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Regulations Redux

4 minute read
Intermediate

Speed limits, traffic lights, parking meters, building codes, dress codes… it’s easy to see rules as restrictive forces in our lives, reducing individual freedom and personal choice.

The Torah is brimming with laws and rules, so it’s a critique one can aim at Judaism with some merit and one that has long been raised by seekers.

There are so many rules, and they stack up fast! Eat this, not that, fast then, do this, you can’t do that, wear this, you can’t wear that. And it goes on and on.

Why can’t we just do whatever we want?

The opening story of Creation about the dawn of humanity centers around the imposition of a rule, don’t eat from this tree, and humanity’s unwillingness to follow the rule – they did it anyway. This first choice to defy a rule reverberates through humanity’s future, highlighting the need for balance that all subsequent laws try to achieve.

There’s a plausible reading here where God is cruel and tantalizing, teasing His creatures by pointing at the beautiful tree they are forbidden to enjoy; the language of prohibition and denial is right there, and it identifies God as the maker and enforcer of a system with arbitrary rules that humans are destined to fail.

But the story that follows about Noah and the Flood is a story about what happens in a world with no rules – total anarchy where everyone is a barbaric savage who pillages and plunders. In Noah and the Flood, we see a world without rules, which leads to chaos and the collapse of civilization, and the unmaking of the world. As our sages teach, where there is no law, there is no justice, and where there is no justice, there is no peace.

No serious person believes that radical anarchy would be sustainable, a total free-for-all where Darwinian principles of survival of the fittest govern the day. Doing anything you want isn’t a utopian dream; it’s a dystopian nightmare. Every human society at all times in all places has understood that humans need rules and norms; ancient and primitive societies had rules and norms we might object to, but they had rules and norms just the same. The existence of rules and norms is a foundation of human society – no one gets to do whatever they want.

Rules form boundaries that enable and facilitate safe human relations by asserting how to interact, preventing infringement on others or abuse or depletion of a thing. Rules are a basic civic requirement.

Beyond the philosophical, this extends to the essential nature of reality; our universe is a universe of rules, built and run according to rules, the laws of physics that govern energy and matter.

The religious aspect of doing whatever we want is based on the notion that observant Jews are missing out. Sure, there are many things observant Jews can’t do or enjoy – bacon, cheeseburgers, lobster, and pepperoni are allegedly some of the big ones.

Yet the Midrash teaches that it is wrong to believe that the Creator denies or prohibits us from the joys of life in any way. Rather, the Torah asks us just to regulate our instincts and stop them from running wild in order to maintain balance in our lives, from greed, hunger, and revenge, to tribal loyalty and sexuality.

Humans break when overindulged – people everywhere abuse and hurt, cheat and steal, get obese and sick, and tirelessly waste years of life on sexual pursuits. These negative impacts aren’t the product of liberty; they’re different forms of addiction and brokenness.

The earliest classical philosophers recognized that freedom without discipline leads to self-destruction; the Torah presents rules that foster virtue and guiding instincts to serve life’s higher purposes.

Like all cultures and societies, the Torah has lots of rules. And like all cultures and societies, some make more sense than others.

But like all rules and laws, they keep us safe and stop us from getting out of control. They help regulate our enjoyment of life; they enable everything else.

Rules like honoring parents remind us that life’s most important bonds need care,  self-restraint, and respect.

The laws of sexuality regulate that family relationships are inappropriate if combined with sexuality.

The laws of Shabbos are endless; you learn something new every time you learn the laws of Shabbos. But the existence of Shabbos changes and elevates how we experience time – it’s not Saturday, a day off work; it’s Shabbos! Moreover, Shabbos has kept generations of families and Jewish communities eating, singing, and praying together for life. Far from deprivation, they enable a life filled with intentional moments and offer positive freedom, transforming ordinary acts into opportunities for spiritual connection.

The Torah permits a carnivorous diet, which could reasonably be construed as unethical; it asks us to limit our diet to animals with certain features that must be slaughtered humanely. If the Creator is the gatekeeper of Creation, it’s not obvious that we should be able to eat living creatures at all! But otherwise, the Torah allows us to enjoy the vast majority of human cuisine prepared in accordance with our culture.

What’s more, when taken together, the rules of kosher keep the Jewish People distinct and separate from the world. They elevate the most basic instinct to consume into a religious act, saturated with meaning and purpose. As the Chasam Sofer notes, the kosher laws open with what Jews can eat, the permission, not the prohibition.

As the Meshech Chochma notes, the Creation story isn’t about a negative restriction on a tree; it’s about a positive command to eat literally everything else in Creation and fill the world with people, broad and permissive, perhaps even indulgent and hedonistic, with one caveat.

The Creator sanctifies human desire with the very first command – the directive to eat and procreate suggests that even our most basic instincts serve God’s purposes. Although there’s a caveat, even several, the Torah’s claim is that God is the gatekeeper of that permission; that’s what “Creator” means. If we accept the premise of a Creator, why would we feel entitled to the entire universe?

Beyond the aspect of a legal obligation, the fact that Jews observe a rule or practice makes it a cultural norm, unspoken but socially agreed on, and therefore sanctified by the collective consciousness of all Jewish People.

The Torah has lots of rules and laws. But those laws come from the Creator of Genesis; the God who creates life, loves life, commands life to thrive, and wants that life to love and enjoy.

We do this thing, we don’t do that thing. No one gets to do whatever they want, that’s not how the world works. We live in societies built on the rule of law, in a rule-based universe.

In a universe built on order, the Torah’s rules transform existence into an offering of meaning. Rules aren’t so bad.

The Long Way

3 minute read
Straightforward

The Exodus story is a foundation of Judaism and features prominently in most of our mitzvos and prayers.

Aware of the magnitude and scope of the Exodus, God tells Moshe and Ahron in real-time how consequential this story will always be:

וְהָיָה הַיּוֹם הַזֶּה לָכֶם לְזִכָּרוֹן וְחַגֹּתֶם אֹתוֹ חַג ה’ לְדֹרֹתֵיכֶם חֻקַּת עוֹלָם תְּחגֻּהוּ – “This day shall be to you one of remembrance; you shall celebrate it as a festival to God throughout the ages, you shall celebrate it as an institution for all time!” (12:14)

We practice this command in festive detail at the Seder, as the Haggadah recounts the story of the Jewish people’s birth and liberation from Egypt and slavery.

But there’s a significant issue we ought to recognize immediately, without which the entire remembrance is irreparably compromised with no contemporary relevance at all.

We are fortunate to live in a vanishingly rare era of safety and prosperity, which obscures the fact that the Jewish People people have been exiled and persecuted time after time in place after place for most of our history.

But even today, we’re not as safe as it superficially seems.

Although largely safe from physical danger, the spiritual dangers have never been more powerful or seductive; most of our people are at different stages of assimilation or disorientation, disconnected in whole or in part from their heritage identity.

What’s the point of talking about redemption that happened long ago when we’re not yet redeemed today?

The Meshech Chochmah explains that if it were nothing more than the anniversary of physical liberation, it would make little sense to celebrate in a time of subjugation. But if we understand it correctly as the founding archetype of the liberation of the spirit, then it necessarily continues to have a residual effect forever as the source of all freedom, as the Torah so powerfully puts it, promising us today that our Seder matters and reflects that moment in full – וְחַגֹּתֶם אֹתוֹ חַג ה’ לְדֹרֹתֵיכֶם חֻקַּת עוֹלָם.

As the Lubavitcher Rebbe explains, the Seder does not reinforce that an Exodus happened that one time; but that an Exodus can happen.

R’ Jonathan Sacks notes that throughout the highs and lows of Jewish history, our people have celebrated the Seder at the heights of civilization and in ghettos and concentration camps under conditions similar to or worse than Egypt.

The Exodus we celebrate was imperfect – it did not lead to a full and final utopia for anyone. The formerly enslaved people fought God and Moshe for the rest of their lives, yearning to return to the Egypt that had shackled them.

But the Torah and Haggadah openly embrace the notion of an imperfect and partial redemption; both subvert our expectation of a happily ever after ending where the Jewish People live in peace and prosperity in Israel.

R’ Shai Held notes that by celebrating imperfect redemption, the Haggadah seems to powerfully suggest that the journey is more important than the destination. The Gemara warns against believing someone who says they have searched for answers but found nothing. As R’ Louis Jacobs put it, the search for Torah is itself Torah, and in that search, we have already found. There is plenty of space between all and nothing; as the Kotzker put it, the searching is the finding. 

The question’s premise is false; things don’t need to be perfect to be a whole lot better. Humans are not robots, and we are all perfectly imperfect in our own way.

We have yet to make it all the way, but the only analysis is that each step further is vastly better than no way.

There is still quite some way to go, but you’re a long way from where you used to be, and that’s also worth celebrating.

Our Seder isn’t the anniversary of an ancient generation’s liberation long ago; each of us must feel as though we experienced the great departure from Egypt. Our Seder continues it, reminding us that redemption exists, redemption can happen, and we are all worthy of it.

Context is Key

2 minute read
Straightforward

For whatever reason, many people today believe in a God that is angry and out to get people. Instead of understanding that sins are mistakes that can be fixed, some people believe that they are irredeemably bad and broken, and God hates them. They wish that God loved them, and don’t see God’s blessing in their lives. Instead, they believe that their lives belong to Satan or the devil, or some other dualistic entity.

We grow up reading the same stories, and we can become desensitized to the context of the lessons our stories are trying to convey. Moreover, worldviews can become entrenched and force their perspectives into ours.

A classic example is the story of creation.

To some, it’s the story of a God who makes arbitrary rules and creates sinful and irresponsible humans that are doomed to fail.

That’s certainly one way to read the story.

But that’s a lopsided and myopic perspective, laden with pain and blame.

The Meshech Chochma notes that when our tradition reads the story, we see neither people who are doomed, nor a distant God who sets arbitrary and impossible rules.

The first two rules God gives are “Be fruitful and multiply – the entire world will be yours,” and “From every tree shall you eat…”.

To be sure, the second rule finishes with a qualification – “From every tree shall you eat, except this one.”

Without context, it seems so tantalizing and cruel – “You can’t enjoy this delicious tree over here!” We can hear the language of prohibition and denial.

With context, we can understand that it is a limitation in the broader context of a positive command.

Many people see the world and our tradition the negative way. Perhaps it’s a problem with the way we educate people, or maybe the popular worldview is irresistibly strong. But it’s just plain wrong.

To be sure, Judaism has some restrictions. Some do seem more arbitrary than others. But none exist to impede our enjoyment of life.

On the contrary, they exist to regulate our wholesome enjoyment of life, to prevent us from running wild with greed and hedonism. The commandment to enjoy comes before the commandment to refrain. The regulation gives a context and meaning to all the countless things that we do get to experience.

A husband who remembers or forgets to buy his wife flowers on their anniversary isn’t instantly a good or bad husband. It matters as one data point in the context of their entire relationship.

Shabbos is not just a Saturday not spent working – the concept of Shabbos elevates our time by giving it context, making it sacred and valuable. Not just “Saturday,” but our entire week building up to it as well. It’s all about the context. And the same goes for everything else we believe.

The story of Creation speaks for itself. It rejects the worldview of a God who wants to create stumbling blocks for people, and of people who are intrinsically evil.

Our God is the God who loves life, creates life, and wants that life to learn to love and enjoy as well.

Our lives are surrounded by blessings and abundance, and our tradition is rich and full of meaning.

But not everyone can see that.

We just have to look for the context every day. Because it’s there.

Visionary Leadership

3 minute read
Straightforward

The story of Egypt begins by setting the scene of a nation oppressed and enslaved, and we learn a few details of Moshe’s youth.

He witnesses an Egyptian officer harassing a Jew and intervenes to save the victim and kill the bully. He witnesses two Jews fighting and intervenes to separate them. He witnesses shepherds bullying Yisro’s daughters and intervenes to protect them.

The Midrash fills in some gaps, suggesting that he followed a thirsty lost lamb and carried it to water, which led him to the burning bush.

Although the Torah and our Sages give specific indications that Moshe was born special and was always destined to save his people, the Torah also leaves a space for these formative stories, suggesting that it wasn’t as simple as destiny; that Moshe also had certain vital qualities and characteristics that made him the man for the job.

The Meshech Chochma notes that the common thread in these short vignettes is that Moshe demonstrates his compassion and concern for the weak and vulnerable and a willingness to take responsibility and intervene for others.

The stories of breaking up a fight between Jews and stopping the abuse of another Jew show he cares about his people. The story of his intervention to save Yisro’s daughters demonstrate he cares about other people too, not just his own. The story of the thirsty lamb show goes even further to show he is a deeply compassionate person in general, concerned with the wellbeing of just another creature.

This quality of perception that drives action and behaviour is what God sees in Moshe:

וַיַּרְא ה’ כִּי סָר לִרְאוֹת וַיִּקְרָא אֵלָיו אֱלֹהִים מִתּוֹךְ הַסְּנֶה – Hashem saw that he had turned to look, and God called to him from within the thorn bush. (3:4)

This is the very first time God speaks to Moshe, the moment Moshe is called to greatness, to become the ultimate leader and liberator. While the simple reading is that God noticed Moshe turn to look at the bizarre apparition of a bush on fire yet did not burn, it also suggests the quality that God recognizes in Moshe, that Moshe is someone who notices things and will turn to look – וַיַּרְא ה’ כִּי סָר לִרְאוֹת. Consider that this is one of the vanishingly few instances where the Torah narrates God’s thoughts to us, in this case, that God noticed something that provoked a response from God as a result.

Sure, Moshe was born under miraculous circumstances and, by luck, was born straddling the political divide between Egypt and the Jewish People. But while we can’t hope to emulate the circumstances of his birth, we can undoubtedly invoke the qualities that made him so compelling and worthy in God’s eyes. Moshe was a natural giver and helper who wanted nothing in return. He protected the weak and vulnerable with genuine self-sacrifice – all before God ever said a word to him.

That’s the kind of person who can carry people out of the depths of abject misery to the heights of greatness. While the specific expression looks different, they start with one thing – the leader’s vision.

Before you can solve, first, you must see.

Our sages teach that when Pharaoh announced his policy for all the Jewish infant boys to be thrown in the Nile, Bilam congratulated him on his wise policy and was rewarded by the king; Yitro told him that it was wrong and had to flee for his life; and Iyov saw that Yisro’s protest was ineffective, so chose the path of prudence and was silent in the face of monstrous evil.

And as a result, says the Midrash, he was afflicted with all of the suffering recounted in the book of his name.

Pharaoh took counsel on his policies of genocide, oppression, and subjugation from three men – Bilaam, Yisro, and Iyov; the renowned villain advised Pharaoh to hurt the Jewish People, Yisro advised against it and fled, and Iyov remained silent and suffered for pretty much the rest of his days.

But Pharaoh was resolved on his wickedness! Yisro’s protest was ineffective, not to mention the Torah itself says that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. What good would it have done to speak up?

R’ Chaim Shmulevitz answers that it’s basic – when something hurts, you scream. Even if it does not accomplish anything, you scream from the pain.

Iyov wasn’t pained enough at the prospect of all Jewish boys drowning in the Nile; pain does not allow you to stay silent. Open your eyes to the people around you. It doesn’t hurt enough if you can rationally decide that it’s not worth it to scream.

As R’ Avraham Yitzhak HaKohen Kook said, I don’t speak because I have the power to speak; I speak because I don’t have the power to remain silent.