Ramban made his way to Israel towards the end of his life, a fulfillment of the mitzva as he saw it.

But Rambam Didn’t See It That Way

The challenging view here is not Ramban’s, since he has and cites many sources, Scriptural and Talmudic. Rather, the question is why it is that Rambam omitted the mitzva. This is especially problematic since Rambam includes many of those same sources at the end of his Mishneh Torah. In the fifth chapter of Laws of Kings, he reviews the laws of מלחמת מצוה, obligatory wars, and of the prohibition to live in Egypt (a continuing puzzle, since he himself lived there for most of his adult life).

He closes the chapter by writing (again, in my translation):

Par. 9: It is always forbidden to leave Israel, other than to study Torah, to marry a wife, or to salvage property and then to return… or …a business trip, but to live outside… is prohibited unless there was a dire famine…

Par. 10: The great Sages would kiss the borders of the Land of Israel and kiss its stones and roll in its dirt…

Par. 11: The Sages said whoever lives in the Land, his sins are wiped away…even if he walks four cubits in it [he] merits life in the World to Come, and so, too, one who is buried there…but there is no comparison to where the Land absorbs…while alive to…after he has passed away…

Par. 12: A person should always live in the Land of Israel, even in a city that is majority idol-worshippers, rather than outside of the Land, even in a city that is majority Jewish, since anyone who leaves to outside the Land is as if he worships idols, as Scripture says [recording David’s complaint, I Samuel 26;19, about Saul’s chasing him, which forced him to flee the Land], “for they have expelled me this day from staying in the inherited land of God, saying go worship other gods” [implying that having been forced out of Israel was identical to being told to worship other gods].

Rambam’s including these ideas shows that he did not dismiss the Talmudic discussions as a lone or rejected opinion, but challenges us (and many who have come before us) to understand why he did not, therefore, include it as a mitzva.

Some suggested—and Ramban seems to have understood Rambam this way, since he goes out of his way to explain why he disagrees—that Rambam thought the commandment to live in Israel was only for the generation that first conquered it, even as its importance remained throughout history. It seems odd, though, that Rambam would recognize such significance to living in Israel and yet not accept its mitzva status. Possibly, this is just a technical matter, that he did not think the verses that Ramban cited established a continuing commandment.

I am, myself, more attracted to another possibility that my rosh yeshiva, R. Amital (among many others), suggested in my time in Yeshivat Har Etzion. R. Amital pointed out that living in the Land of Israel is a prerequisite for many other mitzvot, known as מצוות התלויות בארץ, mitzvot dependent on the Land. As Rambam himself had pointed out in the introduction to his work, he does not count as mitzvot those practices that incorporate or are prerequisite to all or large portions of the Torah. In this explanation, of course, Rambam does not count a separate mitzva to live in Israel because it is too significant, too essential to being Jewish to qualify as its own mitzva.

Messianic Hopes and the Land

To some extent, all of this should be unnecessary, in that it should be obvious that Israel is vitally important to a fully-lived Jewish life. We speak of our existence now as Exile, of the Jews outside of Israel as in the Diaspora, and pray often for a return to Zion and to a Temple-filled existence. We observe days of mourning for the loss of the Temple, we note, on each Shabbat and holiday, that the full observance of these days involved sacrifices in the Temple, and the list goes on and on.

In all of these senses, then, it would seem clear that Jewish life focuses on Israel, on Jerusalem, and on the longing for a Temple. I note that even if this were true, it would be another example of a God-centered focus, since one of the central functions of the Temple was to serve as a house of prayer for all the nations, stressing our Jewish sense of ourselves as those who bring a relationship with God to the world at large.

So, Part of the Mission, Right?

There is certainly more to be said about the significance of living in the Land of Israel in Jewish thought—whole books have been written on the topic. Our brief review, though, shows enough of that significance to make it plausible to wonder how I could leave that out of the essential mission of Orthodoxy.

I admit that I have no problem with including it, for those who see it that way. There is more than ample support for a Jew to say to him or herself, “It is part of the mission that God established for Jews to live in Israel, and from there serve God in all the various ways set up by the Torah, including especially improving the world and making it a kinder, more God-filled place.”

What stops me from saying that as an unequivocal aspect of Jewish experience is the fact that thousands of years of Jews have lived outside of Israel, forced by the hand of God that punished our people for our sins. In reaction, many if not most of them built lives of faith and commitment to God, many of them giants of Torah and/or righteous in a way I could hardly aspire towards, let alone accomplish. I cannot imagine implying that these people have failed to fulfill the mission of Judaism in its most minimal expression.

On the other hand, it does seem clear—and I believe such people would themselves have agreed—that Jewish experience is always significantly lacking when living outside of Israel, and when suffering with the absence of a Temple, its worship, and the related laws that come into play in those circumstances. We can define a mission that does not insist on those factors, but must recognize how significantly lacking it necessarily is. This is the condition of Jewish Diaspora, a condition that has been partially alleviated by events of the last century and a half, but will only be fully resolved once we see the full Redemption, speedily in our days.[i]

As we close in on turning this discussion to practical communal issues, we have two more questions to take up, the first being halachic process, the method of deciding Jewish law on a particular issue. As we have already implicitly noted in our earlier discussions, Orthodoxy accepts multiple answers on many issues, with only the caveat that those formulating these views followed a legitimate process to get there.

Understanding that process is vital because we have seen that the giving of the Torah was a central component of our relationship with God. If so, the process by which the authoritative understanding of that Torah and of how best to apply it in the realities of each generation is fundamental to, and conceptually prior to, actual halachic discussions.

We need, in other words, to find the lines between unequivocal, debatable, and illegitimate halachic statements. It is to that underlying issue of Orthodoxy that we will next turn our attention.

[i] I note the possibility the Redemption itself might occur or be occurring in stages, as I imagined in my Murderer in the Mikdash.

We are reviewing Rambam’s list of commandments that characterize a Jewish life. So far, over sixty percent of those mitzvot have focused on turning our attention towards God, whether in thought, with specific practices, or by observing certain holidays.

A further fourteen commandments in the list—almost a quarter of the whole– regulate the functioning of civil society at large, and family life in particular. These commandments are: 175) to follow the majority in disputes among the sages, 184) to remove dangers from society (the Torah’s specific example was constructing a fence around our roofs, but Rambam understood it to incorporate the broader imperative), 195) to do charity, to sustain the weak, 197) to lend money to a poor person, 206) to love our fellow Jews, 207) to love converts, 208) to correct our weights and measures as much as possible, 209) to honor Sages, to stand up for them, 210) to honor our parents, 211) to fear our parents, 212) to have children (at least one boy and one girl, a commandment not obligatory upon women), 213) to perform kiddushin (giving the bride a ring or other object of value) before marrying, 214) to have the groom stay with his bride—meaning, not to travel outside the city without her permission or to go to war– for the first year of marriage (restricted to males), 215) to circumcise our sons, (restricted to males).

The societal obligations here would seem geared towards establishing a benevolent and well-run society. Some aspects of that society are: fostering respect for religious authority (properly wielded), the rule of the majority balanced with bonds of love and concern extending both to “ordinary” and disadvantaged members of that society, and the creation of families.

These families are created by marriage ceremonies (as opposed to just living together, a halachically acceptable way for non-Jews to create marriages), are concerned with building a bond between husband and wife at the relationship’s onset, and are at least partially focused on the bearing of children and raising them with a sense of their attachment to the Jewish people (the mitzva of circumcision). Those children, in turn, owe their parents honor and fear, a sense that these people created him/her and should be seen in that way at all times.

Taken together, 85% of the mitzvot in Rambam’s list of positive obligations that characterize the ordinary male Jewish life throughout history are focused on developing a relationship with God, using holidays throughout the year to intensify awareness of some aspect of that relationship, and to build a society that can promote its members’ abilities to flourish in their God-centered lives. It is no wonder that Rambam saw all the mitzvot in the Torah as contributing either to תקון הנפש, the welfare of the soul, or תקון הגוף, the welfare of the body—the simplest readings of the most prominent mitzvot point that way!

Food and Its Positive Aspects

Almost completing the list are a set of obligations regarding food, several of which are unique to Rambam. The obligations he lists are: 146) to slaughter animals in the proper manner before eating them, (while there is some discussion as to whether this obligation should be counted as a separate mitzva, it is certainly an obligation and would characterize a Jewish life that involved the eating of meat or fowl), 147) to cover the blood of certain animals and birds after slaughtering them, 149) to check that animals have the requisite signs—chewing their cud and cloven hoofs—before considering them kosher, 150) to check that birds have their requisite signs, 152) to check the signs of fish (fins and scales).

These last three are interesting in that Rambam sees them as separate obligations, separate from the need to insure that we are not eating prohibited foods. Whatever he meant by that cannot be central to our discussion, though, since, as Ramban notes, Behag does not count them as separate mitsvot. We will therefore leave a discussion of that question—and other interesting ones, such as why Rambam skipped mitzvah 151, the obligation to check the signs of grasshoppers and similar insects[i].

We can note, however, that the eating laws of Judaism (and this applies, by and large, to the food prohibitions as well) all focus on eating once-living creatures. Other than questions of how they were prepared, both in their tithing and cooking, or whether they might be infested with insects, all grains, fruits, and vegetables are unregulated by Torah food law. This suggests that the food aspect of mitzvot was concerned with regulating how Jews partook of the animal world, not food in general.

Closing Up and Summarizing the List

Three of the mitzvot on the list do not unequivocally fit in any of the categories we have presented so far. The first two, 73) to articulate/confess our sins along with our repentance, and 94) to fulfill our oaths, seem to me to be examples of our relationship with God, but I need not push the point, and the last one, number 172) to listen to/obey a prophet, may also be part of the proper functioning of society, the proper respect for those who bear the word of God (see endnote 1 for a different suggestion).

Whatever we do with those three, and without pretending to have mined the wealth of ideas and insights each commandment on this list would provide, we have enough to offer an accurate if incomplete summary of the list. This subset of mitzvot, akin to the other sources we have consulted, presents Judaism as a religion focused on shaping people to know God, be aware of God (daily and in periodic intensive holidays), and apply that awareness to every facet of their lives, such as the communities and families they establish and the food they eat. Again, note the consonance of these conclusions with the emphases we saw in the theological posts, with the perspectives of mitzvot we found in looking at the karet and death penalty crimes, and in the six mitzvot that obligate all Jews at all moments of all stages in history.

Whether we build our view of Judaism from within Scripture—as in the texts to remember daily, the theology implied by the haftarot, or the Talmud’s understanding of the Prophets’ encapsulations of mitzvot— from Principles of Faith as articulated by Rambam and then discussed for centuries, or from different slices of the world of Jewish law, we find ourselves meeting the same basic ideas and principles.

So, here it is, the Mission of Orthodoxy, concisely stated: To live a life in constant awareness of the God Who took the Jews out of Egypt, gave the Torah at Sinai, and promised to reward and punish successes and failures at observing that. Central foci of those Torah observances are, again, looking to serve God at every turn, denying or rejecting all temptations to act in ways other than for the service of God (including, notably, wrongful sexuality), and building families, communities, and a nation that shares those ideals.

The clearest next step would be to show how that mission statement, in practice, differs meaningfully from how Orthodox Jews today live their lives, and I will get there, but there are several steps I need to take first. The first of those is to fulfill a promise I made several posts back, to show how this list of Rambam’s offers an interesting framework for one way in which Judaism differentiates men and women.

Rigid or Fluid Religiosity: Women’s Exemption From Prominent Mitzvot[ii]

I noted, back when we started discussing Rambam’s list, that Rambam offered a mnemonic to remember that there were sixty such obligations, the reference in Song of Songs 6;8 to sixty queens. When he mentions that women are only obligated in forty-six such mitzvot, he offers two other mnemonics. One cites a verse that refers to כי אזלת יד, that the hand has fallen away,[iii] the numerological value of the word יד, hand, being fourteen, and the second builds off of a second verse, גם את בדם בריתך, you, too, in the blood of your covenant,[iv] where the word בדם, numbers forty-six.

The two mnemonics have contrasting implications, the first seeming to see women’s list of obligations as lesser than men’s, a יד or fourteen of the mitsvot having fallen away. In the second mnemonic, though, he seems to indicate that women have a covenant of their own, a forty-six mitzva covenant (בדם בריתך, in the blood of your covenant) that would be equivalent to men’s.

That separate women’s covenant, judging from the list, focuses on larger religious ideals, not the specific manifestations of those ideals. For example, women are not required to lay head and hand tefillin or to wear tzitzit, but bear equal responsibility to believe in, think about, imitate, and serve God. So, too, they are exempt from specific manifestations of the holidays—shofar, sukka, lulav, counting the Omer—but are fully obligated in the positive commandment to actively desist from labor, to celebrate the holiday itself.[v]

Although this is too brief a discussion for a full-fledged theory, it suggests that one axis along which women and men differ is the specificity with which the religion chooses to shape their relationship with God. A woman may observe the holidays exactly as men do, in which case she will experience her status as אזלת יד, having lost obligations as compared to men. But a woman might equally—and with equal approval by the religion—choose not to sit in a sukkah, not to shake a lulav, and develop her own sense of how to celebrate what God did for the Jewish people in the desert and throughout the year. For such a woman, the covenant would be בדם בריתך, a forty-six part blood-covenant connecting her to God.[vi]

That may be a nuance within our broader discussion, but it again brings us around to realizing that Orthodox Judaism sees itself as entailing commitments to a relationship with God and a shaping of oneself in the image of God. For men, those terms are more explicitly defined, less so for women. The overall thrust of a Jew’s religious endeavors, male or female, is the same: recognizing, accepting, and furthering the awareness of God in one’s own life and in the world.

While, as I mentioned, the next step would be to see how the view of Judaism we have elicited from the sources does or does not match contemporary reality. Before we can take up such questions, we need to address three topics also vital to Orthodoxy, two of which the system never fully addresses nor labels essential.

First is a question that has only become even available for asking in the last 100-150 years, the status of living in the Land of Israel as part of the mission of Orthodoxy. Next time, then, we will try to evaluate the strength of the Jewish connection to Israel, whether it reaches the level that we can unequivocally declare living there part of the mission. Beyond that, we take up two broader questions, the first being halachic process, the method of deciding Jewish law on a particular issue, and the second being the sociological component to Jewish observance. We will explain both those in more detail after next time, when we consider the role of the Land of Israel in Jewish thought and aspiration.

[i] The surprise in this is that Rambam counts the obligations to check the signs of animals, birds, and fish, and skips grasshoppers, even though it appears in between birds and fish. Possibly, Rambam expected people to eat meat, birds, and fish during an ordinary life but not grasshoppers, although we know of no reason that should be so. To me, pairing this oddity with another one, that he included Mitzva 172, the obligation to listen to prophets, suggests a more interesting possibility.

Since Judaism has not seen recognized prophets since the beginning of the Second Temple, Mitzva 172 sticks out in a list of mitzvot that apply in all times to an ordinary Jewish life. Rambam may have assumed there were prophets in every generation, which would be revolutionary and interesting in its own way. Famously, the late Abraham Joshua Heschel suggested that Rambam may have thought of himself as a prophet; if that were true, it would fit well here.

My own suspicion, with no evidence to back it up, is that Rambam wrote קנ”א, 151, and an early copyist misread it as קע”ב. That would mean, though, that aside from misreading the letters, the copyist moved mitzva 151 to the place for 172. Still, it explains both otherwise odd aspects of the list.

[ii] Other factors differentiate the religion’s treatment of the two sexes, such as the different requirements of צניעות, modesty, for each. I do not mean here to completely explain how men differ from women in Judaism, just to note one aspect of the question for which Rambam’ lists suggests an answer.

[iii] Devarim 32;36.

[iv] Zechariah, 9;11.

[v] Their exemption from the commandments relating to family—the groom staying with his bride for a year, the obligation to have children, and to circumcise boys—suggests that they were not held responsible for family-creation, a topic for a different discussion.

[vi] Having dipped a toe into the question of women in Judaism, I also note how little these lists focus on communal life, one of the areas where many women have been most offended by their exclusion. Without meaning to deny the value or importance of communal worship and activity, the sources nonetheless suggest that the core of Judaism does not obligate or insist that such activity shape a Jewishly lived life. If so, the exclusion of women from leadership roles, right or wrong, amenable to change or not, is less significant to the Jewish view of a relationship with God than Western society, with its focus on public and prominent achievement, leads us to believe.

Just the six commandments we studied last time carry significant enough policy implications to fuel the discussion of how Orthodoxy ought to change to more faithfully strive to fulfill its mission, but Maimonides gives us material to go one step further. In closing his presentation of the 248 obligations laid out by the Torah, Maimonides lists sixty that apply to all male Jews in all places, at some point in the course of an ordinary life. To remember the number, he offers the mnemonic “ששים המה מלכות,” sixty are the queens, from Song of Songs 6;8.

Forty-six, he notes, apply to women, a number for which he gives two mnemonics, “וגם את בדם בריתך,” and also you in the blood of your covenant (where the word בדם, in the blood, counts for forty-six in gematria, the numerological reading of Hebrew letters) and כי אזלת יד, for hand (יד, or fourteen) has fallen away. We will be able to understand the implications of these two mnemonics better once we have seen how the women’s list of mitzvot differs from the men’s.

Studying the lists will show us, I think, a broader presentation of an essential Orthodoxy (for men and for women) and also offer substantiation of an idea I shared previously about how the religion differentiates men and women. I should note before we start that, as with Behag’s list of death and karet-penalty prohibitions, there are some disagreements about elements of Maimonides’ list—some mitzvot he counts among the 613 that others would not, for example—but not such as to weaken the conclusions we will be drawing from the list itself.

Maimonides’ Sixty Queens

As we have done before when faced with a lengthy text from which we seek to elicit its central and recurring themes, we will forego a mitzva-by-mitzva discussion of this list. I do this, first, because the detail involved in such an effort, which could only build from finding each mitzva’s internal logic and motivations,[i] would obscure our larger goal, finding the essential overall message of this set of commandments

Too, such a study would necessarily involve interpretation of mitzvot in a way that could not stay unequivocal. I mention this to remind readers that while we can accomplish much that is important and necessary by staying with the unequivocal, we are also foregoing other vital projects for a full experience of a personal or communal Orthodoxy.

Staying at a more general level, highlighting unequivocal patterns of the sixty, we can still find an overall perspective these mitzvot mean to inculcate in the Orthodox Jew.

In presenting the sixty, I have chosen to split the list into groups. While I acknowledge that this prejudices the presentation, I hope readers will see the patterns I do, and agree that that they jump out of the list on their own, rather than my imposing them on it.

Building Awareness of God

The first nine mitzvot in Rambam’s list are (the number before each mitzva is where it appears in Rambam’s list of 248): 1) To believe in God (a First Cause); I note that Behag omits this mitzva, an omission Ramban defends by saying that this is a foundation of all the commandments rather than a commandment of its own. For us, the distinction is irrelevant, since they agree that this belief is, as a matter of halacha, necessary to Jewish life. 2) to believe in the unity of God, 3) to love God, 4) to fear God, 5) to serve/worship God (through prayer, Torah study, and in other ways), 6) to cling to Torah scholars as an expression of clinging/cleaving to God, 7) to swear in God’s Name, (Ramban disputes what exactly the verse in question obligates, but agrees that taking an oath in God’s Name is an act of connecting to God, 8 ) to imitate God (or God’s Attributes) to the extent possible, 9) to sanctify God’s Name (to spread belief in God throughout the world).

I have grouped these first nine– fifteen percent of the sixty—because they offer a framework for every adult Jew to build his or her awareness of God. They tell us both that we need to build a life in relationship with God, and much of the how of doing that. While love and fear are perhaps hard to define—some might see Torah study as the highest road to love, others might find appreciation of the universe a more effective method, while yet others might do so through helping others—the obligation to build a relationship with Torah scholars, since they can best guide people on the path to cleaving to God, is more clear. So, too, tradition assumed that Jews imitate God’s Attributes primarily in the realm of human interactions, in their acts of justice and kindness.

Finally, at least for Rambam, the need to spread the knowledge and awareness of God similarly assumes that Jews will be people whose ideas and ways of life will be attractive enough so that they will draw others in to worshiping the one true God. Others, such as the Tosafists, understood the obligation to sanctify God’s Name more restrictively, as a question of Jews’ loyalty to Torah, refusing to abandon it in the face of persecution. As this is debated, we will not elaborate on it here, but push on with the list.

Practical Tools For That Awareness

Seven more mitzvot—another ten percent, bringing us to over a quarter of the list—offer practices that reinforce the ideas and worldview embedded in our first group. They are: 10) to recite Shema morning and evening (this commandment is not incumbent upon women),[ii] 12) to wear head tefillin, (not women) 13) to wear hand tefillin (not women), 14) to wear tzitzit, (not women), 15) to place mezuzot on doorposts, 19) to bless God after eating,[iii] 26) that the male priests should bless the people every day (only male priests).[iv] In all of these, Jews will be continually reminded of the lessons of the first nine, and given frameworks within which to consistently encounter God.

The role of priests is particularly interesting, since much of their function within the nation was lost with the destruction of the Temple. In addition to their continuing obligation to bless the people, two other mitzvot that persist independent of a Temple’s existence suggest that priests’ serve as representatives of God not just as Temple functionaries. Jews are 32) to honor male priests, as an extension of the honor of God, since God chose them to serve in the Temple, and 143) to give to a priest (male or female) certain parts of animals that are slaughtered, suggesting that we treat priests this way less because of their onetime Temple service than because they continue to serve as representatives of God. Three of the sixty mitzvot thus remind Jews of priests’ niche in the Jewish system, and, at the same time, of the loss of the Temple as a continuing lack in the full expression of the system itself.

Torah Study: Solely Informative or Spiritually Illuminating?

Two other commandments, 11) to study Torah and to teach it, and 18) that each man own a Torah scroll of his own, preferably writing it himself (not women), seem focused on awareness of God, but leave enough room for debate that I will not insist on the point.

Before I explain my perspective, I note that I have grouped these two together even though Maimonides does not explicitly see them as related to each other. Rosh (R. Asher b. Yechiel, late thirteenth-early fourteenth century, Laws of a Torah Scroll 1), however, did, which led him to suggest that in a time when Jews study Torah from books other than official scrolls, the mitzva changes into an obligation to own sufficient books (or today, perhaps, CD-ROMs) to support one’s Torah study.

I suspect Maimonides agreed, or would have if faced with Rosh’s logic, since he excludes women from the obligation to write such a scroll, see Laws of Tefillin 7;1. While others have explained this away, it seems to me that the most convincing reason to exempt women from this mitzva is to see it as an extension of the mitzva of Torah study; exempt from one, exempt from the other.

Now for why I think these two mitzvot should also be thought of as geared towards furthering continuous awareness of, and relationship to, God. First, Scripture and tradition’s conception of the need for constant Torah study, expressed in verses such as “לא ימוש ספר התורה הזה מפיך,” this scroll of the Torah shall not leave your mouth, fits best with seeing Torah study as geared to more than just acquiring the necessary knowledge to be a good Jew.

Rambam seems to share that view, since he included the Rabbinic statement that study is a form of worship in his definition of the obligation to serve God. In addition, Kiddushin 30a says that knowledge of the Five Books of the Torah fulfills a father’s basic requirement to teach his son Torah. Since Jewish law resides in the more than just the Written Torah, that the Talmud is satisfied with knowledge of the Written fails to insure students will know how to act. Were the point of the mitzva to foster practical observance, it seems unlikely the minimum requirement would fail it.

Second, as we noted in a previous post, that same Talmudic discussion connects Torah study to the memory of the Giving of the Law at Sinai, with little emphasis on knowing how to act Jewishly. True, that same page of the Talmud speaks of having words of Torah so sharp in one’s mouth as to be able to answer any question asked, but the context suggests that it means knowing how to answer questions about the text of the Torah itself, not its halachic applications.

Depending on how we conceive of the mitzvot of Torah study, writing a Torah scroll, and those relating to priests, then, just over or just under a third of Maimonides’ list either directly mandates building a connection with God or sets up frameworks for it to occur.

The Holidays

Seventeen more mitzvot—almost thirty percent of the list– focus on holy days, Shabbat and the Yamim Tovm, defining them as days to desist from creative labor, presumably and sometimes explicitly to force Jews to set aside time to work on their awareness of God. These mitzvot are:

54) to rejoice on the Festivals, 154) to desist from creative work on the Sabbath, 155) to sanctify the Sabbath with words, 156) to remove leavened bread from our houses on the fourteenth of Nisan, 157) to tell the story of the Exodus on the night of the fifteenth of Nisan, 158) to eat matza on the night of the fifteenth of Nisan, 159) to rest on the first day of Passover, 160) to rest on the seventh day of Passover, 161) to count forty-nine days from the cutting of the Omer (not women), 162) to rest on Shavuot (which Rambam refers to as Atzeret, the Mishnaic term for the holiday), 163) to rest on the first day of Tishrei, 164) to afflict our souls on the tenth day of Tishrei, 165) to rest on the tenth day of Tishrei, 166) to rest on the first day of Sukkot, 167) to rest on the eighth day of Sukkot, 168) to reside in a Sukka for the seven days of the holiday (not women), 169) to take a lulav and celebrate with it before God for seven days (although only one outside the Temple, not women), and 170) to hear the shofar on Rosh haShanah (not women).

Much can be said about the holidays, but not so much that is unequivocal. What we can say unequivocally is that, as a positive element in a Jew’s experience of the year, there are periodic days devoted to withdrawing from the world and focusing on some aspect or other of the Jew’s relationship with God. These days are defined by both general obligations to desist from creative labor as well as specific ritual acts that give a shape and substance to the messages of the day.

Including the holiday commandments, sixty percent of Rambam’s list of the mitzvot that accompany an ordinary Jewish life serve to shape and focus a Jew’s attention on God and his or her relationship to that God. The exact shape might be open to differences of interpretation and nuance, but once again we find ourselves, now in a fully halachic context, seeing just how central the focus on God is in a well-missionized Jewish life.

Next time, God willing, we will see the rest of Rambam’s list and then summarize the basic vision of Judaism we have found by coming at the question from our various and multiple perspectives.

[i] I have an unpublished file entitled Sixty Queens: Towards an Essential Jewish Observance. That short book examines each of these mitzvot on its own terms, and builds a picture of an essential Orthodoxy from there. The general conclusions of that analysis largely match those offered here, although I there allow myself to share personal and therefore equivocal understandings of those mitzvot.

[ii] Future mitzvot that do not obligate women will be noted by a parenthetical “not women.”

[iii] Maimonides here does not exclude women, although the Talmud is uncertain as to whether women’s obligation in Grace After Meals stems from Torah law or rabbinic ordinance.

[iv] Ashkenazi Jews outside of Israel hear these blessings only on holidays. I assume Maimonides was focusing on the experience of the blessing, since only priests are actually obligated to administer it.

Our focus last time on prohibitions showed us what the religion sees as so wrong as to make life untenable. What the religion requires us to avoid, however, is not the same as what it is trying to build. Prohibitions outline the negative space of religion, the relationship with God formed by that which a person refrains from doing; the positive commandments set up a more active relationship in obligating Jews to do something.

Here, too, we need to find a way to measure significance, to see whether some mitzvot stand out as more mission-forming than others. We cannot turn to punishments, since only two positive obligations are punished in such a severe manner. We will have reason to revisit those two– the willful failure to offer the Paschal sacrifice and a man’s failure to be circumcised– but punishment cannot be the determining rubric.

Another signifier of importance we used in the case of prohibitions, level of repentance required, also fails us here. As we saw, the Talmud tells us that atoning for the failure to fulfill positive commandments is in fact easier than even the “ordinary” prohibitions, since it comes by repentance alone. From this perspective, positive commandments seem less important than prohibitions.

Could the Positive Be More Mission-Shaping Than the Prohibited?

One halachic principle points us in another direction, explaining the status of positive obligations, and encouraging our search for the mission-defining ones. Although the specifics are complicated and not our issue, there is a rule that עשה דוחה לא תעשה, that if a simple prohibition is standing in the way of fulfilling an obligation, the commandment “pushes aside” the prohibition.

One example would be tzitzit, the strings placed at the corners of any garment that has four or more corners. Some of those strings (the exact number is a matter of debate–one, two, or four, depending on which view we follow) are supposed to be dyed with תכלת, a bluish dye. Garments of wool or linen are obligated in tzitzit, while techelet-dyed strings are made of wool. A Jew who wished to wear a linen garment with four corners would need to put on wool strings, a violation of the prohibition of שעטנז, shatnez. The principle of עשה דוחה לא תעשה explains how this is allowed: the commandment of tzitzit pushes aside the prohibition against wearing shatnez. (1)

Positive commandments’ ability to override prohibitions, in at least some circumstances, tells us that severity of punishment is not the only way to judge an act’s value. I suspect this is because fulfilling positive obligations gives content to a religious personality. The prohibitions tell what is off limits, what damages religiosity, but do not actively advance a connection to God (except insofar as avoiding what is wrong is itself a step towards God). Positive commandments open doors to a deeper and richer interaction with the Creator.

That would explain why repentance alone suffices—the failure to perform a positive commandment is a missed opportunity, whereas the transgression of a prohibition is an actual wrong that must be wiped away. If I fail to invest in a stock that then rises, I have missed the chance to make money, but if I steal I am in possession of money that does not rightfully belong to me. Sins need to be atoned; lost chances need only to be regretted and taken off the table as candidates for future neglect.

Ubiquity as a Marker of Missionality

When we were looking for texts and ideas that were more mission-shaping than others, we looked to those that the Torah insisted stay in our consciousnesses continuously or at least continually. With mitzvot, too, we find commandments that are more consistently part of a Jewish life, thus molding the central character of Judaism.

Two such lists of positive commandments offer examples of what we might consider the mission of Orthodoxy. First, Sefer HaChinuch, the thirteenth century discussion of the Torah’s commandments, notes that six of the 613 apply to all Jews, male or female, at all times of their lives, without break or pause, regardless of geographical location or historical era. Clearly, such timeless and universal obligations are foundational to a Jew’s relationship with God. However we define the Jewish mission, these six have to be part of the answer, since they are what the system demands of all Jews all the time.

The six are:
1) to believe in God,
2) to refrain from believing any force or power in the universe can
compete with God,
3) to believe in God’s Unity,
4) to love God,
5) to fear God, and
6) not to stray after the thoughts of one’s hearts or after one’s eyes.

We discussed much of the theological content of these commandments in discussing the Biblical texts we are supposed to always keep in mind, so I will not belabor it here. What I do want to note is how much of Jewish belief turns out to be legislated by halacha, and in a way that makes keeping those beliefs in one’s mind and awareness a more characteristic part of an halachically sensitive life than any particular ritual act.

It is a Jewish law, not just a matter of faith, to continually and continuously believe in God, to refrain from believing in any competing powers, and to assert God’s unity. Not only are these laws, they are laws that are obligatory and relevant every moment of a Jew’s life. This should, it seems to me, be a final death-knell for almost any version of Orthopraxy one advances; even if a person chooses to claim that Orthodoxy is about halacha, halacha requires, at all moments of every Jewish life throughout history, holding to these beliefs.

These mitzvot also offer good first examples of a sub-theme I have occasionally noted, women being commanded in an underlying principle even if not the specific act that expresses that principle. Here, women as much as men are required to always believe in God and God’s Unity, even though they are not obligated to utter the specific assertion of those ideas, the Shema.

Active Involvement With, Not Just Belief In, God

The other three commandments show us that, as a matter of Jewish law, faith requires more than an internal experience. The further obligations to love and fear God, emotions that must shape how one acts, so that a Jew is always required to be relating to God, at each second of his or her day. The multiple ways to accomplish this are perhaps the reason people do not recognize them as halacha, since they cannot be boiled down to a specific act or paragraph of Shulchan Aruch. They are obligations nonetheless.

Perhaps the best expression of this is Rambam’s description of a life lived in the constant attempt to get closer to God, in Deot 3;3. There, Rambam notes that even sleep and other bodily activities can be considered fostering one’s relationship with God, as long as they are undertaken for that purpose. I can go to sleep, or on vacation, or to eat a fine steak for the pure enjoyment, or I can do those (and other activities) out of a considered and sincere judgment of how they will enhance and advance my service of God.

There is a Chassidic story that makes this point, although I confess I have forgotten the names of the rebbe and the chassid who are the heroes of the story. Whoever they were, they were each about to eat an apple. As they sat looking at their apples, anticipating the eating, the chassid (who comes across as not so much of a chassid, so it’s perhaps better I’ve forgotten his name) thought to himself, “Really, how is the rebbe so different from me? He eats and I eat.”

The rebbe, being a rebbe, understood the thought, and asked his chassid that very question. When the chassid admitted he did not see the difference, the rebbe said, “I’ll tell you. You decide you would enjoy an apple, and to allow yourself that pleasure, make a bracha beforehand. I decide I would enjoy blessing my Father in Heaven, and to get to that pleasure, I eat an apple.”

The commandments of love and fear tell a Jew the set of questions he or she should ask of all activities—is thinking this thought, performing this act, indulging this pleasure, promoting a better relationship with God, neutral, or, Heaven forefend, a contradiction of what God wants of me? If the answer is the latter, fear should ideally prevent the Jew from being able to take that course of action; if the former, the action should be taken enthusiastically, an expression of one’s love of God; if neutral, taken or not, but recognized as outside the realm of one’s religiosity.

Safeguards and Their Role

The final mitzva in the six, as ubiquitous as the others, warns the Jew to continuously and continuingly avoid enticements away from God, intellectual or appetitive. With the mind the seat of thinking and the eyes the vehicles of desire, the last of the constant mitzvot adjures the Jew to recognize the frequent, perhaps constant, lures away from God the world presents. I think that this mitzvah being always incumbent suggests we are meant to be ever-alert for such dangers, not just to resist them as they come along.

In this mitzva as well, it is impossible to give specifics, since each person is prey to different lures or attractions. What I believe can be said unequivocally is that Jews need to always recognize the possibility that an idea or bodily pleasure will engender thoughts or feelings that run counter to a God-centered world. That recognition obligates us to critically consider each of the ideas and pleasures we imbibe, to see not only whether they are prohibited by some specific halacha, such as pork, but also whether they are such that they lure a person, either intellectually or appetitively, away from God.

A story about the late R. Shlomo Carlebach makes the point well, I believe. In the 1960s, he founded his House of Peace and Love in San Francisco in an attempt, as far as I know, to give Jews a path back to God. One of his students, by that student’s own recollection, ingested a lot of drugs while there. He relates that R. Carlebach saw him one morning and said something along the lines of, “If it brought you closer to Hashem, I wouldn’t say anything; but as it is, you stay up late, miss all the Torah study classes, and are unable to think straight.” Whether or not drugs violate a specific paragraph in the codes of Jewish law, he was saying, they demonstrably qualify as things that take a person away (in that case, probably both intellectually and appetitively) from service of God.

These six mitzvot, then, already shape a worldview considerably more theology and God-focused than even many Orthodox Jews currently realize. They envision a Jewish life as one of constant devotion to the One God, both in the sense that there are no others and the sense of Unity intended by the Shema. That devotion should express itself, at least, in a desire to grow in both positive (loving) and awe-filled (fearing) aspects of the relationship, and of an awareness of the possible threats to that devotion the world tends to present, to be ever-alert to those dangers, and to resist them when they come close.

As I have noted before, and will again as we go along, once we have seen these obligations, we can be sure that whatever else the religion wants of us is meant to expand on these six, not compete with them. Any Judaism that does not place them front and center, whether by indulging in non-Jewish values or even by adhering to other Jewish values but in a way that contradicts these six is, by that very fact, essentially and mission-failingly lacking.

Having taken such a huge step in our understanding of the Jewish mission, the next step will be to see Rambam’s list of sixty essential commandments, and the picture of the religion they give us. See you next time.

(1) Beitza 8b. אנצקלופדיה תלמודית, the Talmudic Encyclopedia, vol. 2, p. 81, notes that we generally assume that a positive commandment cannot push aside a karet prohibition (again highlighting the severity of this class of prohibitions, as in the previous post).

In the introduction to his eighth century Halachot Gedolot, one of the earliest compendia of Jewish law we have, the author (known as Behag, the acronym for Baal Halachot Gedolot, author of Halachot Gedolot) provided one of the earliest extant listings of the 613 mitzvot, and grouped them by punishment, so that a part of his list gives us exactly the subset of prohibitions we were seeking. While some of his choices were subjected to later critique, particularly by Maimonides, enough of his list is universally accepted that we can use it without abandoning our search for unanimity.

Behag notes eighteen commandments punishable by stoning. Just before I begin, let me note and reiterate that Judaism never favored the wholesale, or even infrequent, use of the death penalty. These penalties would only be administered in the most extreme cases, where the sinner flagrantly and willfully flouted communal mores. We are here looking at these penalties only as markers of the severity of the transgression involved.

Acts That Could, At Their Worst, Deserve Death by Stoning

Several of the sins mentioned in that context are sexual, so let me also note that the Torah not only prohibits intercourse, but also “coming close” to such relationships, although that would not incur the death penalty. The definition of “coming close” is certainly not unequivocal, so I mention it only to point out that the Torah is opposed to any such inappropriate sexual activity. It is only that some such activity is so serious as to lead to a person’s death (and to be clearly mission-shattering), while lesser such activity is merely reprehensible.

Similarly, the halachic notion of אביזרייהו, mentioned in Sanhedrin 74b, tells us that while we might not administer the death penalty for extensions of such relationships (or of murder and idol worship, for that matter), the person faced with such a sin would have to allow him or herself to die in many circumstances rather than transgress even such an extension. That, too, suggests these areas are deeply problematic— meaning, I think, mission-destroying—not only in their most extreme version, but even ordinarily.

One last technical note: Between all the versions of death and karet, we are going to quickly list almost eighty prohibitions here. I do not intend to comment on each of them, only to note patterns that characterize the whole list. As you read through the lists, therefore, I hope you will try to get a sense of the overall picture presented by them rather than getting caught up or bogged down in trying to memorize or characterize each one.

Stoning Prohibitions

The first six prohibit sexual intercourse with 1) one’s mother, 2) one’s father’s wife (meaning, even if she is not the man’s mother), 3) one’s daughter in law, 4) another man, 5) an animal, 6) a woman engaging in bestiality.

The Torah and Behag mention the female partner in the last of those because there was no male human involved. The Torah addresses the man in the other sexual prohibitions presumably because it assumes the man initiated such sins, but both willing partners are fully implicated in the crime and the punishment. Completely unwilling partners, male or female, bear no liability, although the definition of “completely unwilling” would require further clarification in a full discussion.

The next sins on the list move away from wrongful sexuality, no. 7 being blasphemy, no. 8, idolatry, no. 9 giving one’s children over to Molech worship, no. 10 & 11 being Baal Ov and Yidoni. I did not translate these last two because there is debate about which types of witchcraft or sorcery they are, and because the definition is not vital for our discussion.

The twelfth stoning sin on Behag’s list is desecrating the Sabbath, no. 13 being cursing a parent, no. 14 having intercourse with a נערה המאורסה, a girl between the ages of 12 and 12 ½ who has been betrothed to another, no. 15, attempting to lure individuals to idol worship, regardless of whether the attempt succeeds, 16, attempting to lure a group to idol worship, 17, being a witch, and 18, being a rebellious son.

I note that each type of death penalty is a subcategory on its own, and would likely reward consideration of any overarching themes running through that subcategory. I am less sure, however, that such themes could be identified unequivocally, and therefore leave that for another time.

Prohibitions That Deserve Burning or Death by the Sword

An additional nine sins are punishable by burning: A man having sexual intercourse with 19) a woman and her daughter (and they with him, as we noted above), 20) his own daughter, 21) his granddaughter through a daughter, 22) his granddaughter through a son, 23 & 24) his wife’s daughter and granddaughter, through her son or daughter, 25) his mother-in-law, 26) his mother-in-law’s mother, 27) his father-in-law’s mother, and 28) a priest’s daughter who commits adultery. The male partner in that last case would receive the ordinary punishment for adultery, strangulation.

I find two points worth noting about this list. First, it is entirely about problematic sexuality, and second, while there is debate about whether and which of these should be separate prohibitions, the punishments for these acts are universally accepted.

Only two commandments lead to death by the sword: 29) murder, and 30) committing idol worship as part of a city where the majority has similarly worshiped.

Sins That Incur Strangulation

Nine are punishable by strangulation: 31) hitting a parent, 32) kidnapping, 33) a qualified elder contravening a ruling of the Great Court, 34) being a false prophet, 35) prophesying in the name of an idol, 36) having intercourse with a married woman, 37) and she with him. I notice, as I am sure you have, that Behag here singles out the adulteress as a separate commandment when he did not do so for other female sexual infractions. As I have mentioned, Rambam and others disagree with Behag’s count of sexual infractions in this and other areas. As they do not argue about the prohibition or the punishment administered, though, we can safely leave that discussion for another time.(1)

Excision

The punishment of excision, or karet, is ordained for a man having intercourse with: 40) his sister, 41& 42) his aunt, paternal or maternal, 43) his wife’s sister, 44) his brother’s wife, 45) his uncle’s wife, or 46) a menstruating woman. In addition, various eating sins incur karet, such as 47) prohibited fats, 48) blood, 49) leavened bread on Passover, 50&51) eating or performing prohibited actions on Yom Kippur, 52) leftover sacrifices, 53) or those sacrifices that became פיגול, having been offered with wrong intention, and 54) a ritually impure person eating sacrificial meat. Staying with the Temple but not eating, we find karet for 55) entering while ritually impure, 56& 57) slaughtering and offering sacrifices outside the Temple, 58-60) making or anointing oneself with the ritual oil of anointing, or making the incense, 61) failing to offer a Paschal sacrifice, and, last, 62) failing to circumcise.

Any one of these transgressions, committed willfully, suffices to exclude a person from the nation, which suggests there should be an explanation of their essential importance to Jewish observance. Both for the sake of brevity and because those kinds of analyses are rarely so convincing as to be unequivocal, I restrict myself to noting general patterns.

The Importance of Sexuality

Twenty-six of the sins we just noted—over forty percent (slightly less for Rambam, but not significantly)—deal with prohibited sexuality. In today’s environment, this bears repeating and emphasizing: of all the prohibitions in Judaism that incur either the death penalty or excision, forty percent stem from illicit sexuality. This would seem to mean that Jews, as part of the mission of the religion to which they adhere, are meant to be members of a people that bear witness to God’s view of appropriate sexuality as the base standard for the human condition.

In stressing that, I note that wrongful sexuality (defined slightly differently) applies to non-Jews as well as Jews, so that this part of the Jewish mission is to declare a universal ethic about sexuality, one at great odds with common assumptions of contemporary Western thought. It is also true that the Torah itself tells us that violating these sins will lead the Land of Israel to spew out those who do so, as it did to the nations that inhabited the Land before us.

I emphasize this so because it is not only out of sync with Western culture, but with much of the Orthodox world today. Perhaps because of a laudable desire to help sinners find their way back to God, the past century and a half has seen a revolution in Orthodox responses to sinners. In the last five decades, as Western society’s sexual ethic has changed, there has been a move within Judaism to also be more sensitive to the great pressures and struggles faced by people challenged by frowned-upon sexual urges.

That reaction, it seems to me, can be completely true and appropriate in the individual case, but the recognition that these sins are central to the Jewish mission is equally important. In all cases of wrongful sexuality—and, from a Jewish perspective, they are all the same, situations where well-intentioned human beings are struggling with a sexuality that wishes to express itself in ways God declared completely off-limits, whether that is through adultery, a close relative, a woman who is menstruating, or two men together– our practical approach to dealing with specific sinners raises different questions than our communal policies and attitudes. In the latter, it is part of our mission to declare and insist on striving for what should be, difficult as it may be to get there.

Summing Up the Rest

A further eleven of the prohibitions have to do with the Temple and its service. Some of those still apply today, such as not slaughtering or offering sacrifices outside the Temple, but it is an area we can mostly leave for another time. It does show the centrality of proper treatment of the Temple in a full Jewish experience, and should reinforce our awareness of how inherently lacking we are in our ability to fulfill the basic mission of the religion in the absence of a standing Temple.

Ten Commandments legislate issues of idolatry or witchcraft, reminding us of the religion’s concern with focusing worship solely on God, on not turning to other powers for assistance or protection. Finally, five sins on the list focus on the three most significant holidays of the year, the Sabbath (captured in one prohibition, although one with 39 parts, the prohibited creative labors of the day, the willful commission of any of which suffices to incur the death penalty), Yom Kippur (the prohibitions on creative activity and eating), and Passover (the obligation to bring the sacrifice and the prohibition against eating חמץ, leavened bread).

Sum total, eighty percent of these significant sins focus on sexuality, the Temple, idolatry, or three central holidays. Interestingly, the holidays in question carry a strong theological component as well, Sabbath being explicitly a reminder of both the Exodus and Creation, Passover of the Exodus as the foundation of the Jewish people’s relationship with God, and Yom Kippur as a day of atonement, a reminder of judgment, Providence, and reward and punishment.

Building only on this foundation, we would have to say that the mission of Orthodoxy is to build a relationship only with God as controller of the universe, to the exclusion of any other candidates, to cultivate a sexual sanctity defined by the limits set by these mitsvot, and using certain times of the year (and, ideally, a central place) as specific vehicles of sustaining and furthering the relationship with that God.

That picture comes out of the prohibitive approach to the religion, and yet is still consonant with what we have seen before. Next time, we will begin working on the positive approach, and see if that takes us to the same place.

(1) A similar complication of deciding what to include in the 613 bedevils Behag’s no. 38, witnesses who falsely testify against a priest’s daughter. This would seem a detail of the prohibition of עדים זוממין, false witnesses who receive the punishment they attempted to impose on their victim. Behag apparently counts it because they receive a different punishment than the female victim. Either way, they do receive the death penalty, and thus belong on our list. So, too, with no. 39, the man who has adulterous intercourse with a priest’s daughter, who gets a separate appearance on Behag’s list for his differing death penalty.
The offering priest assumes, during one of the crucial aspects of offering the sacrifice, that the sacrifice will be eaten after its right time, invalidating the sacrifice.

The world of halacha, Jewish law, gives an impression of clarity or exactness that, to some, makes it more attractive as a way of defining Jewishness than theology. In this idealized version, certain practices earn admission to Orthodoxy, freeing us of the need to analyze whether another Jew passes theological muster. For such people, if a Jewish man has a beard and sidelocks or, in other communities, cares about Sabbath observance and the dietary laws, he must be Orthodox. Similarly, this mode of thinking leads many to assume that a Jewish woman who covers her hair and wears ankle-length skirts must be Orthodox.

I write here to show that that view misses much of the essence, the defining mission aspects, of Orthodox halachic life. That is, even were we to ignore the previous posts in trying to articulate a mission of Orthodoxy and focus only on the world of halacha, I believe I can show we would find our way—again, unequivocally, in ways that no one could dispute– to similar points. The irony is that taking this path will offer an even more specific version of Orthodoxy, yet one that even fewer people realize needs to be the defining qualities of their religiosity.

Are Mitzvot the Same as Halacha?

Some points of introduction: First, I will speak a great deal about mitzvot, operating with the assumption that if something is a Torah-obligated mitzva, it is also part of halacha. While any Orthodox Jew must concede that God gave not only the mitzvot in the Torah, but also an Oral Law, such as the authoritative interpretations of certain verses, as well as laws given to Moses at Sinai but not recorded in the Torah, and left room for rabbinic ordinances and legislation, it all started with mitzvot.

I mention this because one of the clearest signs, to me, that Orthodoxy has strayed from its foundations is that this connection is not recognized even by some of the most educated Jews. To many, halacha is what is found in books of codification, while other mitzvot, those not as clearly codified, are matters for hashkafa, Jewish thought. I know this from personal experience because I once worked at a school where the curriculum substituted a class in Sefer haChinuch for a halacha class. Some of the most vigorous complaints came from teachers, who complained they were not getting the chance to teach halacha.

Such people do not deny the importance of mitzvot, but their experience of Judaism is such that the bread and butter of the religion is found in those areas with an easily accessed halachic literature, such as the laws of blessings, Sabbath, or Sukkot. For many mitzvot, though, that literature is both less well-known and less exactly defined (1).

This leads to the misconception that these topics are a matter of Jewish ethics, recommended laudable behavior rather than strict obligation, or that there is such a welter of opinions on how to fulfill them, there are no right and wrong ways to do so. Granting the challenge of ill-defined parameters, I still note that this leads to many Orthodox Jews neglecting actual mitzvot, laws ordained by the Torah. By neglect, I do not mean only failure to observe, I mean ignorance of the obligation. This is all the more problematic when the laws I highlight here are often demonstrably more central to how God intended a Jewish life to be shaped than the ones we include in our regularly lived halacha.

Looking For the Mission of Mitzvot

Even as I restrict my search to mitzvot most identifiably mission-defining, I again stress that Jews are obligated to keep all mitzvot with as much dedication and alacrity as possible, regardless of source of the obligation. My search here is only to be sure that our human limitations do not lead us to focus on a subset of mitzvot that neglect the most indispensable ones. These “mission” mitzvot do not define a good Jew, since goodness stems from maximal effort; rather, they set the parameters of what is necessary to be part of the system at all.

As when we were looking for Biblical texts (click here), we need a method of identifying mitzvot that mark the mission of the religion. Aviezer Ravitzky, whom I quoted earlier (click here), suggests that the foundations of Judaism should be seen in those commandments for which a Jew is required to die rather than transgress. His reasoning that such a requirement indicates an overriding importance seems sound, except that it only applies to situations of stress, where an outside actor is attempting to coerce the abandonment of Jewish values.

We here, though, are interested in the vital and mission-forming aspects of an ordinarily-lived Torah lifestyle, some of which God might temporarily forego to save a Jewish life. For an easy example, Sabbath observance is not one of those three, so that in many cases a Jew would be allowed to violate the Sabbath to save his or her life (or someone else’s). Yet being Sabbath observant is indubitably part of the mission of Judaism, as we have seen, since it was mentioned in the Decalogue, and as we will see.

That leaves us with the question of what standard to use in judging a mission-shaping observance. To answer it properly, I note the halachically significant distinction between commandments and prohibitions. When the Talmud mentions that there are 613 mitzvot in the Torah, it immediately adds that 365 are prohibitions and 248 are commandments(2). This raises the possibility that mission-shaping prohibitions might be defined differently than mission-shaping obligations. Since the line between merely important and centrally mission-defining is clearer with prohibitions, I will begin there.

The Chief Prohibitions: Capital and Karet Crimes

For all that tradition adjures us to observe the commandments without regard to severity, it also takes for granted that the severity of punishment the Torah delineates for an act reflects the severity of the sin itself. I think it interesting that Rambam chose the Mishna in Avot that stresses the importance of all mitzvot to mention this hierarchy. Without intending to subvert the Mishna’s lesson that we have to work as hard as we can at all parts of halacha, Rambam reminded us that we should not take that exhortation so far as to forget realities of the halachic system, in which indeed some mitzvot have more of an impact than others.

From that perspective, within the world of prohibitions, those that incur monetary liability are less severe than those that invite lashes. At the top of this list are those transgressions that, if committed in the most extreme fashion, would bring upon the person either the death penalty or karet, excision.

It is always sad to contemplate the possibility of a human court, or God, taking someone’s life as punishment for a crime. To make sure we not get the wrong impression—I once encountered a teen who answered “we kill him,” any time he was asked how Judaism reacted to a crime— I want to pause to point out that administering punishment is demonstrably not the intent of instituting them.

In the case of the death penalty, we know this because the detailed technicalities of meting it out make it almost impossible to do, as the Mishna Makkot (1:10) noted in its famous comment that a court that puts someone to death once every seven (or seventy) years is too quick to cause injury. For karet, tradition assumed that courts could administer lashes as atonement, allowing the sinner to escape with less severe punishment than his actions justly called for.

While we might question how the Torah expects us to enforce laws if it makes its prescribed punishments almost impossible to act on in practice (3), the fact of it being so suggests the value of these punishments lies at least as much in their giving us a sense of the relative severity of sins as in their being actualized. The Torah categorized some sins as incurring death or karet liability, I am suggesting, at least partially or mostly to let us know that these were, in fact, more serious than others.

Other Indications of The Severity of Death Penalty/Karet Sins

Support for that view comes from the חילוקי כפרה, the different kinds of atonement required for different sins, advanced by Yoma 86a. There, the Talmud tells us that those who have failed to observe a positive commandment need only repent to find atonement, those who have transgressed an “ordinary” prohibition need repentance and the experience of Yom Kippur, while those who violate a death penalty or karet prohibition need both of those plus יסורים, suffering. (There is an even higher level, of those whose sin is not atoned until all of these and death, but the category of חילול ה’, of desecrating God’s Name, is not well-defined, and will, I think, be covered in other mitzvot we will discuss). Here, too, the longer process, and the insistence that actual suffering will be necessary for expiation of sin, suggests a more severe transgression.

Truth be told, however, I do not think we need to go that far. The Torah is clear that these are sins that would cut the sinner out of society, either by a court being empowered to put him or her to death, or by God doing so, in the form of karet. We are being told that Israel’s tent is large enough to accept and incorporate thieves or talebearers, terrible as such sins may be. Violating the prohibitions we are about to discuss, though, requires removal, to, in the Biblical phrase, “cut that soul off from its nation.” (4)

The Yom Kippur service performed in the Temple also shows that the failure to adhere to these obligations weakens a person’s right to be considered a full member of the Jewish people. Shevuot 12b tells us about the expiation provided by the שעיר לעזאזל, the scapegoat sent out to the desert, which secured atonement for all Jews. The Talmud notes that sinners did not even need to repent to receive this Godsend, a surprising claim on its own terms.

However, the Talmud says, those whose sins were among the חמורות, the severe ones, which at least includes those (5) that incur the death penalty or excision, would not benefit from that service without the sinner’s having repented first. Exclusion from the national sacrifice and the atonement secured thereby seems at least a promising way to identify transgressions that rise to some more significant level of importance to Jewish faith and practice.

Not Quite Unequivocal

I have gone to such lengths to support my point because there is a counterclaim. Minchat Chinuch several times notes a comment of Ran to Yoma that seems to say that a repeated transgression, such as eating several pieces of forbidden meat, might be more severe than a one-time occurrence, such as killing an animal on Shabbat. He also suggests that Rabbinic commandments might be more severe than those ordained by the Torah, because of his understanding of the Torah’s prohibition against violating the Sages’ words.

It would take us too far afield to deal with his claims, but I find them unconvincing, first, because of the other, universally accepted sources I offered here. Most likely, even accepting his claims would only affect certain areas of halacha, certain choices of priorities in specific situations, but not the overall perspective of the system. For that reason, I will proceed next time on this assumption, that the prohibitions for which the Torah prescribes death or karet are so central to the mission of Judaism that transgressing any of them forces the sinner out of the community. Looking at what the Torah included in that list should surely, therefore, give us insight into what is vital to Jewish character, identity, and fulfillment of our mission in the world.

(1) Although still abundant to those who know how to look for it. For an example of the application of erudition to mitzvot that might seem to lack halachic content, see R. Daniel Feldman’s The Right and the Good: Halachah and Human Relations (Yashar Books, 2005) as well as Divine Footsteps: Chesed and the Jewish Soul (Lambda, 2009).

(2) Makkot 23b, a text that we discussed somewhat in this earlier post (INSERT LINK).

(3) A question Ran took up in his Derashot, but not our issue here.

(4) As in Genesis 17;14 and numerous other places.

(5) Rambam limits it to these, see Laws of Repentance, 1;2; Kessef Mishneh thinks it is possible that the category includes even more transgressions, but takes for granted that these should be included.

We have been working our way through Rambam’s Thirteen Principles of Faith, noting that even as some parts of them have been disputed, others have been universally accepted. After we review the last one—one of the most debated, in its details at least—we can see how they combine together to offer another path to identifying the foundation of an Orthodox Jewish experience of the world.

Resurrection of the Dead and Its Uncertainties

The final principle, resurrection of the dead, also generated much controversy. Until Rambam, virtually all Jewish thinkers had conflated the Resurrection and the World to Come. I would note that this view seems to accord best with the simplest reading of Sanhedrin 90a, which tells us that the punishment for denying a Scriptural basis for the belief in resurrection—it is not enough, in other words, to believe that there will be a Resurrection, the Mishna mandates accepting that there is Scriptural basis for that belief– is loss of the World to Come. The Talmud says the punishment is מדה כנגד מדה, measure for measure, which seems to mean that being barred from the World to Come is exactly parallel to sinning regarding resurrection.(1)

Rambam’s insistence that the ultimate reward is purely spiritual, and bodily resurrection only temporary, was so revolutionary that it led many, admirers and critics, to conclude that he did not really believe in resurrection. Despite his several explicit statements of his belief, both camps suggested he had included it only to avoid antagonizing others. The private or esoteric Rambam, in this view, did not really think a bodily resurrection would ever occur.

This is another example of what I mentioned last time, that the centuries since Rambam lived have seen many who thought he asserted certain beliefs, despite their being untrue, because they were necessary for the masses. I reject this and other extreme esoteric readings of Rambam’s because I know of no place he allows for such falsehoods. He does speak of contradicting himself, but explains that as an unavoidable result of trying to articulate complicated truths. Since those truths are too complex to be told all at once, he felt forced to record partial truths in scattered places, which might seem contradictory to each other. The irony, to me, is that this was his way of reaching to greater truth, whereas his readers have assumed he meant it as a way of allowing himself to lie.

Rambam also speaks of necessary truths, beliefs that are important for the masses even though they are not fully true. I emphasize the adverb because of the chasm between making statements that are not fully true and ones that are untrue(2). Many readers of Rambam comfortably see him as having lied repeatedly for the sake of the masses, prescribing false beliefs because they need them; I believe, but cannot prove, that he saw each statement he made as true in some way, with the whole truth to be found only by combining the various statements together.

Admittedly, that is my own strategy for reading Rambam and I cannot insist that others adopt it in the current context. In that light, I will not include the belief in resurrection—despite the clear Mishnaic assertion to the contrary—in my articulation of an unequivocal mission of Judaism, since many have assumed that Rambam himself did not actually believe it, his protests to the contrary notwithstanding.

That does not mean or imply any personal doubts about this Principle or its Jewish necessity; it only means that as I try to rejuvenate Orthodox awareness of the most unequivocal mission of an Orthodox Jew, I cannot elevate consciousness of the resurrection to that level. What I see as a wrong minority, but a persistent one, claims that Rambam himself did not actually believe in this; I disagree, but am writing here only that which is absolute and unequivocal.

Beliefs as a Lived Experience

Let me repeat at this point that beliefs shape a sense of mission even if we are not obligated to work to spread those beliefs. Often, people mouth a belief without recognizing its ramifications. I have heard Orthodox Jews, for example, speak about whether some course of action is prudent, since it might lead to the annihilation of the Jewish people. If by annihilation the person actually means the total destruction of world Jewry, he or she has lost track of the necessary worldview of a Jew, and holding that worldview while living life is part of the mission of Judaism.

While, God forbid, large percentages of the Jewish people may be destroyed, as the Holocaust proved, an Orthodox Jew can never worry about its happening to the entirety of the people, since we have a guarantee of the future redemption, the restoration of an halachic monarchy to Israel and the Jewish people. That underlying belief may not always free us from fear—we would also not want to act so as to endanger large segments of Jews, either—but Jews are supposed to always recognize and accept that we know the ultimate course of history.

So, too, the belief in the World to Come, whether physical or spiritual, can take its place on our list. The confusion about the nature of that World complicates incorporating it in people’s lives, but it at least means that Orthodox Jews must, as an essential part of their worldview, see a future in which accounts are balanced and closed for what has happened in the rest of world history. That has at least two parts to it: first, the constant awareness that there are no actions without consequences, good or bad, and, second, the certainty that death is not the end; while what comes after may be daunting, part of an Orthodox Jew’s mission is to constantly approach life and its happenings with the certainty that there is something beyond death to which we aspire and a place in which we are all promised.

To put one practical touch to that piece of the discussion, I wonder at the different forms that a fear of death takes among Orthodox Jews. There are many legitimate Orthodox reasons to fear death. Berachot 28b tells of the deathbed of R. Yochanan b. Zakkai, who explained that he was afraid of God’s judgment. The moment of death, in that perspective, is one in which we will face our Maker, and be confronted with the absolute truth about our various personal failings, and is, appropriately, a fear-inspiring one. The Vilna Gaon is reported to have cried on his death-bed because of the impending loss of the ability to perform mitzvot; Rabbi Soloveitchik spoke of Judaism’s abhorrence of death in similar terms, its quenching human creativity and closing off our ability to contribute to perfecting God’s world.

But I doubt that this is the fear of death felt by ordinary Orthodox Jews today. I speak only anecdotally, but conversations around death, end of life care, and the emotions those arouse seem to me, often, to occur in the absence of any lived or felt belief in a continued existence beyond death, one culminating in a World to Come to which all but the worst of sinners are guaranteed a place. Once again, then, as we review ideas that might seem purely theoretical, we see that they would, properly absorbed into our consciousnesses, shape our actions and contribute to what we see as our mission as Orthodox Jews.

The Principles: A Final Review

Our run-through of the Thirteen Principles of Faith has shown us how much of that core has remained so despite the armies of thinkers who critiqued them in the centuries since Rambam released his writings to the public. We find general agreement about central ideas inherent to including oneself in the religion.

Four of those make claims about God, that: 1) God is omnipotent (although perhaps not able to perform the logically impossible), 2) unitary (a term open to debate), 3) at least by now, that God has no physical body in the ordinary sense of the words, and 4) that God is prior to the world, whether chronologically or ontologically.

Beyond the direct God-propositions, we found that Jews must believe in prophecy, in the special qualities of Mosaic prophecy (although here there was room, according to some thinkers, for competitors, none of whom, however, have produced works that affect us today). Moses’ prophecy produced the Torah, and Jewish faith obligates Jews to see the historical Torah in their possession as for all intents and purposes the same as the one given to Moses. Further, barring either another prophetic revelation (or direct encounter with God) as public as the original; the Arrival of the Messiah, which may bring some halachic changes; and/or the workings of the halachic process to uncover hitherto unrealized aspects of a law, Torah law remains in full force in perpetuity.

Successful observance of that Torah or failure to do so will, again according to essential beliefs, be recorded and remunerated, although the exact mechanism of each of those is disputed. Some of that compensation will come in the form of a future redemption/return to a Jewishly organized society with a Temple, whether the redeemer will be a human being or God. Finally, there will be some sort of resurrection, physical or spiritual, ushering worthy souls—including all Jews not excluded by their sins—into the World to Come.

With all the caveats we have invoked, we still find in the Principles a basic worldview that is accepted by all traditional Jewish thinkers and that must therefore characterize an Orthodox Jew. Not surprisingly, much of that worldview is already included in the basic texts and memories we saw earlier in this chapter, those that Scripture and/or the Rabbinic tradition singled out for special attention.

Orthodoxy, with all its internal struggles and disputes, takes significant and unequivocal positions about the nature of God, the nature of the Jew’s role in the world, the existence of record-keeping and judgment over how well Jews’ fulfill that role, and the course of human history. The religion expects Jews to keep those ideas consistently and continually in mind, by reminding themselves at least twice daily of the Exodus, always remembering the Giving of the Law at Sinai, having the lessons of Haazinu in their mouths, and at least twice daily rehearsing the theological ideas in the first two paragraphs of Shema.

Theology has been vital to our discussion thus far because what we believe shapes our underlying perspective of the world. As I have noted several times (and will again), to define a full theology (which is necessary for any full Jewish life) would require going farther than I can as long as I restrict myself to the universally accepted. There are many other important, even necessary, beliefs for an Orthodox Jew, but they are not ones that have been stressed or even agreed upon by all thinkers. Rationalists and kabbalists, Zionists and anti-Zionists, Hasidim and Mitnagdim, and others would each articulate fundamental faith statements I have not included here.

Those other statements might lead to such great divergences among Jews that we could almost not recognize them as adhering to the same faith. My review of the basic building blocks of Orthodoxy is meant to show that no matter where we go from here, Orthodox Jews share a core set of commitments, a core approach to the world, and that the bonds of that approach constitute at least some of our shared sense of mission.

Aside from my fixation on unequivocality, theology is also limited in that it does not take us into the world of mitzvot, of commandments, the most identifiable characteristic of a Jew’s religious life. In the next posts, we will turn to that world, again looking for the core, mission-shaping, obligations of the religion. I hope to show that what is often thought of as the ritually focused aspect of Judaism exhibits the same God-centeredness and theology-focus we found until this point. In doing so, we will take an important step towards recovering what Orthodoxy was really supposed to mean, allowing us to contrast it with where public policy has put it until now.

(1)We cannot know how Rambam would have interpreted that section of the Talmud; I would suggest that he might have seen resurrection as a necessary prerequisite to the World to Come, so that the measure for measure was the loss of resurrection. Without resurrection, though, the person would not be able to get to the World to Come, and would lose that as well.

(2)Much like the distinction between being mostly dead and all dead, but I leave that for another time.

Last time, we saw the first five of the Principles and which aspects are universally accepted by Orthodox Jews. Today, we will see the next seven, leaving the last, and a summary of their overall thrust, for the next time. I should mention now that that will bring to a close the ideological side of our discussion, the finding a mission of Judaism by looking at ideas, beliefs, or memories, that the religion has stressed. From there, we will move on to the halachic world, to see how its messages match, supplement, or diverge from what we have found so far.

Prophecy, Especially of Moshe Rabbenu

As with earlier Principles, our search for an unequivocal version of Rambam’s Principles of Faith lets us only partially accept the sixth and seventh, which state that prophecy exists and that Moshe Rabbenu’s was greater than anyone who preceded or followed him. It is clearly an essential and therefore mission-shaping belief that God communicates with human beings, but there is much debate about when and how that works. We will take only that minimal statement, leaving a hashing out of the details for other venues.

More trouble comes with the claim that Moshe Rabbenu was better or greater than all other prophets. Talmudic and Midrashic sources suggest that Ezra and/or Balaam reached his level, and various rishonim, medieval scholars, argued that the Messiah as well will surpass him in prophecy. We can safely sidestep those debates, since they have minimal impact on our current experience of faith and the texts of tradition.

We cannot so easily avoid the claim by some kabbalists that they had reached a greater understanding of divine matters than had Moshe Rabbenu. While Shapiro cites R. Shneur Zalman of Lyady’s explanation that these kabbalists came to this knowledge through their intellect rather than through prophecy, he nonetheless sees it as contradicting Rambam’s assertion.

This is, indeed, a dispute, but a dispute about whether knowledge of God can only be achieved by prophecy. Within the realm of prophecy, we can safely say that Orthodox Judaism universally believes that there is such a phenomenon, and in the special qualities of Moshe Rabbenu’s prophecy - other than the three possible exceptions - as prophecy. We would also need to note the two sides to the question of whether prophecy or intellect offers the greatest knowledge of God.

Not incidentally, the belief in prophecy means that Orthodox Jews need to reject much of the modern attitude towards Scripture. There might be some room to argue that some parts of Scripture are not prophetic, a difficult subject we will see in discussing the next principle, and tradition differentiates among the prophetic levels that inspired the Torah, Prophets, and Hagiographa. But the fundamental belief that Scripture represents God’s direct communications with special individuals implies an attitude towards those writings, and the truths they contain, that goes beyond the respect we allot to really insightful but non-prophetic writers.

There may be interesting literary themes, or development of motifs, or wordplay in Scripture as in other texts, but they are above all else the record of God’s communications with human beings, and the truths they contain are those revealed to us by God, not by the extraordinary insight of special human beings. Comments such as “Isaiah was concerned that…” in studying that book may convey the impression that prophecy reflects a prophet’s ideas, rather than his or her articulation of God’s messages.

I do not want to go too far in saying that—there is room to see an individual element to prophecy, although how it works is, to my understanding, a complex and undefined topic. I might think, for example, that Yirmiyahu and Yechezkel, who prophesied in the same era, produced different bodies of work because of differences in their personal circumstances. To say that, though, I would have to say either that God tailored the messages sent to each one because of those differences, or that each prophet was more attuned to certain aspects of the divine Voice than others, again based on those circumstances. However that aspect of it works, though, the fundamental point that we need to remember is that the content of these prophecies must be seen as the result of communication from God, a qualitatively different experience than what we colloquially call inspiration.

A Necessary Debate: Torah From Sinai

The next principle has been the subject of much controversy, since it seems to require a belief that every letter of the Torah that we currently have was given to Moshe Rabbenu at Sinai. The problem, as Shapiro documents at length, is that numerous authoritative pre-Maimonidean sources recognize errors in the transmission of the Torah, and, further, sources that seemed to accept the possibility that scattered phrases of the Torah (or as much as the last twelve verses) were written by others. Generally, those were assumed to have been produced by Divine inspiration, but some dispute even that.

That this is well attested in pre-Maimonidean sources means that Rambam certainly knew of them as well, so the challenge is not to figure out what we believe so much as to figure out first what Rambam meant. Shapiro has his own suggestion, one that relies on a view of Rambam I have already said I find untenable, that Rambam put forth a principle he knew to be untrue but that he thought was important for the masses to hold. More plausible, to me, is that Rambam meant a narrower expression of the Principle, such as the one Shapiro cites from the late rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Ner Israel, R. Ya’akov Weinberg (1923-99). After mentioning some of the points already made, Weinberg states:

Rambam [Rambam] knew very well that these variations existed…The words…`the entire Torah in our possession today’…should be understood in a general sense that the Torah we learn and live by is for all intents and purposes the same Torah that was given to Moshe Rabbenu [our master, Moses]. (1)

As an essential Orthodox position, we can do no better. Recognizing and accepting that pieces of Torah have a tortured history, whether in specific letters or words, and that the authorship of some sections is in some dispute, we are still left with the significant claim that the vast bulk of Torah is directly dictated by God.

This belief becomes significant, among other circumstances, in one’s attitude towards the Torah and the values contained therein. If Torah law comes directly from God, our discomfort with particular commandments is a failure to understand God’s Wisdom, and needs to be experienced as such. Since God is omniscient enough to know how to limit those laws that are only relevant in certain times and places, any time we dismiss a Torah law that God did not so limit, by suggesting, for example, that it reflects the values of the time in which it was written, is to forget that God made these laws, not humans. A mitzvah legislated without limits is a mitzva the divine wisdom has ordained universal and timeless, and we need to recognize it as such, whether we understand it or not.

The ninth principle states that the Torah we have will never be changed or abrogated. The vast majority of the sources that Shapiro collects to show that other thinkers thought the Torah would change have to do with the Messianic era (especially on questions of whether the Temple service of the future will differ from the past) or the time after the Resurrection of the Dead. Since neither of those are relevant today, the principle stands for our time.

It is also true that certain laws are conditional, so their applicability changes over time. Much of the agricultural law relevant to the Land of Israel, for example, only takes full Biblical force when the majority of the Jewish people are living there. The understanding of the laws of moneylending has changed over time, a phenomenon we will have to consider when we get up to discussing the role of halachic process. It is thus not the point of this principle that all Torah law applies at every moment of history, but that the Torah in principle applies at all time, and that without some recognized limitation on a rule’s applicability, it should be seen as stating an eternal value of the Jewish people.

The Possibility of Change in Torah Law

Moving away from the eschatological (and therefore not yet relevant), Prof. Shapiro cites the opinion of R. Joseph Albo, author of Sefer haIkkarim, that were a “new prophet to arise whose mission could be verified in the same public and miraculous way in which Moses’ mission was verified, it would be possible for the commandments of the Torah to be abolished.”(2) Along the same lines, R. Jacob Emden and R. Abraham Chaim Viterbo insisted that God could inform us that the Law had changed.

As with earlier cases, these animadversions of the Principle are irrelevant to our present conditions, since we do not have a prophet of the kind Albo conjectured, a direct revelation from God calling for a change in Torah law, or the rebuilding of the Temple accompanied by the arrival of the Messiah. The Jew today who would wish to fulfill the religion’s most basic mission would have to agree, at least for now, that all of Torah law remains in full force.

This perspective has an important corollary I have not seen stressed. Given a Torah obligation, an Orthodox Jew would have to assume that the mitzva is also the right way to act. Part of believing in an omniscient God is the belief that that God knows how to legislate for all times and places; questioning the morality of mitzvot, then, could only happen within a framework of seeking a better understanding, not from a place of doubt as to the commandment’s basic morality. I note this because even in my limited experience I have met many Orthodox Jews, even prominent thinkers of the movement, for whom this is not true. This bears, therefore, repetition and consideration, to remind ourselves of the mission of the religion and the obligations it places upon us.

God’s Knowledge

Shapiro shows the following limitations to the Principle regarding God’s knowledge: Rambam does not assert that God knows people’s thoughts, Ibn Ezra and others claim that God chooses not to know particulars, but can if He so wishes, and Gersonides—who, as Shapiro notes, was roundly criticized for this view—argued that God only knows in a general fashion, following the universal laws of nature. There is room, then, for a sophisticated discussion of what Jews must believe about what God does or does not “know,” and we should recognize that there are several Orthodox options for how to answer that question.

Reward and Punishment and the Messiah

Prof. Shapiro records much dispute about the belief in reward and punishment. Some see it as naturalistic, meaning that God constructed the world in such a way that it itself rewards and punishes; e.g. the Land of Israel might “naturally” enter into a drought when the Jewish people worship other gods, or “naturally” spew the people out if they engage in incest. Similarly, Shapiro assumes that Rambam himself saw reward and punishment as extending from the impact that observance and sin have on the person; as he or she is changed, the world responds to that person accordingly.

At the other extreme, some see retribution as a function of direct intervention, God stepping into the world to reward and punish. However it works, there is universal agreement about the basic position that people are compensated for their deeds and punished for their misdeeds, whether in this world or the next.

The next Principle, the belief in a future redeemer, includes, for Rambam, that that redeemer necessarily descends from King Solomon (not just King David). In his discussion, Shapiro cites those who disagree and claim that God will Himself provide the future redemption. Shapiro also devotes much time to the status of R. Hillel, a Talmudic sage who opined that the Jews had already used up their Messiah. Although R. Hillel’s view is immediately rejected, the Talmud does not clarify whether his view was rejected but was, at least until then, a legitimate possibility (such as, in halachic contexts, the views of Beit Shammai) or was never plausible.

Even assuming the latter, the example alerts us to the difficulty and necessity of distinguishing the two. There are ideas that are plausible within the system but are eventually rejected, and then there are others that are not even a possibility. In our current case, since all major Jewish thinkers agree that the belief in a future redemption, whether by a Messiah or by God Himself, is essential to Jewish faith, we are left to conclude that a person who denies this belief will necessarily walk a life path that cannot lead where God intended, goodwill, good faith, and sincerity notwithstanding. He or she will have lost sight of part of the mission of Orthodoxy Judaism, asserting a view of history that includes the full redemption of the Jewish people

(3).

One further area where critics say that Rambam stepped too far is in the necessity of the Messiah’s Solomonic descent, which Rambam asserted in several places but not the Mishneh Torah. This question, like that of whether God will be the final redeemer, is less significant for us than remembering that central to an Orthodox view of the world is the confidence that there will be an historical redemption, which will include at least a reestablishment of a Jewish monarchy in Israel, a rebuilding of the Temple, and an ingathering of exiles.

There is only one Principle left, which we will see next time, and then be able to summarize the mission of Orthodoxy, when approached from the ideological side of the sources of Judaism. After that, we can take on the same task from a legalistic approach, and see whether that gets us to the same or different places.

(1) Shapiro, p. 116. I recognize contemporary thinkers who strive to assert one can be Orthodox and yet believe in a Torah not given to Moses, such as Prof. James Kugel’s How I Read the Bible. I will not here delineate my personal disagreements with his arguments; it suffices to note that he and those like him have, with all good intentions, stepped outside the bounds of how Orthodox Jews approach the Torah.

(2) p. 124

(3) Shapiro, p. 147, does note R. Abraham Hayim Viterbo’s claim that this issue should not be taken so centrally as to make it a Principle. From the quote, Viterbo seems to have categorized the Messiah as an issue of reward and punishment, whereas we are interested in the question of the Jewish view of history.

Once we leave the Talmud, we still find a rich literary tradition seeking to define the core mission of the religion. As we try to summarize those elements accepted as fundamental and indispensable to Orthodox adherence by all Jewish thinkers, we will start with Rambam’s Thirteen Principles of Faith.

Principles of Faith: Post-Talmudic Constructions of a Jewish Mission

I mentioned in an earlier post that Prof. Marc Shapiro recorded a wealth of sources proving that those Principles were not unequivocally accepted throughout Jewish history, but the Principles still provide a useful starting point. First, in my personal understanding (Prof. Kellner debates this), Rambam offered his Principles for reasons similar to mine here, as a way to help the ordinary Jew realize that one can be a Jew in good standing, despite sin, as long as he or she has not crossed certain red lines.

It is for that reason, it seems to me, that Rambam closes his first presentation of his Principles– in the Introduction to the Mishna Commentary on the chapter of tractate Sanhedrin called Chelek– with the following words:

And when all these foundations are established for a person…he has entered the Jewish people, and it is an obligation to love him and to have compassion on him and [to extend to him] all that God commanded us one to another in terms of love and brotherhood. Even if he has sinned as much as he could due to his lusts and the conquest of his evil inclination, he will be punished according to the greatness of his rebellion, and he has a share [in the World to Come], and he is among the sinners of Israel.

Rambam seems to me to be advancing a mechanism by which we can decide when a sinning Jew has gone too far; as long as that Jew has not rejected the underlying theology of Judaism, he or she cannot yet be fully excluded from the community of Israel. Similarly, in the third chapter of his Laws of Repentance, where he lists people whose beliefs exclude them from a share in the World to Come, his concern seems to me to be less the World to Come per se than defining those sins that, on their own and regardless of whatever else this person has done, sunder a relationship with God and require a different level of repentance than ordinary sin.

If I am correct, the literature on Jewish dogma, starting with Saadya Gaon, aimed at the same goal as I have set myself, identifying those beliefs and attitudes that allow a Jew to feel consoled that he or she, despite a perhaps full list of human failings, can still consider him or herself within the purview of striving to fulfill the religion’s mission.

The Unarguable Within the Much-Argued

Even if some would disagree with me on that claim, Prof. Shapiro helps us more directly. While his main concern was demonstrating the debate that arose around many of Rambam’s ideas, he also recognized Principles or parts of them that were in fact universally accepted. As we review those indeed unequivocal theological assertions, we will find many of the same notions as we have already discussed, adding to our sense that they are the essence of the religion, the view of the world that is supposed to sit most centrally for a Jew in his or her daily life, shaping his or her actions throughout that day.

Some readers might suggest that past need not predict future, that what has been unequivocally accepted might now become arguable, that we might now find reason to deny them. The flaw is that those who disagreed with Rambam claimed that Judaism never believed what he asserted, whereas today many would like to say that Judaism used to believe x (such as Divine authorship of the Torah or the direct revelation of God to the entire people at Sinai), but we now know that y is closer to the truth. That kind of argument has no basis in traditional Jewish thought.

To demonstrate, I will take the Principles in order. This will take a bit of time, but by the end, we will have etched out a skeletal set of ideas about God and his impact on the world that have stood the test of time, and need to shape any Orthodox Jewish life.

First Principles: The Existence and Nature of God

The first principle, as Prof. Shapiro puts it, “declares that God exists, that He is perfect in every way, and that He is the cause of the existence of all things.” In the ensuing discussion, he only notes that whereas Rambam conceded God cannot do the impossible, the thirteenth century Tosafist R. Moses Taku and, later, R. Nahman of Bratslav, insisted that that limited God too much, that God could do the impossible.

We do not have to wonder which position is correct, since it is at least true that Jews must believe in a God able to perform all miracles that are not logically impossible. Allow me to note a few, to give a sense of what it means to believe in God’s power. It would mean that God could, if He so chose, bring victory to a vastly outnumbered army, prevent a nuclear bomb from detonating even once its chain reaction had been set in motion, bring illness to select groups of people identified as sinners (and/or protection or healing to a select group who had earned God’s favor), and provide untold wealth to a nation seemingly bereft of resources.

There is room to argue about which of these God would do, or whether a specific incident does or does not stem from God’s intervention—as we have noted each time the topic of Providence comes up– but the possibility is well-established in Jewish thought, and thus needs to be part of any believing Orthodox Jew’s approach to the world.

The second principle speaks of the absolute unity of God. As Shapiro notes, kabbala seems to diverge from this worldview, particularly that segment of kabbalistic thought that speaks of Sefirot. These are either emanations from God or might, according to some views, be aspects of God Himself. Within that discussion are sub-questions of which Sefirot performed which functions, and the acceptability of praying to those Sefirot.

While Rambam would have objected to much if not all of this as violating the notion of God’s absolute unity, the kabbalists themselves thought they were well within the bounds of his Principle. Shapiro notes,

“It is true that the kabbalists all believed that their detailed speculations on the God-head did not damage the fundamental unity of God. Yet from a Maimonidean perspective… they indeed violated the intent, if not the letter, of the Second Principle.”

For our purposes, this means we can accurately say that all Orthodox thinkers have required Jews to assert the absolute unity of God (the Shema says so as well, as we have seen), although the exact definition of the word “unity” is disputed. Any belief that openly rejects that unity, however, inherently strays from the core mission of the religion.

The third principle, God’s incorporeality, sparked discussion for several reasons. Most crucially, the simplest reading of some Biblical and Rabbinic sources indicates that God has some sort of a body. Rambam and his followers read those texts figuratively, but others did not.

Two distinct non-Maimonidean positions emerged. Some insisted on a corporeal view of God (notably, R. Moses Taku, whom we have seen before). That could range from seeing God as physically similar to humans, although both bigger and more perfectly formed, to seeing God as having some physical essence, but of a qualitatively different and better substance than our own.

Others conceded Rambam’s view, but refused to label the belief in God’s corporeality heretical. Here, too, some did so only for the masses who were not sophisticated enough to know otherwise, while others conceded that even advanced scholars might erroneously come to believe in God’s corporeality. These debates are largely irrelevant to our concerns, since Shapiro himself agrees that by our times, the belief that God has no body has taken full root within traditional circles, and would seem to therefore be essential to any version of Orthodoxy.

Creation of the World and the Worship of God

These first Principles speak of God Himself, as it were. We now come to those that discuss God’s interactions with the world and with people. The first asserts God’s priority (probably both chronologically, that God came first in time, and ontologically, that God is necessary for the world to exist, regardless of the time issues). That priority was clearly accepted by all Jewish thinkers, but the question of how the world came into being, specifically whether by virtue of creation ex nihilo, from absolute nothingness, has a vexed history, as Shapiro shows.

Indeed, even the question of what Rambam believed is much debated. In contemporary times, noted students of Rambam’s writings have claimed he held each one of the three main positions. We can find scholars who argue that Rambam believed in creation ex nihilo (as he most explicitly says), that God only shaped eternally existing matter (similar to the Platonic position), or adopted the Aristotelian view that the earth we inhabit has always existed pretty much as it is now.

Regardless of what Rambam held, Shapiro shows us noted rabbis who held to the Platonic position. We cannot, then, claim that Jewish tradition has unequivocally accepted creation ex nihilo. An adherent of the Platonic view—the closest to the modern Big Bang theory— has what to rely on in claiming to still fall within the bounds of Orthodoxy. The Aristotelian position, aside from having been discredited in modern scientific thought, also suffers for seeming to rule out miracles.

The Fifth Principle makes two assertions, that only God can be worshiped and that that claim means we cannot even turn to angels to serve as intermediaries. To state it as a universally accepted truth, Shapiro tells us that the first part can stand as is. Debate has arisen, however, on whether Jews may ask angels to intercede with God on their behalf, as well as over the question of whether such angels have any sort of freewill. As with all points of debate, we can ignore those here, and restrict ourselves to saying that it is unequivocally true that Jews are required to worship only God.

I note that ‘worship’ need not mean only bowing down or praying to. Accepting any force other than God as the ultimate ruling power, the ultimate decider of one’s destiny, is a violation of this Principle as well. It is in that sense that the Principle poses a challenge even to many Orthodox Jews today, given their rationally-minded commitment to the truths of science.

For many years and in many areas, science offered relatively little religious challenge, since it focused on particular phenomena, reactions, or interactions. That gravity was a force creating an attraction between two bodies, that evolution explained the development of various species, that chemical reactions moved in certain directions under certain conditions, were descriptions of the observed world and codification into rules of the regular patterns those observations produced. Those observations might be challenging to the regnant expression of the religion, but were simple truths that had to be confronted, digested, and understood within the broader religious context.

More and more, however, we see scientists claiming to provide all-encompassing theories or explanations of the world (or being on the verge of same), notably devoid of any place for God. Any such statements need to raise the hackles of an Orthodox Jew (aside from the fact that they are, all of them, scientifically irresponsible and based on illegitimate induction from the specific to the general, but that is a different diatribe). As Orthodox Jews, the belief in God and the worship of God alone means that it is part of our mission to hold onto our independence of—indeed, to reject as an intellectual position—claims to explain the world in a way that makes it independent of God.

Here, too, experience tells me that many Orthodox Jews have lost sight of this Principle, and need to reconsider what it means to believe in God from a Jewish perspective. If God is only the creator of Nature, but is now completely subservient to those Laws, that is not an Orthodox God, and those who believe in that God have lost sight, by that very fact, of a central aspect of the mission of Orthodox Judaism, to be a cadre of believers in the One True God.

The irony of those last few paragraphs is that we have not even reached the most controversial of the Principles in our time. For that, we’ll see you next time.