Anachronistic Judaism

The Virus of The Politics of Faith

Judaism, the religion of a people that has survived thousands of years and untold adversaries, is now in crisis mode. Antisemitism, its chronic foe- while ever present- is not the main culprit. It suffers from a malignant alchemy of external freedom and internal obstruction. The source of the jeopardy is buried deep within the early history of rabbinic Judaism.

Prior to 1800 there was but a single Jewish religious denomination. The amount of commitment to its faith varied with individuals and communities. However, the religion did dutifully serve its people, homeless from the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in70 C.E. and confined in the ghettos of the world, by locking out potentially invasive and destructive ideas, practices and temptations.

The Change

The cultural dynamics of Europe and the Middle East were altered in the early 1800s by Napoleon, who defeated feudalism, ended the Holy Roman Empire and opened the gates of the ghettos for those who wished to leave. For traditional Judaism, the exit from the ghettos was a Trojan Horse. Life was altered significantly for those Jews who exited to live in neighboring cities and communities. They challenged the traditional constraints of the rabbinical oral law (the Talmud, codified and transcribed from circa. 200 C.E.-550 C.E.) as being too limiting and inappropriate to their lives. As genetic Jews, they did not aspire to leave Judaism, but simply make it more relevant to how they lived.

A New Face of Judaism

A significant result in Germany and elsewhere was the development of Reform Judaism, later to be followed elsewhere by Conservative Judaism and other more liberal denominations. It is easy to place the blame for religious fragmentation on traditional Judaism which conducted itself in accordance with a fixed Talmudic code established during the 6th century A.D. The blame, however, must be shared by Reform Judaism which failed to seek and achieve change within the system but simply created for itself ”Judaism de novo”.

The Reform Movements are Judaism’s exit doors to unilateral assimilation, which happens when a Jew no longer identifies himself as a Jew, but his gentile neighbors continue to do so. This occurred dramatically in Germany in the 1930s and the 1940s. Even today, 500 years after the Spanish Inquis`ition, descendants of the forced converts to Catholicism are afraid to identify their origin for fear of rejection or exclusion from their current religious community. How tragic is it for Jews to abandon their birthright and the nobility of their mission (Tikkun Olam) only be identified by the scourge of antisemitism.

According to Wikipedia, approximately 38% of all of the Jews in the world live in the United States. Since the year 2000, 58% of all American Jews marry Gentiles. The Pew Research Center reports that nearly 48% of all of Jewish millennials have only one Jewish parent. This loss to the Jewish Community is not as a result of pogroms; forced conversions; or even on a battlefield defending the State of Israel. It is a casualty of a self-inflicted wound which occurred when traditional Judaism asserted that the rabbinical opinions of the 6th Century C.E. Talmud were inspired by God and delivered to Moses at Sinai. A deified Talmud stopped, in its tracks, the development of Judaism and prevented acceptance of different opinions and the accommodation of the Torah to modern life.

The Torah (The Scroll)

Traditional Judaism teaches that the contents of the Written Torah, or Pentateuch (The Five Books of Moses) was delivered to Moses during his lifetime for instruction to the Jewish people. That is an essential tenet of Judaism. What is not explained, is just how in the 13^th Century B.C. E., the era of Moses’ lifetime, the precise language of God’s instruction to Moses was transcribed for posterity. The modern Written Torah (Old Testament Bible) has over 400 pages, and 600,000 characters of textual material. Since Moses lived in a “papyrus era”, there is a question as to how God’s instruction to Moses remained intact and unaltered from his lifetime circa 1280 B.C.E. to that of Ezra circa 474 B.C.E. when history and archaeology ascribe the assembly and canonization of the Five Books of Moses. Some modern historians suggest that these books had been written by several different authors. Nevertheless, the Torah is the written constitution of the Jewish People and is mutable only by God.

The Second Temple

The first Temple -The Temple of Solomon- was destroyed in 586 B.C.E. by the Babylonians who carried off many Jews with them into exile. In 515 B.C.E. after the Persians defeated the Babylonians, they released the Hebrew exiles to go home and reconstruct a temple on the site of the original Temple Mount. This was done under the direction of Ezra and Nehemiah sent from Babylon to oversee the task.

Necessity for the Development of a Legal System

It soon became obvious that a Council or Assembly was necessary to apply the laws of the Torah to a flourishing Jewish community. This was accomplished by an integrated Sanhedrin System in which each city could appoint a lesser Sanhedrin comprised of 23judges. The nation, however, had one supreme or Great Sanhedrin, comprising 71 members, which took appeals from the lesser courts and which decided issues of national import.

Since the instruction of the Torah came directly from God to Moses, it was immutable and could not be challenged or altered. All subsequent articulation of Jewish law had to flow from the Torah or, at the very least, not be in conflict with it. However, the sages of the Second Temple, the Tannaim soon recognized that a Torah comprised largely of historical information, commandments and ritualistic prescriptions required interpretation, direction and more rules to control the daily lives of a living and breathing community. The Tannaim, approximately 120 in number, were uniquely gifted rabbis who orally expounded on those rules and interpretations necessary to maintain an orderly society. Their ranks included such notable rabbis as Hillel, Shammai, Johanan hen Zakkai, Gamaliel, Akiba and Judah the Prince. Lest their oral wisdom be lost, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, before his death in 217 C.E. codified this assembly of tractates, statements of law and opinion into a document thereafter known to the world as the Mishna.

The Genesis of the Rabbinate

The Temple and its ordained ritual practices were in Jerusalem. With the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. the services of the Kohanim (lineal descendants of Aaron) became virtually irrelevant. In its stead houses of worship were erected in both Israel and Babylon and under the direction of religious teachers called rabbis. Mosaic law, however, did not provide for a cadre of rabbis. Authority appears to come from Numbers 27(18), in which God tells Moses to lay his hands upon Joshua as a means of transferring authority to him. Presumptively, but without express authority, Joshua in turn passed on his Mosaic ordination to a series of successors, including Ezra, and then on to rabbis like Hillel, Ben Zakki and so on.

The Dynamics of the Contest for Religious Power and Influence

The Second Temple generated an amalgam of different philosophies of faith which gravitated into politically oriented religious groups.

• The Sadducces represented an upper-class elite priestly caste whose main focus was the rituals associated with Temple practice. They were receptive to Hellenistic ideas and spurned the notion of an afterlife since it did not appear in the Written Torah.
• Insisting on a direct literal interpretation of the Written Torah they also rejected, out of hand, the rabbinically generated Oral Law, a position later adopted by the Karaites who are perceived as having succeeded them.
• The Pharisees were the largest and most middle-class of the groups. They adhered to messianic notions of redemption and subscribed to an afterlife in which God punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous, Most emphatically they insisted on keeping the law as interpreted by the rabbis and sages whose practice eventually gravitated to a type of religious formalism. It is from this group that the rabbinate of today originated.
• The Essenes rejected the liberality of the Sadducees and the corruptions of life in the Temple and retired to a monastic existence outside of Jerusalem. It is from the locale of that group that the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947.

These groups and other splinter sects competed for the minds and the hearts of the Jewish People.

The Mishna and The Gemara (The Oral Law) a.k.a. The Talmud

The Mishna’s oral recitations and rules promulgated by the Tannaim were codified circa 217 C.E. It was divided into six separate orders:

SEEDS (agriculture and the support of the poor)

HOLIDAYS (Sabbath and festivals)

WOMEN (rules of husband/wife relationships)

DAMAGES (civil and penal jurisprudence)

HOLY THINGS (Temple sacrifices and the laws of kashruth

PURITY (ritual purity and the laws of family purity).

The laws of the Tannaim, both in its original oral form and later as the Mishna, serviced the Jewish communities both in Israel and in Babylon.

It is important to note that a large number of the families who were originally exiled to Babylon chose not to be repatriated to Israel. They retained their identity and their religion, but appeared to remain quite comfortable in the Babylonian Diaspora.

The Tannaim were ultimately succeeded by the Amoriam, notable rabbis from both Babylon and Jerusalem. The Amoriam reflected upon the law and opinions stated in the Mishna. Their discourses were ultimately transcribed as the Gemara. As would be expected, their reflections were not always in concert with each other. Together, the Mishna, the Gemara and some selections from the Midrash, the Oral Law, constitute the Talmud. It reflected the interpretation of the Torah by the best minds of the Jewish community as it existed in that early era.

The Deification of the Talmud -Judaism’s Achilles Heel

The Talmud evolved out of rabbinical sources and was viewed as indispensable to the understanding of the Torah. As they do to this day, traditional rabbis advanced the notion that the Talmud was delivered with the original Torah to Moses at Sinai; or, at the very least, that it was divinely inspired by God and merited being referred to as the Oral Torah.

That notion- that Moses at Mount Sinai directly or indirectly, received from God, the same rules and laws espoused by hundreds of rabbis well over a thousand years later, stretches the bounds of human credulity. Worse than that, it canonized the Talmud’s rabbinical interpretation of the Torah with a Divine patina that forever locked Judaism into a long bygone era. After all, who can argue with the word of God?

The acuity of the Jews of recent generations in all fields of endeavor is legend. Their minds are of no greater or lesser quality than those of the sages of the Talmud. Modem Jewish thinkers, however, come armed with thousands of years of social and scientific development unavailable to the rabbis of the Talmud. What if the Talmud were loosed of its Divine protective veneer to flow freely with current Jewish thinking and interpretations of the Torah? Would the results be the same? Given DNA, would the progeny of Jewish fathers and Gentile mothers still be excluded from the Jewish People?

Would the simple biblical phrase that was interpreted to create the separation of meat and dairy, with all of its resultant complexities, still be construed the same way? What would constitute biblically prohibited “Sabbath work “in an electrified and mechanized world? Would the divisive six different flavors(denominations)of the Jewish religion still be relevant?

The Karaites

During the7th Century C.E., the Karaites a significant segment of the Jewish population, took issue with what they viewed as a usurpation of the reins of Jewish law by the rabbis. Within the Karaite group there was no objection to the idea of a body of interpretation of the Torah. They did reject the notion that the rabbis could bootstrap their own work product into Canonical law. The Karaites rejected the Oral Law (same as the Talmud which includes the Mishna and the Gemara), not because it was unworthy, but because the pretense that the Oral Law came directly from God made it unquestionable and unmodifiable. Amongst other reasons cited were:

The Mishna quotes many conflicting opinions

• The Mishna does not define in which opinion truth lies, but rather it sometimes agrees with neither opinion.
•  The Oral Law is not even mentioned in the Torah.
• The Torah states, “you shall not add to the word that I am commanding you, nor take away from it, that you may keep the commandments of YHVH, your God, which I command you.” Deuteronomy (4:2).

Why the deification of the Talmud? One need not be a prophet to understand that where there are groups competing for the minds and hearts of the Jewish people, it is helpful to have their work product canonized.

The Karaites believe that their lives must be directed by the express language of the Torah and not by the often conflicting disputations of the Talmud. It is estimated that there are approximately 30,000 Karaitic Jews presently living in Israel and an additional 20,000 in communities elsewhere in the world.

The Talmud’s Construction of the Torah divinely sealed in 6th Century C.E. has so frustrated the modem Jewish community that many have declared themselves secular Jews. They identify themselves with the state of Israel, Jewish communities and charities, but distance themselves from all aspects of normative religious Judaism. Following blindly the opinions and dictates ofa6th Century Talmud has caused no small amount of confusion and distress in the arenas of matrilineal Judaism, conversion, Sabbath observance, and the dietary laws.

Intermarriage

To understand the complexity of this phenomenon, we would do well to reflect on the ghetto communities of feudalistic Europe. Within the physical and social walls of those communities, young Jewish men and women were exposed to persons of similar religious and cultural rearing. Often, marriages were arranged by parents to whom intermarriage would be cause for mourning. As noted, until early 1800, there was only one Judaism, and Jewish intermarriage was virtually unknown. With the French Revolution, Napoleon’s unlocking of all of Europe’s ghettos, young Jews could now mix socially and economically with the rest of the populations of the host nations. They were exposed to education, ideas, temptations and world views that were alien to, and discouraged in the ghetto. The Judaism that had formerly embraced them in the ghetto was frozen into an era of over 1000 years earlier, and could not meet the challenges of liberation.

Especially was this true of those Jews who emigrated to the United States from the former ghettos and villages of the Pale in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Economic opportunities which quickly raised them to the socio-economic levels of their neighbors was another complicating factor. Their desire to “embrace the American Dream” generated an internal confrontation between an exciting and free country full of opportunities in education and commerce with a historic religion confined to the restraints ofa6th Century reality.

For most of the emigres, the religious teachings of their youth sustained them against the temptations of America. As each generation succeeded them Jewish education gave way to training that would better equip the youth in this new land of opportunity. The transition was from “Jew” to” American Jew” to “an American of Jewish extraction”. The education went from “Yeshiva” to “Hebrew School” to “Bar Mitzva training, if you want it”.

Is it any wonder that a large percentage of Jewish youth have started families whose children will no longer identify themselves as members of the Jewish community? It is difficult not to consider whether the outcome would have been different, and Judaism more relevant, had the interpretation of the Torah not been exclusively bound to a Talmud completed in the Sixth Century A.D.

Matrilineal Descent

What is a Jew? The answer to that historic conundrum can best be attempted by a series of inquiries:

• Did your mother and /or father, or someone on their behalf, tell you that they and their antecedents were Jewish?
• If so, does the fact that you consider yourself totally secular, or even anti-Semitic exclude you from Jewish identity?
• If you are born Jewish and voluntarily convert to one or more other faiths are you still a Jew? Should you decide to return to the Jewish community is it necessary to convert back to Judaism, or is the abandonment of the other faith sufficient?
• If you sincerely declare yourself to be a Jew, although you were not born of Jewish parents or converted, are you Jewish?
• If your parents were not Jewish, and you were converted to Judaism by a rabbi who was not of an Orthodox or traditional denomination, are you Jewish?
• What, if anything, do your answers to the forgoing questions tell you about the role of genetics in Judaism?

The Patriarchs, in the growth of Jewish identity, were mindful of the selection of their wives. They left Canaan for Egypt as a family to avoid famine. Subsequently, slavery in Egypt molded them into an identifiable and cohesive people, who subsequently returned to their ancestral home where they lived until dispossessed by the Babylonians.

Years later, when Ezra returned from Babylonian exile to rebuild the second Temple, he viewed the Jews as a people of common genetic origin, an essential condition worth preserving. When he found on his arrival that an earlier contingent of Temple builders had taken indigenous wives who had borne children, Ezra went ballistic. He insisted and received compliance in the separation from their wives and children. The obvious rationale for the act was that one could identify the mother of the child but would never be sure of the child’s paternity. While that vision was clear, it was a rather strange edict, given the fact that the wives of Joseph, Moses, Solomon and others were not Jewish, yet their children were not denied inclusion in the Jewish people.

The Torah Describes Prohibited Marriages

Scriptural opponents of intermarriage point to Deuteronomy 7(1-4) for authority. It referred specifically to intermarriage with the seven named nations that occupied Canaan and to no other nation.

Deuteronomy 7(1)”When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;”

Deuteronomy 7(2)”And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them;”

Deuteronomy 7(3) “Neither shall thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son”

Deuteronomy 7(4)”For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods; so will the anger of the Lord be kindled against you and destroy thee suddenly.”

G-d, having specifically named the seven Canaanite tribes that were destined for annihilation as being unacceptable for Jewish marriage, can we assume that God meant, but did not include, everyone in the world who was not born of Jewish parents? Ifni fact that were true, how do we include into the Jewish community the progeny born of Jewish mothers and Gentile fathers? On the other hand, if God meant to exclude only the seven enumerated tribes, how does Judaism exclude the progeny of Jewish fathers with Gentile mothers who were not of the seven excluded tribes?

Matrilineal Judaism

It is difficult to see how the Talmud (Mishna Kiddushin 68b) relying on Deuteronomy 7(3- 4) could have promulgated matrilineal Judaism. Ironically, the Torah does not explicitly discuss the conferring of Jewish status through matrilineality. On the other hand, the Karaites who are not bound by the Talmud, and directly interpret the Deuteronomy 7(3-4), conclude that Judaism is passed through the father and therefore maintain patrilineal origin of Jewish children.

The Talmud’s endorsement of matrilineal Judaism not only appears out of context with the Written Torah but lacks the wisdom of modem biological sciences. It makes little sense today when we recognize that each parent contributes 23 chromosomes to the creation of child.

How can one justify that the chromosomes provided by the Jewish mother are significant in the creation of the Jewish child while the chromosomes provided by the father may be randomly abandoned. Indeed, how can the Talmud’s practical solution of accepting only children from a Jewish womb be accepted today, when DNA can easily and accurately identify the father?

As long as traditional Judaism maintains that the product of the learned religious jurists of the Talmud are divinely inspired by God, no real development or change can take place. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish children, descendants of Jewish fathers, are denied their heritage due to the deification of some of the archaic laws of the Talmud that both science and time have made irrelevant.

Conversion

For many Jews who are born issue of the blessed seed of Abraham, it is difficult to understand how anyone not so endowed can be converted to Judaism. After all, neither education, circumcision, nor immersion will change their genetic composition. Indeed, how can someone with Gentile genes breed Jewish children? Parenthetically, the opposite is true as to those Jews who were forcibly converted to Catholicism during and after the Spanish Inquisition. Why would they require conversion on their return to Judaism? Does your genetic composition change with the prayers that you were instructed to recite, or with the adoption of a belief in one who you were taught was “God’s real Messiah “?

The notion of conversion is generated out of the practical necessity for an open Jewish community. Every living religion or societal community, of necessity, must have an entrance and exit. Closed societies, such as the Essenes, were destined to oblivion.

Early Biblical Period

In the early biblical period Judaism did not constitute a religion. Rather, the Hebrews were a people whose God was a national God who oversaw their needs, i.e., release from slavery, oversight in the desert, victory in the conquest of Canaan, etc. During that time, Judaism as a faith had not as yet been formalized. When the Jews left Egypt, reportedly a number of other individuals who melded into the Jewish community. Non­ Jewish women simply came to live with their husbands. They and their children were just absorbed into the community.

Several things, however, changed after the destruction of the first Temple and during the early Babylonian exile. The God of the Jews remained with the Jewish community in Babylon, and was not tied to the homeland in Israel.

The absence of the Temple sacrifices following the destruction of the first Temple was replaced by an assembly, with rabbis offering prayers to God – the beginning of collective worship.

Subsequently, in the Fifth Century B.C.E., with the construction of the second Temple, a sea change took place. Ezra saw the Jewish people as a genetically connected nation. He roiled against inclusion of men from tribes of other nations. For a number of years there were major controversies about what to do with strangers who wished inclusion in the Jewish community. The Sadducees, rabbis who were contemporaries of the Pharisees, opposed inclusion of strangers, while The Pharisees supported it. A method was generated by the Pharisees and their successors, the Tannaim, in which persons not born of the seed of Abraham could conclusively become members of the Jewish Nation. It was a prescription not found in the Written Torah. The formula involved circumcision for males, education and the immersion for both sexes and an expressed desire to become part of the Jewish people. The formula remains the same today.

More Recent Times

There has been a disinclination to open wholesale proselytization to groups wishing to enter the Jewish community. The formula for conversion can easily be used to discourage Gentiles by simply expanding the amount of time necessary for the educational element required for the conversion process. Ironically, in prior years, large groups have rarely sought conversion to Judaism because in several of the Christian and Moslem countries that was considered a capital offense.

Ultimately, the Jewish people have, for practical reasons, allowed for the inclusion of strangers. For sundry reasons, there has always been a genuine need for conversion. Because the numbers of applicants are rarely large, the notion is that the inclusion of strangers would not significantly impact the genetic pool.

The philosophical question regarding conversion raises a totally different issue. In Genesis 12(7) God gave the land of Israel to the seed of Abram. Since the Written Torah does not provide for conversion, by whom, and how, is conversion authorized to be performed? Where do the rabbis obtain such authority? They are neither authorized by God nor elected by the Jewish people. Judaism has a strong, but not exclusive, genetic component. But what is Jewish conversion? What authorizes the person performing the conversion to give an individual and their progeny genetic access in perpetuity to the people of Israel?

The Sabbath Shabbos

Singularly, the Sabbath is one of the most important gifts from God. Both Exodus 31(12-17) and Exodus 35(2-4) are among the many Torah references that provide “Six days may work be done; but in the seventh is the Sabbath of rest, holy to the LORD”

So important was the Sabbath in the eyes of God that it provided a capital offense if violated. In the Written Torah we are not treated to a definition of the word “work”. Clearly the underlying thesis is that the seventh day is a day forest. God created the universe in six days, and recognized the importance and value forest, reflection and renewal on the seventh day. Given man’s propensity for continuous work it was totally an enduring and necessary gift. What is work?

Is work in the 21st Century C.E. the same as work in the 5^th Century C.E.?

The problem with identifying the appropriate way in which to comply with the Sabbath is that the Torah provides very little example and instruction. Essentially the Torah tells us in multiple sites that we are not to work on the Sabbath. It does instruct us however that there are two specific things that we cannot to do on the Sabbath:

·       “Abide ye every man in his place, let no man go out of his place on the seventh day. Exodus 16(29)

·       “Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations on the Sabbath day” Exodus 35(3)

The Meaning of the Word Work

While the Torah cannot change without being altered by God, the nature and description of the word work changes in every generation with the advent of design, science, invention, and ingenuity. Creating a fire in a biblical desert is not the functional equivalent of simply striking a match.

When put to the test, the Tannaim defined the word work by including 39 prohibited activities which were needed for the construction of the tabernacle while in the desert. It is no secret that the Jews of the world today live a different life from that of our ancestors. Lives have been changed by thousands of years of development, innovation, science, agriculture, invention and engineering. One can only imagine how the authors of the Talmud would have construed the word work had they been tasked with the obligation while living in a world that contained electricity, smart phones, airplanes, autos, elevators air conditioners and the like.

What is more work, walking up six flights of stairs to an apartment, or pressing an elevator button?

Is it more work to drive to shul on the Sabbath or to walk 1 ½ miles in the hot sun to get there? 3)Societal changes, as well, must be taken into consideration. Who can deny that pulpit rabbis and cantors who earn a salary for working on Sabbath are in fact violating classical notions of the Sabbath

“Let no man go out of this place on the seventh day” Exodus 16(29)

When God instructed Moses the Jewish people were in a vast desert in route to the holy land. There was nothing of value or interest around them and synagogues had yet not been envisioned. The instruction that all Jews were to remain in their habitation during the entire Sabbath might not have appeared so strange.

A thousand years later the Tannaim recognized that the environment and society had changed and that confining Jews to their homes for 24 hours during the Sabbath was no longer relevant to God’s will. The Tannaim had the courage to propose, ex nilo, the idea of encircling all or part of a community with a Rube Goldberg concoction offences, doors and wires so as to suggest an enclosure qualifying as” one’s place” and allowing exit to attend synagogue and for other non­work purposes. This ability to honestly recharacterize the nature of work in a modem society is denied traditional rabbis because of the limitations of a deified Talmud.

Kindle no fire

“Ye Shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations upon the Sabbath day”. Exodus 35(3). That one sentence alone has engendered a fierce controversy within the Jewish Community as to which modem innovations violate the Sabbath, and promote such questions as:

• Does the word kindle, in this context, mean start, or start and maintain?
  • Why would anyone be prevented from starting a fire if it were lawful to maintain it, as the Talmud apparently allows by Shabbos Candles and pre- lit cooking elements? A possible answer lies in the fact that the creation of the fire during biblical times required work which would be prohibited on the Sabbath.
  • Does the fact that we can now strike a match and produce fire suggests that it is no longer work and therefore not in violation of the Sabbath?
  • If work were the consideration, why was lighting a fire limited only to habitations? Isn’t maintaining and feeding afire as much, or more, work as starting one?
  • Was it Gods intention to restrict the Jews to their habitation on the Sabbath (Exodus 16(29) and provide no warmth during the cold nights in the desert? Or, did the no fire rule relate to cooking Friday’s manna on Saturday since manna was not provided on Sabbath?

There is a significant controversy as to whether the use of electricity is in fact the use of fire. Most traditional sources suggest that using a switch to complete a circuit is an act that constitutes work prohibited on the Sabbath and thus they avoid the characterization of electricity.

Is there a traditional shul that does not utilize electric lighting, air conditioning/heating, some form of amplification that considers their use authorized so long as it was not turned on and off by a Jewish person or member of the congregation. That conclusion would compel the notion that one could use fire, or its stepchild electricity, as long as that person himself did not initiate, or kindle it. But, how can you use the services of another to violate the Sabbath when the Decalogue itself, Exodus 20(10) expressly prohibits the use of a manservant, maidservant or stranger in order to violate the Sabbath? How is the utilization of the Shabbos goy justified?

God is a better Lawyer

The act of a Jew to avoid violation of sabbath, whether by mechanism initiated prior to sundown, or by Shabbos goy after its commencement, is still that Jew’s act and still violates the Sabbath. Try escaping liability for a wrongful act against another for a plan put in place prior to the event, or for an injury to another caused by a person you hired to do the job.           ·

Constraining the definition of work to an experience 3000 years earlier has boxed Judaism into ill­ conceived notions of the word, and occasional deceptive workarounds: e.g.

Recently, it has been reported that traditional Jews who, rather than close their business on a sabbath, prefer to sell it to a Gentile for Friday night and Saturday only. The fact that a contract is used does not conceal the sham nature of the undertaking. Assuredly, God knows that the real party in interest is the purported vendor, who would have a heart attack if the place burned down on Saturday in the hands of his surrogate. The vendor prefers to keep the comfort and goodwill of his customers rather than close his place of work on the Sabbath.

A sixth century Talmud operating in the 21st century has also promoted an era of Trap Door devices designed to avoid the consequences of stubborn reliance on some anachronistic interpretations of work in the Written Torah, e.g.:

• Sabbath elevators Shabbos Goys
• Kosher lamps
• Kosher clocks
• Shabbos safe hotplates
• Kosher Fridge (holds down the refrigerator light on Saturday) Pre-cut Toilet paper
• Sabbath contracts
• Eruv (An artificial means of expanding the area of the Torah’s Sabbath home limitations.

WHAT HATH MAN WROTH?

Dietary Law (Kashruth)

The basic laws relating to food that a Jew can consume come directly out of the written Torah and are immutable. They include:

• The animals that can and cannot be eaten (See LeviticusI1(39) and Deuteronomyl4(6 9andl l);
• How slaughter of animals is to be arranged (See Deuteronomy 12(27) and Numbers 1(22);
• The requirement for the elimination of blood before consumption

Derivative laws and rules include:

•  The separation of meat and dairy; Talmud
• Utensils used in the food preparation process; Talmud

Jews who choose to avoid the dietary laws frequently claim that the laws were imposed for antiquated hygienic reasons and that they are no longer relevant in the modern society. Many whose lives are irretrievably involved with the dietary laws find in it a spiritual, benign and respectful treatment of the food animals. While the rationalizations for the existence of these laws are interesting, they are nevertheless fundamental principles of Judaism and require compliance by observant Jews.

Some issues regarding the dietary laws arise from the Talmud’s confounding interpretation and construction of the Written Torah’s laws.

The laws relating to mixing milk and meat stem from the following reference in the Written Torah: Exodus23(19) 34(20) and Deuteronomy 14(21): “thou shall not seethe(cook) a kid in his mother’s milk”. The interpretation of the foregoing ten words by the Talmud and subsequent rabbinical commentators has, for generations, dominated Jewish lives and Jewish households. It has required the strictest separation of all sources of meat from all sources of milk products, including separation of all dishes, pots, pans, cooking utensils, dishtowels, and even periods of digestion.

Would dedicated modern Jewish minds, unbound by the restraints of the” Talmud” come to the same conclusions, if they asked questions like these?

• Why did the exact language at three separate Torah sites limit itself to only a goat and its milk if its intention was to include all Kosher food animals and all milk? Certainly, God in other parts of the Written Torah was very precise as to His meaning?
  • Why did the language on all three separate sources limit the origin of the milk to the mother of the goat rather than milk from any source? Do the specifics help to identify that it was intended as a humane rule?
  • Why, and by what authority, is the scope of the provision expanded from milk of a single goat to all milk of whatever source and the meat of a single kid to all meat of whatever source?
  • More importantly how could anyone have come to the foregoing expansion in the light of God’s direct mandate in Deuteronomy 4(3)”Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish aught from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you”

If that were not a sufficient quandary, consider the fact that chicken is considered as a meat and cannot be consumed with milk or milk products. Is this not adding to the law in violation of Deuteronomy 4(3) considering the fact that chickens do not even give milk. They give eggs which are allowed to be consumed with the chicken and with milk products. Strange?

The burden on Jewish Women

The rabbis have ordained that each traditional household should have a separate set of dishes and silverware for meat and for dairy use, and separate sets of each for Passover. This was not ordained by the Written Torah, but obviously generated out of the rabbinical desire that not even a scintilla of milk from any source should ever touch a scintilla of meat.

However, traditional rabbis have already acknowledged that glass does not retain residue in its pores when properly washed. Modern glazed dishes and flatware are likewise free of residue when properly washed. Is it not suitable now that the unnecessary and perhaps unjustified burden of multiple sets of dishes and silverware be alleviated for Jewish wives, for whom God also promised Sabbath rest from her labors?

Conclusion

The Written Torah embodies the history, the character and the faith of the Jewish people. It is immutable because that Torah was delivered by God to Moses at Sinai as the life force of the Jewish nation.

The Oral Law (The Talmud) contains the opinions, ideas, and interpretations of a coterie of brilliant religious scholars. The frame of reference from which they viewed the Torah was from circa 150 B.C.E. to 550 C.E. Although many interpretations and judgments may still be relevant, their views and conclusions were made in the context of that period.

A serious misjudgment took place when the Oral Law, opined by man, was reported to have been delivered to Moses at Sinai or, at least, to have been divinely inspired by God. That position had the effect of freezing all access to the interpretation of the Torah to the world as it existed in the Sixth century CE. Politics and religion are a hazardous admixture.

As collateral damage, by having the word of God exit from hundreds of the rabbinical mouths of the Tannaim and the Amoraim it implied a core of prophets to which the rabbis themselves laid no claim. Minhag, custom and tradition -as they are charmingly identified in “Fiddler on For the Roof’- are not a substitute for Torah or Judaic values.

What was done by man, man can undo.

The dated brilliance of the Tannaim and the Amoraim must be uncoupled from the silent implied authority god. It must be allowed to flow confluently with the great Jewish minds and times of today. No generation or era has a monopoly on wisdom. In that way, the Torah will be free to express God’s will for every generation.

For the 2000 years of diaspora, stateless Jews of the world floated on a life raft of sixth century Talmud. The State of Israel has been in existence for more than 68 years during which time it has generated great strides in defense, science, medicine, electronics, engineering, agriculture, music, films and literature.

Weare no longer a wandering people without will or resource to demonstrate God’s relevance and presence in contemporary life.

It is time for the Jewish scholars of the world, including our respected rabbis to review our Talmud in the light of the 21s1 century; to retain that which is still relevant; to discard what is extraneous; to reestablish a reunited strong Jewish faith; and to rebuild Judaism for the next 4000. years.

By Douglas C. Kaplan

1. Jeremy Kalmanofsky in Foward.com March 8, 2015

2. Gregory Smith, Pew Research Center, November 12, 2013

3. Max Dimont, The Indestructible Jews