Cardozo on the Parashah. Volume 2 - Shemot/Exodus

Essays on the Weekly Torah Portion

Nathan Lopes Cardozo

• Publisher: Kasva Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781948403276
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

In this collection of essays, Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo looks at the weekly Torah portion through the eyes of philosophy, contemporary controversies, and personal struggles. Written in his unique style, this book offers something for many different types of readers: laymen and clergy, full-time students and intellectually curious practitioners, Jews and non-Jews alike.

Encountering Shemot

The Theology of the Halachic Loophole

The book of Shemot is the first book of the Torah dominated primarily by commandments and laws. In its pages we are introduced to the mitzvot (commandments), the mishpatim (laws) and the hokim (ordinances). These together have become the basis for the great system of Halakhah, which regulates the lives of Jews and Jewish communities to this day.

To a great many people, the authority of Halakhah derives from its divine origin; these are the very laws that God has ordained for the Jewish people. For others, Halakhah is authoritative precisely because it has benefited from centuries of human input from some very great thinkers.

In this essay, I will try to describe where I stand in this ongoing debate.1 Let me start by saying that I believe that the Torah is min haShamayim (“from heaven”) and that its every word is divine and holy. But I do not believe that the Torah is (always) historically true (sometimes it seems like Divine fiction) nor that it is uninfluenced by external sources. What’s more, I am reminded of the observation by the famous Chassidic leader Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Rimanov,2 who suggested that the children of Israel heard only the Alef of Anochi of the Ten Commandments, which means that they did not hear anything, since one cannot pronounce the Alef!

Nor do I believe that the Torah’s laws, literally interpreted, are all morally acceptable. They are not. Rather, I believe that the Torah is often morally, deeply, and deliberately flawed, and that furthermore, God Himself intentionally made it flawed.

It is the latter issue that I will discuss in this essay.3

Far-fetched arguments and halachic loopholes

My belief that the Torah is morally flawed is closely related to an altogether different topic: The “halachic loophole,” which our Sages and later poskim (halachic decisors) frequently used to solve halachic problems.

Many of these loopholes are legal fictions, used by the Rabbis to deliberately ignore straightforward biblical pesukim (verses) or halachic standards.4 They often made use of far-fetched arguments and twists that violated the very intent of these verses or halachic norms, and they seem to have done so with no compunctions and without much resistance. To the Rabbis, this method was seemingly a normal procedure whenever it was “convenient” to achieve their goals. To us, however, some of these loopholes are not only far-fetched, but misleading; they seem like a kind of trickery.

The Sages declared that certain implementations of Torah laws “never were and never will be”. These included the Ben sorer umoreh (the stubborn and rebellious son, who was to be executed),5 and the Ir hanidachat (the subverted city, which was to be entirely destroyed because its inhabitants worshipped idolatry).6

In addition, they decided that lex talionis, the principle of “an eye for an eye,” meant financial compensation, while the text does not even hint at this.7

To solve the problems of mamzer (a child born from an adulterous relationship), the Sages invented mechanisms that the Torah never mentioned.8

There are numerous other such cases. In all of these instances, the Rabbis used arguments that are highly problematic, and seemingly dishonest and deceptive. How could they do this with a clear conscience?

The Torah as a divine compromise

We believe that a profound reason stands behind the Sages’ willingness to adjust the Torah in this manner. While the Sages believed that the Torah is absolutely divine,9 they did not see it as the final text. They realized that the Torah’s text was a stage in God’s plan at a particular moment in Jewish history.

Revelation is a response to the human longing for a relationship with God; it can succeed only to the extent that human beings can relate to it. The Divine Will, therefore, is limited by what human beings are able to pragmatically and spiritually understand and accomplish at a given time and in a given place.10

The Torah is anthropocentric, while its aspirations are theocentric. In other words: While the Divine Will may want to accomplish the ultimate, it is constrained by the limitations of human ability. The Torah, then, is really a divine compromise, filtered through the mindset and mores of its intended audience.11 It is necessarily flawed in the sense that it must sometimes allow or introduce laws that are far from ideal, but were the best possible option at the time they were revealed to the Jewish people. In some cases, they were never meant to be applied literally, as we will see.

Rambam: the outdated sacrificial cult

One famous example of this view is given by Maimonides (known by his Hebrew initials as the Rambam), in his Moreh Nevuchim. There he deals with the sacrificial cult in the Tabernacle and later in the Temple. He suggests that the Torah carefully limited the already existing practice of sacrifice, and kept it for the sole purpose of weaning the Jewish people away from the primitive rituals of their idolatrous neighbors. In other words, Rambam believed that the sacrificial cult in Judaism was established as a compromise to human weakness:

For a sudden transition from one opposite to another is impossible. And therefore man, according to his nature, is not capable of suddenly abandoning those things to which he is accustomed…. Therefore He, may He be exalted, suffered the above-mentioned kinds of worship to remain, but transferred them from created or imaginary and unreal things to His own name…commanding us to practice them with regard to Him.12

To give the sacrificial cult a more sophisticated, dignified, and monotheistic meaning, the Torah introduced many laws to refine this kind of worship. This would slowly move people towards allowing it to be abolished altogether, which was the divine objective.

Still, the numerous and intricate sacrificial laws in the Torah, carefully detailed in the Oral Law, have tremendous symbolic and educational meaning far beyond the actual sacrificial deed. Many of them, paradoxically, make the worshiper sensitive to higher standards, leading to genuine monotheism. Thus, while one should really outgrow the actual sacrificial deed, the many spiritual messages behind these laws remain relevant even to this day.13

Slavery

The same reasoning is true also of slavery.14 The fact that the Torah tolerates slavery only means that it was not yet possible to completely abandon it. Ancient societies would not have been able to sustain themselves economically had slavery come to a sudden end. So the Torah introduced laws to make slavery — at least Hebrew slavery15 — more ethical, by creating much better conditions for slaves, helping them to overcome their slave mentality, and giving them the opportunity to free themselves and start a new life.16 Only at a later stage could slavery be eliminated altogether.

What if the Torah were given today?

To take the point one step further, not only would the laws concerning sacrifices and slavery be totally abolished once the people outgrew the need for them, but they would actually not have appeared in the biblical ...

Table of contents

• Shemot-Front-matter
• Shemot-6 X 9 Body_HC
• Shemot-6 X 9 Backmatter