Clarity

 There are some things in the Bible that are quite clear. Do not murder or steal, those are pretty clear. There are other things that are not completely clear. In Judaism in contrast to Christianity, understanding all the fine print is important, and that is why Judaism has a vigorous tradition of study and debate and dialogue. The Talmud for instance is a book where rabbis of different time periods are quoted together in commentary on the Mishnah, which is itself intended to flesh out the troublesome bits of the Torah. So it is in essence a time spanning debate on a commentary on the Torah, layers upon layers. 

All in pursuit of clarity! ;) This is one reason why I tend to favor the attitude of Karaite Judaism, which is that there is no one authoritative rabbinical commentary on the Torah. You can read and seek to understand such commentaries, but only the Torah is authoritative and sometimes the Torah is hard to interpret. The interpretation of it is each person's responsibility and that responsibility cannot be deferred to rabbis.

This debate concerning what the Torah means about certain things for me comes to a head on the topic of the Sabbath. You do not work on the Sabbath.

BUT EVERYTHING IS WORK! Breathing is working. Standing up is working. Thinking burns energy, so it is also work. Living beings labor in some form continually. If my heart would stop pumping blood for the Sabbath, that would be it for me. The old rabbis had their interpretations, but those interpretations are hard to reconcile with the modern world too. It says not to light a fire: is turning on a lightbulb lighting a fire? Yes and no.

So with the Sabbath as with other puzzling things in the Torah, I go to the core meaning. What is the core meaning of the Sabbath? There is some mention of the Sabbath being connected with the seventh day of Creation, but the core meaning that rings true for me is connected to the Exodus itself. What were the Israelites in Egypt? Slaves. Well the Sabbath is a day when no one is a slave, not even slaves are to be slaves on that day according to the Torah. So the core meaning is, you don't engage in any economic activity on that day. You don't work, you don't make your employees work, you don't make other people work. You don't order delivery pizza, for instance, because that would be making the person that makes the pizza and the person who delivers it work. Anything that relates to whatever you normally do for a living, you don't do that and you don't make anyone else do it either. You do not buy or sell.

There are other deeper meanings to the Sabbath, but in terms of your conduct that is what you should not be doing. Is that the complete meaning of the Sabbath? No! But it is the external observation of it.

Another one, and one in which I disagree with the rabbis, is the passage about not boiling a kid in its mother's milk. For the sake of this one sentence, observant Jewish households have two complete sets of cooking utensils and in some cases (Jewish schools for instance) actually two completely separate kitchens! Imagine how much ink has been spilled, and how much the ironmongers have profited, off this one sentence!

For me, the sentence is clear and has more to do with the value of all life than the contamination of dishes. Don't kill a baby animal until it has weaned. Let the baby goat or sheep or cattle finish up its babyhood. Don't be so selfish with the mother's milk that you kill her offspring before it has even finished infancy. It has nothing to do with ritual contamination. Don't boil a kid in its OWN mother's milk.

Now the Christian approach to such things is to just throw the Jesus blanket over it. "Jesus, And It's All Good." Problem is, we don't do that with the Ten Commandments (or 9 of them anyway) and we don't do that with proscriptions against homosexuality and cross dressing. What defines the difference between the Law that you get to be picky about and the Law you can shrug off? Christians are involved in interpreting the Law too, or else they are forced into some sort of New Age Christianity where there is no Law and EVERYTHING is okay. So you can't not interpret the Law and interpretations involve uncertainty.

I think this is actually kind of deep. It is like we are on a stationary bicycle of holiness, where we have to keep working on getting there but we never quite get there in this life, but in the meantime we build our muscles. The effort itself is part of the Law then: we are meant to try to struggle to understand the mind of G-d, but we can't quite. Christians throw the blood of Jesus on the struggle and Jews or Rabbinical Jews anyway just refer to their rabbis for definitive interpretations. Both approaches foreclose our inquiry, they foreclose something that shouldn't be completely foreclosed in all situations. The Talmud is like photos taken of a hologram: the thing itself contains much more information than our snapshots of it. We engage in the reasoning and questioning and debate in order to conform ourselves to the hologram, not because any judgment or decision or word we will ever say is perfect.

On the one hand G-d wants a Law for us that is clear and easily interpreted and obeyed; on the other hand the world is always changing and the Torah is very old, so we have to interpret some. On the whole, the Law of G-d is very clear and is meant to be. That is my governing principle in interpreting the Torah: what is the clearest most essential core meaning? But there is a lot of stuff there and in the Tanakh as a whole, so we must always be inquiring. Not as the World would inquire, not skeptically, but knowing there is meaning there and that it is our own shortcomings that separate us from understanding that meaning better.

And then we pray that the spirit of G-d, which alone can enlighten minds and hearts, will shed its light on us.