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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

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.

asciimov 5y ago
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.
- dsr_ 5y ago
  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 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.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    Karaite Judaism holds exactly such a literalist position.
- chadash 5y ago
  > 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.
  - asciimov 5y ago
    Thanks for your answer. It sounds like most things involving religion, complicated.
LudwigNagasena 5y ago
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.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  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.
  - chadash 5y ago
    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?"
derefr 5y ago
> 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?
- golemiprague 5y ago
  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.
  - derefr 5y ago
    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?
1-more 5y ago
> 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. https://www.kashrut.com/articles/WormsInFish/ https://www.kashrut.com/articles/WormsInFish/
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  Aren't worms and lice disobeying the Word of God by not spontaneously generating? Aren't they going to hell for that?
int_19h 5y ago
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.

asciimov 5y ago

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.

dsr_ 5y ago
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 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.
- int_19h 5y ago
  Karaite Judaism holds exactly such a literalist position.
chadash 5y ago
> 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.
- asciimov 5y ago
  Thanks for your answer. It sounds like most things involving religion, complicated.

LudwigNagasena 5y ago

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.

BitwiseFool 5y ago
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.
- chadash 5y ago
  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?"

derefr 5y ago

> 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?

golemiprague 5y ago
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.
- derefr 5y ago
  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?

1-more 5y ago

> 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. https://www.kashrut.com/articles/WormsInFish/ https://www.kashrut.com/articles/WormsInFish/

DonHopkins 5y ago
Aren't worms and lice disobeying the Word of God by not spontaneously generating? Aren't they going to hell for that?

int_19h 5y ago

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.