If the Torah Was Given Today Would It Have Laws on Slavery?
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 text had it been revealed at a much later stage in Jewish history.[13]
This has enormous consequences for a proper understanding of what Torah, in essence, is all about. Just as slavery and the cult of sacrifices are compromises to human weakness would not have appeared in the text at a later stage, the same may be said for other problematic laws.[14]
But whether or how they would have appeared at a later stage would depend on the moral and religious sophistication of human beings, not on God. The more human beings purge themselves of earlier ideas and practices that still reflect primitive and amoral perceptions, the more the ideal divine law will be able to reveal itself. So the text of the Torah is human in the sense that it is the human condition that will determine what will appear in the divine text and what will not.
Humanity’s Innate but Inchoate Moral Intuition
But a person’s obligation is to aim for higher moral and religious standards. Because people are created in the image of God, they carry within themselves moral notions of the highest order, which are very close to God’s ultimate will. They may not be aware of them, since they remain subconscious at an early moment in Jewish history – such as at Mount Sinai – but at a later stage and throughout all of history, these moral notions slowly develop and come to the forefront.[15]
The Need to Disconnect from Torah
But developing these higher moral notions is possible only if the readers morally disconnect themselves from the biblical text when the text still represents lower moral standards. Would they constantly come back to the text, they would be unable to opt for higher moral and religious goals, since they would consider it to have the final word. The text would then become an obstacle, instead of a support system to achieve even higher levels of growth. So rather than the person following the text, the text should follow the person.
A Twenty-First Century Torah vs. a Three Thousand Year Old Torah
Were the Torah given today, it would not be the same text that God gave at Sinai. After all, over the many years people have developed a more sophisticated understanding of moral values. It is true that they have bitterly failed in living by those standards, but there is no doubt that humanity’s understanding of what morality should be is far more advanced than it was in the days of the Torah. The unconditional equality of all men, the dignity of all women, Jews and non-Jews are but a few examples.
Yet the drive to reach for these higher levels is inspired by the Torah’s introducing such laws as Love your neighbor as yourself, and laws that call for sexual restraint, the well-being of the stranger, respecting human dignity, and many others. The Torah gave people a taste of how things really should be. By doing so, it has greatly contributed to the ongoing development of many other values, some of which are not even mentioned in the Torah.
The Paradox of the Torah’s Ethical Charge
Sometimes the Torah’s laws reflect the highest standards, and sometimes they do not. Too much “theocentric” legislation at once would probably have been impossible to accept by a society that was still rooted in conditions so at odds with those standards. The resulting Torah is, thus, a paradoxical mix of sublime divine ideals and primitive human necessities.
By sustaining this paradox, the text created a vision and aspiration in stages. It gave human beings a feeling of how things should really be, while not yet asking them to go all the way. It reveals an understanding, as Maimonides teaches, that such changes need time to reach human beings, since a person cannot make a “sudden transition from one opposite to another.”
The Sages’ Responsibility to “Update” the Text
It is here that one of the most far-reaching ideas in Judaism appears. Instead of God constantly upgrading the text to higher standards according to human capabilities, and giving the Torah over and over again, God left it in the hands of the Sages.
After laying the foundations, God asks the Sages to become partners in the creation of the Torah,[16] in the sense that humans would now be able to develop it to even higher levels. Just as in the creation chapter (Gen 1), God provides the main ingredients and then asks humanity to fashion the world and improve it, the Torah is presented as the main ingredient that the Sages must engage with and improve. The text was meant as a point of departure, not as an arrival,[17] and the Sages are the ones required to adapt the text.
Changing the Laws without Changing the Text
The Rabbis’ divine mandate to update Judaism and keep its moral development on target was not to be accomplished by changing the “underdeveloped,” compromised, and flawed divine wording itself but by their interpretation of the Torah text, or by advancing ideas and even laws that sometimes required drastic changes, which violated the literal meaning of the verses. That they were willing to do so is now obvious. They felt obligated to do so, since this was the very intention of the text. The divine but flawed text asked of humans to go beyond it and sometimes even ignore it. The text demanded its own fundamental renovation.
Four Examples of Rabbinic Updating
Let us return to the four examples with which we opened the piece:
- Ben Sorer u-Moreh (Rebellious Son)
The Torah commands that a stubborn and rebellious son must be put to death. The rabbis were of the opinion that this law could never have been enforced, since it completely violates the moral spirit of the Torah, even by its lower standard at Sinai. They therefore declared that such a law is only theoretical: “There never was a stubborn and rebellious son, and never will be.”[18] Its message was purely educational. There are many important lessons to be learned from this so-called commandment, but that it should actually be implemented is not one of them.[19]
