Creed or Conditions
“And it shall be, if you truly heed the voice of the LORD your God to keep to do all His commands that I charge you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth.” Deuteronomy 28:1 Robert Alter
All His commands – Keep them all! That’s the message, right? So, no clothes of two fabrics, no cheese on your hamburger, two sets of dishes, two dishwashers, no bacon (of course), no walking more than a certain distance on Shabbat, no turning on the lights, no – no – no. It’s a long list. However, it’s not that the list is long that bothers us. Most of the important commandments we probably already keep. Lying, murder, stealing, etc.—those aren’t the problem. The problem is that these commandments were given to people thousands of years ago who lived in an agrarian culture without the techno-geo-political reality we experience today. The problem is that we’re not ex-slave wanderers entering a Promised Land. If the commandments are fossilized remnants of post-Egyptian life, then they really don’t help us with the details today. And that’s the reason for halakhah.
“ . . . this system of mitzvot is historically conditioned and . . . halakhah denotes the ongoing adjustment of mitzvot to changing historical conditions. Within the halakhic system there are and will always be disputes regarding the proper response in any historical moment.”[1]
If the biblical commandments are going to be relevant to any society other than the nation of slaves exiting Egypt, then they will have to accommodate societal and temporal changes. They will have to deal with elevators, airplanes, time zones, taxes, corporations, legislators, elections, deeds, jails, automobiles, and the hundreds and hundreds of other advancements since Moses left Egypt. If Stone is right, then this means disagreement and debate. Exactly how we adjust Moses to the modern world will have to be worked out, personally and communally, in discussion, sometimes difficult and often challenging. But necessary. Fossilized ethics are no ethics at all for the following generation.
By the way, this is one reason why Christianity often seems historically antiquated. It is a religion of creeds, not conditions. Creeds don’t change. The Apostles’ Creed has been the same for thousands of years. The Nicene Creed was adopted in 325 C.E. and is considered the defining statement of Christian theology. What does this mean? How can these creeds remain unchanged since the early centuries, not susceptible to societal evolution? The answer is that these are not “living” ideas. They are statements of faith, recorded words without immediate application to lived experience. They don’t contain anything that requires conditional adjustment. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, and in His Son . . .” asks nothing of me in terms of my daily interactions with the world. It’s a belief, not an action. I can believe it while I’m eating my cheeseburger without any conflict. I can even believe it while I misrepresent my taxes. Moses, on the other hand, is imminently applicable and therefore requires changing conditions.
If you decide that you need a faith of absolutes, a faith that never changes, a faith built on certainty, then creeds are the way to go. No debate. No discussion. Believe it or else. But if you need a faith that’s alive, a faith that speaks to your daily interactions with others, then you’ll need a faith that’s conditional, a faith that changes as the world changes, and that means you’ll have to debate its application. It won’t be cast in concrete. It won’t be certain forever and ever, amen. But it will be alive. Halakhah isn’t extra Jewish thinking. It’s essential Jewish thinking.
Topical Index: faith, creed, halakhah, certainty, commandments, Deuteronomy 28:1
[1] Ira F. Stone, in Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim: The Path of the Upright, p. 175.
Creeds represent the rationalistic character of the mind and thought of a Western culture… intertwined with with a missional perspective that looks toward a manifest destiny. This creedal form expresses the attempt to attain that destiny as it was understood to be manifest in the context of thought about a reality influenced, defined by, and bound to rationalism.
Judaism, by example of comparison, considered—and was more concerned with—the relational nature of its experience at the hand of YHVH, in contrast with the other peoples (nations).
Notwithstanding, all theological expression must engage the culture of that expression, (whether “Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female”). From what point of view, then, are we to consider the theology presented in Israel’s testimony of witness, as to their existential experience and relation to the God that is encountered there?
Fortunately, the Scriptures that comprise that account and written record also provide the point of view for our proper perspective: “All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, in order that the person of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17)
Thus, whether Jew or Greek… whether bound to experience or to rationalism… it is the rooting of Scripture in the substantial ground of all reality, Jesus Christ, the living Word of God, that—by the Spirit which he sends—provides the ultimate and true perspective allowing one to know and understand the concrete reality that is the spiritual nature of our rational-existential experience.