Abraham's Razor: Part 1
Why the Halacha matters
Introduction
As we set out on this project to learn how to learn, the first thing we have to ascertain is—What is halacha and why does it matter? Why should Jews pay attention to it? Where does it come from? Why is it binding? What parts of it are binding?
Every Jew who professes to follow the halacha must ultimately identify the halacha as an attempt at implementing God's will in the world. This assumption—that God exists, that he gave the Torah to the Jewish people on Mount Sinai, and that the Torah is consequently explained and understood by and through the oral Torah—is foundational to Judaism. You simply do not have Judaism without a God-given Torah and a halacha that attempts, in so far as possible, to implement God's will as given in that Torah in the world.
This belief in the divinity of the Torah and the authority of the Sages' version of the Oral Torah is where so many problems arise for us as Torah-observant Jews. Problems that plague us in modern society, like agunot or mamzerim, are as thorny as they are precisely because we respect the authority of the Written and Oral Torah and take their precepts seriously. It's precisely the boundaries that they set out which create the problem and that simultaneously might offer the solution.
The entire reason that there is a corpus of halacha surrounding the exact ways in which meat and milk may combine without creating a new issur, and how we deal with it when a mishap does happen in the kitchen, is because Torah-observant Jews want to understand precisely what it is that God has asked, and how He should be worshipped.
It’s difficult to overstate this point—the entire legal tradition of Judaism has developed in response to this fact—keeping Halacha means keeping God's will in the world.
This point has an affective purpose as well. It's easy for us to get lost in the legality of what we're doing and lose the forest for the trees. As the prophet1 writes:
“And the Master said, Inasmuch as this people approached with its mouth and with its lips honored Me but kept its heart far from Me, and their reverence for Me was a commandment of men learned by rote.”
Rote religion is a problem. Our lives are only structured as they are because we are ultimately trying to do God's will—when we lose sight of that and turn halacha into a thing to be worshipped in and of itself, we both lose the purpose for the halacha, as well as create a new religion, one of worship of the Halacha as opposed to worship of the Divine through the halacha.
Why is the halacha the key to worshipping God?
Many Jews reject the halacha and yet demand to remain part of the Jewish people. They consider themselves Jewish by race, perhaps, or nationality. The problem is that the selfsame text which is foundational to Judaism, and defines what a Jew is or isn't, and who is or isn't involved in the covenant, rejects this claim.
“And now, if you will truly heed My voice and keep My covenant, you will become for Me a treasure among all the peoples, for Mine is all the earth.”2
Our relationship with God is predicated on one very clear consideration - "if you will truly heed My Voice". If we heed God's voice, we are in the covenant with all of the attendant privileges. Indeed, our side of the covenant is keeping God's laws. The alternative is a rejection of that covenant and a removal from the people of Israel.
Over and over again in the Torah, certain sins are listed which can "cut a person off from his people".3 A person who rejects the basic premises of the Oral Torah is not considered a Jew in many respects.4 Further, there are even some authorities5 that suggest that a person who rejected Judaism and now wants to do teshuva needs to dip in the mikveh like a convert!
All this reinforces the idea that our continued relationship with God is predicated on our doing his will. Yes, if a Jew sins, he is still technically considered Jewish6; nevertheless, it is clear that what sets us apart from other nations, and what forms the basis for our nation as a whole, is our keeping of the halacha.
The late professor Jose Faur7 put it succinctly: "Peculiar to Jewish monotheism is its insistence on monolatry: the one God may be worshipped only as prescribed by the Law. ... As the morality described above, the religious ceremonies of the Law are fundamentally arbitrary. ... They are, rather, norms of conduct, mutually agreed upon by God and Israel."
The mitzvot are meaningless outside of their proper context - a relationship with God
Faur’s point is that no mitzvah has any worth independent of the covenant. What would wearing leather straps on your arm and head mean if God didn't command it? Why would someone desist from certain precise types of creative artifice every seventh day if it weren't for the location of Shabbat within the covenantal relationship? What possible worth could there be to shaking palm fronds for seven days in the Autumn if such a request didn't come from God?