admin asked Staff ago Hello.
I read with great interest the material on this site.
As one who comes from a secular home, I do not know religious terminology, and certainly not Aramaic, so I never tried to read the Talmud or the rest of the literature.
Thanks to your site I can finally read them in modern Hebrew, and so I thank you.
My question is about the enforcement of law in Halacha.
In several places on the site you quote the zealous who would harm someone, or in other cases that any religious person must kill those who transgress specific violations, be it actively or passively.
This, in fact, creates an anarchy and a situation in which anyone who wants to close accounts with a rival has only to claim that he has violated the Sabbath or something like that.
Is this the type of rule we would have if there were a Halachaic state? Doesn’t this seem problematic to the religious?
Even if we were to suppose that the zealous were experts in all laws, it would be sort of like giving lawyers the right to kill criminals as they chose, wouldn’t it?
David
jsadmin Staff answered 20 years ago
Dear David,
Jewish law (Halacha) gives the individual, in certain circumstances, liberty to be judge, jury, and executioner, to kill heretics and repossess property, even by force… For more detail, see our article Violence in the Charedi-Religious Sector. There is no doubt that Halacha does not meet modern criteria and is considered one of the worst systems of law, but one must recall that Halacha was created in the not-so distant past when Israel was under foreign dominion which supervised and enforced social order. Halacha’s only purpose, as the “legislators” saw it, was to guard the Jewish community as they would guard a lamb surrounded by 70 wolves. Halacha is not based on reality as we know it today — a sovereign nation for the Jewish people — but on the historic reality of perpetual exile until the coming of the Messiah.
Religious Jews are aware of the severe problems which are raised in your question, but for theological reasons their hands are tied and they cannot rebel and change Halacha. They are in a sorry state which,, unfortunately, will drag the entire nation behind them: on the one hand, they have no social program which matches the values of the modern state, and on the other they aspire to impose the Torah’s laws on the sovereign state. The aspirations and fantasies of the religious public about imposing theological rule blind them to the fact that they would deplete the strength of the Jewish state and relegate it to the history books, “Let my soul die with the Philistines.”
On the other hand, the “secular” public sacrifice their reason, in the name of “unity” and to satisfy their craving for identity, and give legitimacy to the Chief Rabbinate and the Charedi educational system.
Wishing you a happy Independence Day,
Daat Emet