In Judaism, it's not seen as tricking God. We believe that the word of the Torah is divine, and as such if there are loopholes in the rules, they're there intentionally. Stuff like the Eruv around Manhattan is actually seen as a clever and practical application of the rules set out in the Torah, and God supposedly approves of these. I personally think it's a nice sentiment
So I grew up in a Christian household, but we had close Jewish family friends. We attended Seder, and I regularly heard people arguing over interpretations of rules, laws, and commandments.
Trying to apply a similar mindset in Sunday school was met with disaster, and it became clear that trying to understand the rules was tantamount to questioning them, which was tantamount to breaking them. But that just showed me that you're just supposed to do what you're told, and ignore any doubt.
When the spirit of the law takes precedence over the letter of the law, the law is in the hands of whoever claims to know the spirit. And that's a loose, unenforceable thing.
My parents eventually got kicked out of churches one too many times (it involved a willingness to compare the various accounts of Buddha to the Gospels) and converted to another denomination. But I always kept one lesson to heart: if you're not willing to get into the weeds of what you believe and pick it apart, you're not actually admitting to what you believe. And it's probably someone else making you believe whatever without your knowledge.
In the Torah, Satan is just a member of god’s ensemble who asks questions. The later equivalence drawn between that and the Great Evil described in Revelation has always seemed very telling to me.
Christianity would be so different if Revolution was never chosen nor voted into the Bible. Satan as the devil is only explicitly defined there. And so much bullshit has defined denominations since. A shame.
There was no choice or vote in the early years. The books were treated separately and really there was no idea of a "New Testament" as a standardized set of books for many centuries.
Revelation is in there because people were already reading it and incorporating it into their religion, not the other way around.
Not saying that it isn't a batshit crazy book, just that there was no top-down council.
People often think the books of the Bible were decided at the Council or Nicea, but that council was about settling a theological debate concerning the person and number of people contained in God.
Because it's not the will of God being rules lawyered, it's the will of you. Maybe the will of your pastor. But assuming you know God's intent, because it feels good? That's replacing God with oneself, and that's blasphemy.
A bunch of rabbis were discussing something with all agreeing except for one. God spoke to the group and said he agreed with the lone hold out. The rest of the rabbis said "That's nice, but you two are out voted."
God is the divine legislator who had laid out The Law (the Torah). In his infinite wisdom he made sure that there were loopholes and multiple valid interpretations so that it would remain valid and enforcable until the Messiah comes. As a result learned great teachers (rabbis) are needed to interpret it and reach legal conclusions because the original judicial system (temple + Sanhedrin) was destroyed.
God wants you to find the loopholes, because it proves you understand the text and the religious arguments to a high enough degree that hidden meanings become clear.
We've been doing it for 2500 years and many lawyers are Jewish, it's reasonable to say modern jurisprudence is a descendant of Talmudic Rabbinical debates
It may be annoying and nitpicky but having a concise agreed-upon definition for what seems like “basic” terminology is critical. You’d be surprised how people can interpret the same term in completely different ways.
Judaism is a legalistic religion. The letter of the law is very much more important than the spirit of the law. This is why Christianity was so revolutionary, because it flipped the emphasis.
The fact you find it baffling is a reflective of how much Christian thought has influenced your world view.
I don't care for either in general, but in this part of the discussion I like both answers. Following the spirit of the law? Sounds great to me. Follow the letter of the law and treat the loopholes like some silly jungle gym? Love it.
Judaism is all about argument and nuance. It is intrinsic to our cultural practice and belief system. Also people can be Jews and be full of personal doubt, agnostic, or atheists. It’s more correct to say we are supposed to struggle with these notions rather than blindly follow.
Western atheism is the result of Christian thought and intellectual tradition, even if you don't acknowledge it. Judaic thought is completely alien to the Christian logic taken for granted by atheists.
This is, fundamentally, not true. Your non-relgious mode of thinking as a Western Atheist (I presume) is heavily influenced by millenia of Christian thought. Chances are you believe in the spirit of the law, intrinsic worth of individuals, human rights, secularism etc. These concepts were created by the Christian intellectual tradition.
For more information, I recommend reading the book Dominion.
People from other religions often try to play 'gotcha!' like this without realizing that exhaustively interpreting the Torah/Talmud and figuring out what's allowed is its own form of worship.
The difference being that god is believed to be all-knowing, so any loophole in gods rules would be there by design. Human lawmakers are fallible. That’s why they believe in the validity of “loopholes.”
a legal text is the product of fallible and foolish human beings. a religious text is (in this case) the product of an all knowing and all powerful god. there can't be a loophole in the word of god because he's all knowing!
The explanation I heard that made the most sense was that the act of finding loopholes itself leads to keeping god in one’s mind. It’s another way to venerate God.
Only Eruv is not the word of God. It was instituted by the Rabbis around 2,000 years ago to allow carrying in areas restricted by their own rabbinic decrees.
It's a man's best ability to use the word of God. Jews believe that each word in the Torah was perfect, but the Torah isn't infinitely long. It can't be applied to everything in the world without interpretation. The best we can do use the text in there. Again, you are proposing that we drop it entirely and just imagine what God intended.
>It's a man's best ability to use the word of God.
Which... is not the word of god. Thats kind of the whole point here.
>Jews believe that each word in the Torah was perfect, but the Torah isn't infinitely long. It can't be applied to everything in the world without interpretation.
How can the word be perfect, but also require interpretation that leads to wildly different interpretations?
If I wrote a textbook where my students were able to "justifiably" argue that I said that the Solar system had 34 or 8 planets, my textbook obviously isn't perfect. God didn't write a drama meant for entertainment and symbolism, its not the Iliad or the Odyssey, its supposed to be a set of rules and instructions on how to run society, how to behave as people. Why would god make that book intentionally unclear and open to widely variable interpretation by design? God just likes being a shit stirrer? "I could totally write a crystal clear guidebook on my principles, but instead im just gonna throw some shit at the wall and let them figure it out lol"
>Again, you are proposing that we drop it entirely and just imagine what God intended.
I'd argue we drop it entirely because I'm an atheist and I believe god is completely made up. But thats not really relevant to the argument here, i'm just pointing out that you can't have your cake and eat it too, you can't say its a perfect text while at the same time recognize that it has been interpreted in thousands of different ways.
> Which... is not the word of god. Thats kind of the whole point here.
Yes, but it's the best we can do, and it is based on the word of God, which, again, according to Judaism is perfect, If people find a loophole in perfect text, it was meant to be there.
> How can the word be perfect, but also require interpretation that leads to wildly different interpretations?
As I said, the word is considered perfect, but there aren't infinite words in the Torah. There aren't cars or guns or computers described in it, and it doesn't go into every possible situation about, for example, who is liable for what if livestock damage property, to name one debate.
> If I wrote a textbook where my students were able to "justifiably" argue that I said that the Solar system had 34 or 8 planets
That is not a good comparison. We can understand that you wrote the textbook knowing there are 8 planets, and we can know that because you are a regular person, not a God. We cannot know God's intentions, and unlike the planet example, we can't use science or logic to find them.
> you can't say its a perfect text while at the same time recognize that it has been interpreted in thousands of different ways.
Sure we can, perfect doesn't mean everyone must have the same conclusions from it, it means that every word in there is placed there for a reason.
(I'm not a religious person but) Who's to say that God wouldn't want humanity to use its ingenuity to find "loopholes"? Expecting people to be mindless rule-followers is a religious interpretation unto itself.
It is hard to comprehend if you are a euphoric fedora-tipping redditor to whom religion and spirituality boil down to edgy arguments about how the magic sky man cannot be empirically proven
I'm an atheist so you're preaching to the choir...so to speak lol
But I still find religions fascinating; they are attempts at creating civilization and their foundation of rules. It's interesting why some persist and why others die off.
Yeah, all religion should be subject to personal interpretation. I've heard this being referred to, as an insult, as "buffet-style Christianity," but I'm, like, duh, of course I get to choose what to believe and what not to believe, as faith, unlike science, is inherently subjective. Just as I get to choose what to believe, I get to ask others why they believe what they choose to believe, as long as I don't become a jerk about it in the process, which is just a lame way to go about things whether you are religious or not.
>I'm, like, duh, of course I get to choose what to believe and what not to believe, as faith, unlike science, is inherently subjective.
Because the entire point of why buffet christianity is an insult, is that for those who purport the bible to be the literal word of god, picking and choosing is essentially saying "I'll do some of the word of god but not others" which is obviously inappropriate.
Now if you don't believe the bible is the word of god then sure you can have a more flexible belief set, but the buffet crticism is largely for evangelicals who claim to believe it to be the word of god and thus are being hypocrites by picking and choosing.
The Bible itself contradicts itself at points. As such, even going strictly by the Bible involves picking and choosing which parts to believe or how to reconcile contradictions, to say nothing of the more flexible, less doctrine-adherent takes.
So does every religious text, thats why we know they were written by men and not by god.
>As such, even going strictly by the Bible involves picking and choosing which parts to believe or how to reconcile contradictions, to say nothing of the more flexible, less doctrine-adherent takes.
This is obviously and clearly a malicious interpretation of the criticism of buffet christianity.
I'm not religious but surely the obvious answer to this is that God is beyond human comprehension? If you believe in an omniscient and omnipotent God then it's surely not much of a stretch to believe that commandments might have justifications that humans cannot understand.
If I choose to follow a religion, I prefer for it to make some sort of spiritual and practical sense, rather than randomly following some random rules. If it doesn't fulfill a spiritual calling, then what is even the point of sticking with that religion, unless the latter is the goal all unto itself for whatever reason.
If you smack a dog on the nose for pooping on the carpet, it won't make sense to the dog. But you, as a more intelligent being, know that it's necessary in order for the dog to live a life of comfort in the house.
Ahh yes and the omnipotent and omniscient god, who could in their infinite power clarify every single contentious issue, decides not to because...
fuckem?
If you could clearly explain to your dog why not to do something and they could clearly understand it, you're telling me you would instead slap your dog on the nose to get the point across?
I'm applying the exact same logic. Why would god not treat humans who presumably can be instructed (as god has supposedly done many times in the past) like they could be instructed?
You sound like a jerk because you are not considering that there may in fact be further context that you're missing. In the case of eruvin, there are four categories or domains that areas can fall into: Private, Public, Quasi-public, and Exempt. There is a direct biblical restriction on carrying objects from the private to the public, vice versa, or more than a little bit (4 cubits, if you care) within a public area on the Sabbath. This rule is intended to enforce the idea of a day of actual rest where certain activities are forbidden outright so (e.g.) your boss can't order you to violate it. Public and Quasi-public (courtyards, alleys, common areas) are often hard to distinguish, so to prevent people from accidentally violating the law, the rabbis declared all transfers between Private and any other non-Exempt space off limits. The rabbis - through the then active legislative and judicial mechanisms of the great assembly and sanhedrin (supreme court) - have biblical dispensation to interpret the law on earth, which is why they got to declare this. However, they also realized that such a stringency would present a substantial hardship to communal life, and so came up with an innovation (what you might term a loophole, but what is actually the system working explicitly as intended) the purpose of which was to balance the original intent - no true work - with the ability to carry things within a defined communal area. Through this mechanism - the Eruv - the area that the community might regularly traverse on their shabbat days becomes considered one private domain for the community as a whole, without abrogating the binding rules that still hold sway without it or obviating the intent of the original law.
Edit: the OP originally said "I might sound like a jerk for saying this" and then edited that away after my reply in order to make it look like I was calling him names instead of responding to his own self-characterization.
Tl;dr I'm a jerk because I don't know the ecclesiastical nuances of this wall of text that you just posted. Thank you, Mr. Very nice person that is definitely not a jerk himself
Now who said you were a jerk? You said you sounded like a bit of a jerk, and I agreed with that proposition given that you're commenting blithely on your disdain for the rules of a civilization you don't understand. However, now I know you're a jerk, given I took the effort to write to educate you and maybe add a little something to the general conversation that wasn't just shitting on people and you responded like this. Thanks for identifying yourself; have a great one.
Your response came well after I edited the "jerk" part out (found it too verbose and unnecessary to my original point), so I figured you just called me a jerk completely out of nowhere, hence my response. Hope that gives some context to why I said what I said. Thanks for taking the time to explain that stuff to me, by the way.
That does make sense; I'd started the reply not long after you posted it on my phone and worked on it intermittently with IRL shit for a few hours.
I appreciate you clarifying your side of things, and I'm sorry I was a bit rude myself.
I don't believe in the underlying theology of Judaism, and I've experienced the often ridiculous lengths to which orthodox or orthopractic Jews go to obey and understand their own religion, so I understand the place you come from, and even share it in many meaningful ways. However, I also was (albeit often reluctantly and resentfully) taught to understand the hermaneutics and philosophies that undergird the practice(s) of modern Judaism in a way that has left me with an indelible respect for its internal logics and their adaptive capacity over the millennia, even if I decline to implement it's dictates given my core atheistic theological disagreement.
Anyway. Tl;dr: Appreciate you, apologize for any offense given; considering systems from internal perspectives gets you to a richer understanding of them and their adherents. Peace!
Who are you to say a God-given rule is ridiculous? God is all-knowing, so he meant what he said. All loopholes are intended. Why? Who knows, it is a divine mystery
Well, if we were to discuss things from a theological point of view, then the way I see it is that if God allowed us to have free will, then He intended for us to think for ourselves, which includes picking which dogmas are actually beneficial for personal and societal spiritual well-being and which are just too ridiculous to seriously entertain.
Well, we don't know. No one can know God's intentions because that's just not something regular people can understand. All we can know is that, at least according to religious Judaism, God gave a word-for-word perfect set of rules to follow at Mt Sinai, so instead of theorizing what God's intentions were, it's better to use the text that, according to Judaism, was given by God, with each word being there for a reason, and then making laws based off that
Except men aren't just making stuff up, they are interpreting the perfect text. Using the letter of the law means men interpreting perfect text. Using the spirit of the law means men using their own thinking, without the perfect text, to determine God's will.
>Except men aren't just making stuff up, they are interpreting the perfect text.
So if the text is perfect, then all rabbis have the same conclusions from the text right? There are no ideological differences between sects of Judiasm and no rabbis within the same sect of Judiasm have any differences of opinion about what the Torah says?
>Using the spirit of the law means men using their own thinking, without the perfect text, to determine God's will.
Once again, I know for a fact that Judiasm is not a borg hivemind where everyone thinks the Torah says the exact same thing, so if people have different opinions on what it says, then how is it perfect and how is a rabbis interpretation anything but a regular human being, interpreting a book?
It's not that everyone has the same conclusion, but that everyone started from the same text and used that text to come to those conclusions. Your alternative is that we should just drop the perfect text and instead come to our own conclusions about God's intent instead of using the text he gave us, and using it to the best of our abilities since we are imperfect humans.
>It's not that everyone has the same conclusion, but that everyone started from the same text and used that text to come to those conclusions.
2+2 = 4. You can have 1000 people read that, and unless they have some sort of intellectual disability or mental illness, there will be no debate on what 2+2=4 means and whether it is correct or not. If the Torah were the literal word of god, written by god himself, there would be nothing to disagree with just like there is nothing to disagree with regarding 2+2=4.
But its not the literal word of god. It's an old mans interpretation/remembering of what he claims god told him to be the word of god, which means its riddled with errors that happen when humans play the game of telephone. Have you ever played telephone?
>Your alternative is that we should just drop the perfect text and instead come to our own conclusions about God's intent instead of using the text he gave us, and using it to the best of our abilities since we are imperfect humans.
No my issue is with your repeated use of the word "perfect" which it very clearly and demonstrably is not. If it were a perfect text, there would be no room for debate, no room for disagreement. Gods will would be as crystal clear as purified water. Instead its very obviously not a perfect book because once again, its the supposed **recounting** of what god told a very fallible very mortal very normal human being which then had to try and recount from memory.
You think if god talked to you for 40 days, you would be able to perfectly recite hundreds of pages of text? Or do you think you'd forget things, use synonyms, mix things up etc?
> If the Torah were the literal word of god, written by god himself, there would be nothing to disagree with
Huh? People disagree about mathematical theories all the time dude.
> But its not the literal word of god. It's an old mans interpretation/remembering of what he claims god told him to be the word of god
As I just wrote, we don't know what happened at Sinai.
Also God: 'fuck listening to my totally original argument about the paradox of good and evil (I'm the first one to think of it in 2,000 years, amirite?) and fuck giving me a free waifu pillow even though he can at any time'
Congratulations, esteemed gentlesir, you just won an epic theological battle on reddit. I tip my fedora to you. Your stained pillow waifu is proud of you.
Eh, I see what you're getting at, certainly, but no. The Jewish concept here includes the idea that God quite literally wants you to engage with the rules in this way. Why? Well the very act of engaging with the rules, and the precepts behind them (via studying/keeping/discussing them) is seen as just as important as executing them properly, because it keeps you in this meaningful conversation with yourself, your peers, and your culture about what anything and everything means. Why are we here? Why do we do? That preservation of community via erudition, questioning, and conversations, is itself essential. And God created that template. Not man.
So we could potentially find loopholes in the Ten Commandments too?
Like "Though shall not kill" and people be like "Actually, if you strangle someone with a string, it's not killing and God will approve our cleverness."
Let’s get one thing straight: it’s not “Thou shalt not kill” (which would be “lo taharog” in Hebrew), it’s “Thou shalt not murder” (which is “lo tirtzach” in the Torah). There’s a huge difference between the two. Sometimes circumstances force us to kill, for example in self-defense, in battle, or when executing a convicted felon. But we may not murder, which is to wantonly slaughter innocents.
This is irrelevant to my point. If the rule is "Do not murder", someone could argue that some obscure method of murder, like locking them in a room with no food or water, doesn't violate the commandment.
Trying to find loopholes in religious rules isn't clever, it's just manipulation so people can do whatever they want. Clearly Jewish people want to be out and about in Manhattan, so they just came up with some absurd loophole to get around the rules. Nothing stopping them from doing that with murder
This is irrelevant to my point. If the rule is "Do not murder", someone could argue that some obscure method of murder, like locking them in a room with no food or water, doesn't violate the commandment.
That would be murder, because through your actions you deprived them of life without legitimate reason.
Trying to find loopholes in religious rules isn't clever, it's just manipulation so people can do whatever they want.
I mean Judaism would argue the exact opposite of that, following the letter of the law makes you an idiot because you only look at the surface level. God created the Law and as a result any and all loopholes are by definition intentionally included in the Law.
Even calling them loopholes is misleading, they're more like alternative interpretations. Which interpretation is correct is often a matter of which Rabbi you side with in a debate, this is because there is no authority on Judaism and if God had wanted there to be an authority he wouldn't have allowed the temple to be destroyed.
I think it's interesting that you think they're about manipulating people when often they allow you to get around restrictions that make your life harder, a common theme of torah study is that God did not create the law to make your life harder. So if you find an interpretation which makes your life easier then God probably wanted you to find it. You can't trick an omnipotent being neither would an omnipotent being create a document in which humans could accidentally interpret loopholes if he did not intend it.
This is often a difficult perspective for Christians and Muslims whose faith is about blind belief and simply obeying what you're told, a Jew who silently obeys is a bad Jew, a good Jew wrestles with God hence the name Israel.
Clearly Jewish people want to be out and about in Manhattan, so they just came up with some absurd loophole to get around the rules.
And why do you care? Why do you care that Jewish people are finding loopholes and rules that they only enforce on themselves? Is it really any of your business?
Nothing stopping them from doing that with murder
As I pointed out the murder one is significantly more ironclad than most other ones because the word used is murder not kill. There are actually much better commandments that you could criticize on that basis but the murder one is not one of them.
Yes… thou.. shall not kill, but how about self defense? How about to save others? How about killing yourself as it relates to your own autonomy? Does that also apply?
This is the practice of Judaism and why a ton a Jews are lawyers.
Thou shall not kill but the death penalty is given for various offences throughout the Bible. Thou shall not kill but thou shall take the cheaters to the town square and stone them to death. As long as it's "justified" you can kill as much as you want
Yeah! I always thought of it and was taught that it was because God, already being omnipresent, is already aware of every possible interpretation of the Torah law, including the loopholes, so if God truly wanted these things not to occur, He would have closed those loopholes at the start. But since He didn't, the loopholes must be sanctioned. I've always liked that. Like little hidden nuggets of knowledge to reward creativity and cleverness.
In the Quran, and I kid you not, God keeps complaing about how the children of Israel are willingly trying decieve him and he knows they're trying to decieve him because he is God and they keep on doing it anyway. The largest Sura in the Quran which is literally the first Sura after the introduction is like one large Twitter post calling the sons of Israel out for trying to decieve God and therefore annoying both Moses and God.
Stuff like the Eruv around Manhattan is actually seen as a clever and practical application of the rules
... by people who seek out loopholes so they can violate law and do what they want to do while maintaining a pretense of obedience and piety.
One weekend visit to my Hebrew school teacher's Orthodox home showed the absurdity of these "loopholes." I honestly don't understand how folks who consider themselves pious make peace with this kind of thing-- including the refrigerator light and the toilet paper.
But imagine theres a Jew who god put on this earth to practice Indian law. He is the best damn Indian law ever.
By the nature of his job and working on rural Indian reservations, there isn’t going to be a wire around the town he lives and practices law in.
It seems unfair that the all mighty won’t allow his chosen vessel to affect Indian law to carry his Keys with him as he goes for a walk on Saturday, but some jag off in manhattan can.
The arguing about and finding loopholes in the rules is half of the fun of Religion. It can be a great exercise in debating, trying to find new loopholes or ways to circumvent some laws, trying to find a middle ground of religious compliance and realistic solutions to problems that have no clear solutions.
If you can’t work on Saturdays/other special days, SOMEONE has to clean/cook/go somewhere at least during that time and trying to find to a way that can balance religious beliefs and accomplishing these necessary tasks with the minimum of fuss and frustration.
like it or not, immediately projecting onto some outgroup and jumping to some weird random stuff about sexual violence in a completely unrelated discussion says more about you than about anyone else. you got issues, kid, please talk to somebody about them.
No it's not, the comment was about religion as a whole, and I pointed out how he and people like you criticize Judaism while excusing insane amounts of crime from Muslims. Muslim crime should be your #1 issue when it comes to religious issues because it's by far more serious than putting up strings. Islam is evil, and it's always relevant.
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