Shalom. This video we will try and deal with the question of problematic verses and stories that occur in the Torah. Often times, they get questions of, if God wrote this book, then why there are sometimes things are so impossible to understand like laws who kill lots of people or killing stubborn rebellious child or lots of different laws it seems problematic today.
There are many responses to this, the first one is that Orthodox youth have harder time explaining this because they believe every word is written from God to Moses at Sinai, they have to rely completely on the rabbinic understanding of these texts. And to some extent, I have that same answer, that we are not Jews that go literally by the words of the Torah, Judaism is a religion that is based on what the rabbis, how the rabbis understood the words of the Torah and how subsequent generations have and so we do not understand the texts literally. You need the contacts and the rabbinic understanding is the way that they had provided.
Going back way from the beginning of our earliest understandings of the meaning of the verse, we believe that there is no oral tradition and a accompanying these texts. A lot of it is classified in the Mishnah(ph) and Gomorrah(ph) and I have a video on that but for example, what does it mean to remember the Sabbath or to guard the Sabbath? What does that mean to give the corner of the field to the poor? When the Torah says to kill a stubborn or rebellious child, how do you define stubborn and rebellious? For the rabbis and the Talmud say, the Torah may say that, but the actual existence of a stubborn rebellious child has never happened and never will.
So one way to understand it is the way the Orthodox do it and say you have to look into what the rabbis did. For example, people often will say, “Well it is an eye for an eye.” The rabbis did not mean that the Torah saying you take somebody’s eye before they take your eye, but the whole context is of economic compensation which is the whole basis that is toward compensation system today. So that is answer number one, you have to understand the way, from an oral tradition. Only the Karites are in Jewish history, from the 7th to 10th century believe that there was no oral tradition and the Sadducees before them.
Otherwise, the Torah is how it is understood and those verses then are explained by the sages do not mean what they mean for example, the Torah has many crimes which are punishable by death. But the rabbis and the Talmud, they actually wrote the laws of how you apply it, made it virtually impossible to execute anyone.
Second of all, for us non-Orthodox Jews, we do not believe it was written every word from Moses to God, God to Moses at Sinai. It was written over hundreds of years by many people and therefore there are going to be in ancient text, ideas and laws that we find repugnant today, a few commands we just do not understand that necessarily would occur.
So what we do is we look at how Judaism understood those, perhaps that they were later put in by someone else or that they were understood by our sages to mean something else or they simply say that there was not a period of history which introduces some ideas that Judaism did not pass forward. That does not diminish in any way the sanctity of the text, that we believe there was divinely inspired.
But there is one of the great thinkers of Judaism said the Torah is not a tape recording of God, it is a Midrash, a human reflection of God’s desires for humanity. In that, certain ideas are going to come through which we find repugnant today and we dismiss those and that is the way to which most modern Jews understand the text. But still just like the constitution in United States, hence slavery, originally, that does not diminish the power and significance of that document, the constitution but the Torah is 20 times older and we believe inspired by God.
And so, that is one way we deal with these problematic texts. So, I have no problem, but instead reading selectively. Finding those as the vast majority of the Torah which speaks to us and lifts up love and it has shaped Western civilization. And give us the whole basis of the lives of what we understand to be good civilization today and reject those commandments usually of an ethical nature which seem to be problematic.
Now there are also hundreds of commandments which do not apply to all today because the temple was destroyed, it does not exist and let many of them had to with the ancient temple, or some of them have to do with only those people who live in Israel. When you cut away those commandments, you are left with the quorum of still hundreds; the commandments that shape our lives, to provide a sense of holiness and awe and grandeur, to make God’s vision of a holy world much more possible.
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