Thursday, April 22, 2010

What Torah Means... to Ethan Freedman

Counting the Omer Day 24

What does Torah mean to me? Well, let me first say that I am not one to judge others opinions or criticize but I do decide on my own ideas which is why I can tell you first what ideas about Torah never really worked for me. I never liked the idea that Torah is an exact record of the Jewish history or that it is a set of rules to follow or that it tells us everything we will ever know and I especially don’t like the idea that it can predict the future.

To me, Torah is more like a collection of fables, stories that teach lessons, answer questions. Example: the story of Passover. Do I believe that everything happened just as they tell it and Pesach is a holiday to celebrate God taking us out of Egypt? Truthfully, no. I believe that it was somewhere along the lines of what happened but it was exaggerated and added to tell a point. What point? Well, like a fable, it teaches a moral lesson. To see the oppression the Jews went through, we can see that oppression, slavery, denial of rights is bad. It was written to make us look at other peoples who are currently oppressed and see that they should be helped, released.

Torah also serves as a moral compass. Do I see each rule listed and follow it exactly? No I look at why the rabbis put that rule down. What caused them to say that eating pork was forbidden? Is it that it was just bad, God told us not to? Not to me. If we look back on it, pork was very commonly found with a worm like disease that caused sickness and occasionally death. Seeing as much medical science was available, instead of saying “Don’t eat the pork with the disease” the rabbis just said, “no pork,” which at the time made sense. But now? Should we be eating meat from a cow who has been killed correctly by a shochet but was raised in a feed lot and food genetically engineered corn that causes E. coli?

Well, I say no because that was the reason for the rules in the first place. Why not eat meat that is healthy, raised free-range, fed organic feed from grass? I think if the Torah were written today, the rabbis might have said, “pork okay but from feed lots, no.” All livestock was organic and free-range then! They did what was best for the time and they leave it for us to interpret it to fit the times.

So what does this all say?

It says that to me, Torah is not a way of living by certain rules, it is a way of living by certain standards, ethics, and values. This is what Torah means to me.

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