Fences and Ladders

If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. Deuteronomy 28:1 NIV

Carefully follow – Just how rigid are God’s commandments?  How carefully must we follow each and every one?  Is there wiggle room or are they absolute ethical instructions?  We often think of situations where rigidly keeping one commandment may cause us to violate another, so how exactly are we to shamo tishma (diligently obey) all of them? [You will notice that the two words are from the same root, šāmaʿ, meaning both “hear” and “obey,” and used here twice for emphasis.]  It’s a dilemma.  We want to be diligent but we also need to live in the world, and living often requires some kind of compromise.  Gordon Tucker comments on Heschel’s view:

“Hebrew lifenim mishurat hadin, literally, ‘inside the line of the law.’  The image is intended to convey a flexibility in which the rigid, objective boundaries defined by Halakhah are softened and sometimes altered, so as to promote a value that may not be subject to objective definition.  The term is used primarily in relationships among human beings, to teach the necessity, on occasion, of allowing another person more of a claim on oneself than legally defined boundaries would permit. . .  to suggest a spiritual, and thus somewhat subjective, dimension to religion.”[1]

In other words, flexibility.  God’s commandments have a kind of situational ethics built into them.  There are higher principles and lower principles.  Sometimes a lower principle needs to be bent a little to honor a higher principle.  That’s not an exception to the rule.  It’s an exemption due to circumstances.  So, when the Samaritan encounters the wounded man on the road, he acts according to a higher principle, the value of life, and violates the lower principle, the value of religious purity.  His act is an exemption because the rule still applies—just not now.

Without this sort of flexibility, life under God’s instructions would be virtually impossible.  Why?  Because the creation itself is out of joint, and along with that misalignment come situations where exemptions are important.  The Samaritan is still accountable for the rules regarding ritual purity.  He’s just exempt under these circumstances.  Order is not nullified.  Application just requires some adjustment.

Think of this approach when someone challenges you about “keeping all the commandments.”  First, of course, no one can keep them all because all of them do not apply to every individual, but even the ones that do apply to you as an individual aren’t quite set in concrete.  The beauty (and tension) of the Torah is this flexibility.  For those who want everything to be clean and clear, Torah is messy, but for those of us who live in the mess, Torah is comforting.

Topical Index: Torah, rules, situational ethics, shamo tishma, Deuteronomy 28:1

[1] Gordon Tucker, in Abraham Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations (ed. and trans. by Gordon Tucker, Continuum International Publishing Group, New York, 2007), p. 2, fn. 6.