In Orthodox Judaism, the letter of the law typically is the spirit of the law. Not a perfect analogy, but think of the talmud as similar to the tax code. There are things that are black, things that are white and things that are gray. If the tax code said there's a 5% sales tax on tangerines, clementines, navel oranges, lemons, and grapefruit, I'm probably not gonna volunteer to pay taxes on my Sumo Citruses, because it's not explicitly in there. Perhaps doing so would be in the spirit of the law, but that's just not the way people think when it comes to taxes. Same thing in Judaism... if it's technically legal, you can do it (this stems from the notion that the Jewish legal rules are of divine origin, and so if something was excluded, then its absence is intentional)[1].
Of course, much like the tax code, there are gray areas where different accountants (rabbis) may interpret the rules differently. One place where the analogy diverges is that in Judaism, there are lots of areas where the earlier generations of rabbis acknowledge something to be technically allowed according to the divine rules, but they forbid it anyway, either because they felt there was some societal benefit to doing so, or because they felt that adding an additional prohibition would prevent people from accidentally breaking the divine rule [1].
[1] Of course, the analogy breaks down, because it's more complicated than this. There are plenty of areas where people are customarily stricter, even if something is ok by the letter of the law. This applies to Sabbath Mode on elevators, which many Orthodox Jews won't use, but won't necessarily say that it's prohibited.
[2] An example of this is the prohibition of eating milk and meat in the same dish. Technically, the divine rule is no cooking milk and meat together, but the rabbis added an extra rule of no eating them together to make sure that people wouldn't come to cook them together.
> this stems from the notion that the Jewish legal rules are of divine origin, and so if something was excluded, then its absence is intentional
I would like to understand the reasoning behind the belief that even legal rules of divine origin would include mention of things human culture would have had no concept of, and human language no word for, in the time the rule was made — such that the rules would be "complete for all future time" rather than "those relevant as of the time of covenant."
Wouldn't even a god think it more optimal to hold off on telling us rules about e.g. which synthetic meats are kosher, until we invent such things?
It seems awfully suspicious to the validity of that interpretation, that there are plenty of specific/concrete prohibitions given amongst divine rulings, but of those, none are about things that were entirely mysterious at the time, written down "as spoken" without understanding, only able to be made sense of centuries/millennia later.
In fact — the Hebrew god is an intercessor god, not an absent god; don't they already "amend" their own previous rules whenever they communicate specific orders / demands / requirements to particular people? Does that not, by itself, disrupt the interpretation of the initial set of laws given being a perfect closed set, never to be updated, applicable to all future circumstances? Would a perfect body of divine law not already imply those orders / demands / requirements, such that there would be no need for further communication?
In Jewish monotheism god is beyond time and space, probably because the concept of God tries to encompass the infinity of the universe in time and space and the lack of understanding of those things, us being humans.
Therefore when we ascribe some will to god, specifically the will for humans to follow all those rules, we believe that this god "exists" in every time and every space, past present or future.
That's why also the "spirit" of the rules doesn't matter, we don't try to understand god, all we can is to try to understand things which are in the realm of science. Spirit of the rules is something that might exist in a human moral system, not something we believe that came from a transcended entity beyond our understanding.
Oh, I do get that; I'm more asking why a timeless god wouldn't tell the Jews 4000 years ago to e.g. not construct or partake of social-networking apps (and other such things where they'd have no idea what their God was on about.) An intercessor god dreamed up today would certainly give commandments like that; so why wouldn't a god giving commandments 4000 years ago, but who "exists outside of time", do the same?
Maybe it changed its mind or maybe it drip feeds the laws over time since it knows humans could misinterpret laws for things that do not exist yet. (disclaimer: completely agnostic)
> God cannot be both omnipresent and only exist outside of time.
How so? God exists simultaneously at all the moments that exist. Time was created by God, just like the universe was.
> so clearly that God at least exists within the temporal universe.
Imagine you are writing a book, where you, as the author, are also a character. You can interact with your characters as they do things - but you can also go back and change anything you want, and you can see the ending as well.
(Keep in mind that God always maintains free will - God doesn't force any human to act in any particular way, it's always their own choice.)
The commandments that generalize are the exception, not the rule.
You know there are mitzvot about which positions of the priesthood should or should not be allowed to eat specific varieties of grapes (that only grew in Canaan) during specific growing seasons, right?
Those are pretty concrete rules, that don't really generalize. The sort of thing you'd expect to see matched by modern equivalents. And yet, these are believed to be literal divine law, just as much as "thou shalt build an ark" etc. is.
Also, there are separate mitzvot for kosher-ness rules for basically each kind of animal, starting with general classes, but then getting increasingly specific and obscure/unlikely-to-be-eaten-by-humans. (Almost exactly as if a series of people were actively pestering a High Priest with trivia questions like "but when is it ritually-impure to eat flying insects, though?", where they then felt the need to make a ruling.)
It's a stretch, but maybe you could extract from the rule about eating grapes a general principle, perhaps even one consistent with Japanese tea ceremonies.
I had thought that the Golden Rule was stated explicitly in the New Testament but not in the "Old Testament", or Torah. But that turns out not to be true. (Of course, I was aware that there were some very old statements of it, even from ancient Egypt, predating even Abraham.)
In the New Testament I find Matthew 7:12 and Luke 6:31 cited online. I would also add Matthew 22:36-40 to that, because I think it's simply a more important and more widely referenced quote.
But the Golden Rule is also present, earlier, in what Christians know as Leviticus and Orthodox Jews know as Vaikra, 19:18.
Here are the KJV versions of all of these:
"Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the Lord." Leviticus 19:18
"Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets." Matthew 7:12 (presumably citing Leviticus earlier)
"And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise." Luke 6:31
And IMO the most important to Christianity, from Matthew 22:36-40:
36 Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
38 This is the first and great commandment.
39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
And if God isn't a sociopathic asshole, then why didn't he bother to throw in a commandment explicitly prohibiting slavery? That would have been pretty simple to universally and unequivocally articulate:
Thou Shalt Not Own Other Human Beings, Nor Treat Them As Property.
So my Jewish friends could technically eat a cheese burger, as long as the cheese was placed on the burger after cooking?
Would they have to wait till the burger cools down so that it doesn't melt the cheese? (Here I am concerned about carryover heating/cooking being considered cooking by law.)
I am endlessly fascinated by religious laws and their implications/consequences.
> So my Jewish friends could technically eat a cheese burger, as long as the cheese was placed on the burger after cooking?
No they can't, but this would be a violation of a rabbinical law (the rabbis forbade eating them together as a safeguard), which is less serious than a biblical law violation.
> Would they have to wait till the burger cools down so that it doesn't melt the cheese? (Here I am concerned about carryover heating/cooking being considered cooking by law.)
The real question you are asking is what counts as cooking. This has lots of ramifications in Jewish law, particularly because cooking in general is forbidden on the sabbath. From here, you can go down the rabbit hole of related questions. What temperature counts as cooking? If something has a low melting point, is it treated differently or is there an absolute temperature? Can you keep things warm on the Sabbath if they are already cooked? Can you rewarm them? I can go on and on, but the gist is that it gets complicated and this is the reason why there are many people who spend a lifetime learning talmud and never master it.
But to answer your question specifically, waiting for the burger to cool down is irrelevant in this case since it's rabbinically prohibited to eat them together anyway. The only real question is at what temperature it goes from a rabbinical to a biblical prohibition.
You would have to find someone who counted the validity of the original law ("Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk" in Exodus https://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0223.htm) but did not count any later interpretation or fence around it.
Please talk to your participants well before you start this experiment; very few people are going to have an equivocal attitude towards it.
> acknowledge something to be technically allowed according to the divine rules, but they forbid it anyway, either because they felt there was some societal benefit to doing so, or because they felt that adding an additional prohibition would prevent people from accidentally breaking the divine rule
There are of also cases where a societal benefit outweighed new knowledge about biology. Spontaneous generation meant that it's ok to kill lice on the Sabbath and eat fish with worms in it (which nearly all fish do) so long as the worms are of the kind that hatch within the fish. Well lice don't spontaneously generate and the worm in question lives outside the fish, but are you really gonna tell people to not kill lice any day of the week and totally get rid of part of their diet? It's a fun bit of tradition I think.
The analogy breaks down even for this very example, because the reason why you're not supposed to use the elevator buttons is because operating some electric device is considered a form of "kindling a fire", which is prohibited on Sabbath - which is definitely not a literal interpretation of the corresponding scriptural prohibition.
First, when people feel that the tax code doesn’t represent the spirit of the law, they change the wording, likely they will amend it and put the same tax on Sumo Citruses as on other citruses. So the tax code and the Talmud are quite different animals.
Second, I am pretty sure the Talmud is not so precise to the point of specifically mentioning pressing pressing buttons on an elevator. So the analogy kind of doesn’t work there again.
Imagine if the US Code suddenly became fixed and holy. Now imagine you are thousands of years in the future. Congress is long gone and if you're lucky you might have some notes and stories about how the laws were enforced in the past.
Naturally, the world has changed a lot since the text of the law became immutable. But who is to say how new things fit into the old framework? What about old contradictions that were never addressed? What about laws on the books that were never enforced in practice, do those still count? And so on.
In our hypothetical scenario there is no Supreme Court, but there would probably be dozens of 'pretenders to the throne' who believe they have the right to interpret the law correctly. So you as an individual can choose which school of thought you want to subscribe to. Letter of the law? Spirit of the Law?
And in a funny way, when we ask ourselves "what did the Founding Fathers want?" we are doing the same thing as theologians when they wonder what God wanted.
To extend this analogy further, in Judaism, we ascribe more value to the opinions of rabbis "closer to the source". So we would look at the tax code from 1000 years ago and try to interpret that. But we might also say, "John Marshall was a great justice and one of his opinions dealt with something similar, how can we apply that to our situation here?"
I took my gap year in israel with a religious Jewish friends. We were slight stoners back then and on sabbath in order for him to get high I’d have to light a bong in a cupboard and fill the cupboard with smoke and then swap places with him. This was multiple times per sabbath every sabbath. I also had to constantly open the fridge for him because of the automatic light. I found these rituals ridiculous (20 years later I still do) and we fought over it and decided to part ways for the rest of the gap year.
He should not have done that. In general a Jew is not permitted to ask a non-Jew to do things that are forbidden to him.
Some exceptions are things necessary for normal life, that would be impossible to do in advance. A classic example is lighting a fire for heating (back when that was done with a pile of wood), and minor medical needs. (Major medical needs the Jew would violate the Shabbath and do himself.)
Getting high is not a necessity, and the fridge switch could have been taped before the Shabbath.
My former (I moved) Orthodox neighbors had some lovely coded language for this sort of thing. "Our house is really hot, do you want to come over?" "We're cooking, perhaps you have some advice?"
The letter was, they believe, the word of God. If God hadn't meant the loophole to be there then he would have used different words. The loophole is divine.
If you assume omniscience and omnipotence as a starting point, then you can justify anything that exists using the same reason, otherwise it wouldn't exist, right? I don't mean to get into a theological or ontological argument, though. It just seems like you can use the foundation to justify anything you want.
God doesn't explicitly forbid cannibalism anywhere in the Bible. We just have to find a way to define humans as ruminants with cloven hooves and it'll all be kosher.
No Rabbi approves of eating humans; it is more a technical debate about whether it is explicitly prohibited by the rules, versus "not strictly prohibited but ewwww... so don't do it"
Where did you get the idea that the Hebrew God is supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent? I am told that biblical Hebrew does not even have a word for omnipotent.
Orthodox Jews accept Rambam (Maimonides)'s 13 principles of the faith. Rambam taught that all his 13 principles can be derived from the Torah.
The 10th principle explicitly says that God is omniscient. The 1st principle "Belief in the existence of the Creator, who is perfect in every manner of existence and is the Primary Cause of all that exists" doesn't explicitly mention omnipotence but rather obviously entails it. (If God is not omnipotent, then God is not "perfect in every manner of existence" since God would not be perfect in power.)
Whether or not the ancient Hebrews believed in divine omniscience and omnipotence is something that can be historically debated. But contemporary Orthodox Jews do.
(I'm not Jewish but I hope I've stated the Orthodox Jewish viewpoint accurately.)
Thanks for pointing this out. I encountered the claim recently that the concept of divine omnipotence was invented by Catholic theologians. maybe in the early middle ages, and does not quite exist in Judaism. But you’re pretty convincing.
There are a few sibling comments explain this by saying that, since the law is divine, so are the loopholes. That doesn't tell the whole story.
A big chunk of judaism has always centered about cultural preservation. In a way, the careful crafting of ridiculous loopholes is a stronger indicator about caring that the law exists --ie, presereving the culture-- than blindly following it. And so it's allowed and celebrated.
("What happens when a culture that is built on the notion of being an opressed people finds itself in a position of dominance" is an interesting question and left as an exercise to the reader.)
With all respect, what you said makes zero sense to me.
I don't see how "caring that the law exists" equals to "preserving the culture" (at least not see it in a good way), or how it's not "blindly following it".
It is a form of blindly following it, in the same way that at some point for any legal system that people follow there's some level of blind following.
The other workaround I had heard for this is to have a non-Jew hired specifically to stand in the elevator and push buttons on behalf of Jews on the sabbath. But they'd still have to speak the floor so the attendant would know what button to push, right?
If so, what if an elevator had basic voice recognition? Speaking the floor number to a machine is no more work than speaking it to an attendant, right?
Maybe this rule interpretation was originally made back when elevators generally had attendants and did require some expertise to operate (e.g. to stop at the right spots)? And then didn't get rolled back when it became essentially trivial?
If speaking isn't allowed, a hack* would be for the elevator to start counting, and tell the passenger to nod or lift their head up after their floor number is mentioned. Or even just walk to the activation corner.
It’s not quite as you say. There are more specifics involved than just ‘work generally or kindling a fire’ - but few people except religious Jews would care about the details.
"Work" is a bad translation. A better translation would be "creative activity". Fire is a problem not because it's work to light, but because you are creating heat from wood.
if the idea is to not work then pressing a button isn't going to change anything. if the elevator is being taken to do some work, again pressing the button has nothing to do with it.
There are sects (like the ultra orthodox) who don't use Sabbath mode specifically for this reason. They say that the added weight causes the elevator's motor to work harder thereby desecrating the Sabbath.
A prohibition on "creation" is over-broad. Any action taken purposefully can be considered an act of creation. That would include choosing to adhere to the law (thus creating a world where there is more compliance with the law) even if that takes the form of deliberately doing nothing.
The only way I can think of to completely avoid creating anything would be to remain unconscious the entire time, thus preventing yourself from making any choices.
Yes, that is understood. My point was that if the intention was to prohibit "acts of creation" then the official list is woefully incomplete, and rather arbitrary; other acts which could equally well be considered "creation" under the same reasoning are not prohibited. (Mostly IMHO because if said reasoning were applied consistently it would be impossible to follow the law, regardless of what one did or did not do.) It leaves the impression that "creation" is merely an excuse or after-the-fact rationalization, not the actual reason for the prohibition.
Shabbat observance is a massive world unto itself. It originates in Biblical sources (i.e. "the word of God"), but has developed throughout the entire rabbinic tradition, from the time of the prophets through the Talumdic era, and subsequently to the modern day.
Today, it is universally accepted in Orthodox Judaism that direct active interaction with electrical appliances is forbidden on Shabbat. However, one may benefit from and "use" devices and automated systems set in place before Shabbat, including light timers, fridges, and heating plates.
To be clear: nobody is "tricking" God by using a Shabbat elevator. Rather, this maintains the special nature of the day within the parameters established by centuries of tradition and scholarship ultimately based on God's commandments, while facilitating navigating our modern world.
Of course nobody is actually "tricking god", because there is no god to trick: they're only tricking themselves. So of course it looks to them (the actual gullible chumps in this situation) from inside their tiny little closed-form logical trap of their fictional make-believe "massive world unto itself" role-playing MMPORG that they are "logically consistent", and not both worshiping and tricking a make-believe god who is a gullible chump, but that's sure not the way it looks and actually is objectively from outside in the real world.
They also have just as many stubborn closed-form rationalizations for their outrageously neanderthal sexism, too. Just blame it on centuries of tradition and scholarship ultimately based on chump-god's commandments, not the frustrated angry misogynistic old men who originally invented and still perpetuate it.
How about putting all that energy and ingenuity into coming up with clever exceptions and work-arounds to the traditional misogynistic commandments of a sexist god, that allow you to get away with respectfully treating women as clean and equal human beings seven out of seven days of the week, even while they're menstruating, instead of smugly obsessing on inventing intellectually and physically lazy tricks to cleverly ride elevators without pressing buttons one day a week?
> not to pick on a specific belief system, but it's quite interesting the lengths people go to follow the letter but not the spirit of things.
That's not the way observant Jewish people look at it at all. You're assuming that these workarounds are not "following the spirit", but according to them, the workarounds are as much a part of the spirit of the law as the law itself.
> s quite interesting the lengths people go to follow the letter but not the spirit of things.
Perhaps it appears that way to you, but what do you know about the 'spirit' of Jewish law compared to generations of life-long practitioners and rabbis?
not to pick on a specific belief system, but it's quite interesting the lengths people go to follow the letter but not the spirit of things.