Judaism And The Torah

The legalism of modern evangelicals has a sibling in the preceding legalism of ancient Jewish communities, which is continued in the legalistic traditions of many who currently practice Judaism.  It is the Talmud, a collection of writings from Rabbis that can serve as commentaries on the Old Testament yet still wildly misinterpret it, that mainstream Jews in the religious sense might treat as if it has any of the inherent authority that the Old Testament does on the Judeo-Christian worldview.  Just as writing or talking about the laws of logic is not logic itself, but a communication of true or false concepts pertaining to logic, and only has authority if it aligns with the real, demonstrable nature of logic, writing or discussing religious commentaries is useless without understanding the text the commentaries are based on--and it is largely unecessary to even prompt thoughts, in the first place.

There is nothing irrational or unbiblical about writing, reading, or enjoying commentaries, of course, and this very blog is to some extent a commentary on miscellaneous passages of the Bible.  It is untrue that there is some Biblical sin in writing commentaries, and it is untrue that someone is irrational for appreciating ones that are not riddled with irrelevance, assumptions, or contradictions.  That is not the issue.  When Christianity, Judaism, and even Islam are predominantly assumed to be exactly what later commentaries say they are instead of what the actual teachings of the religious texts themselves say, fools think that they can know the concepts of the religions themselves from secondary writings, which they of course evaluate without strict alignment with logic anyway.  Hearsay is epistemologically invalid as it is and thus no one could be justified in believing that a religious theology based on a text can be understood without reading the text in question.  This is how misconceptions about religions, whether they are logically impossible or probably true, become assumed to be the religious theologies themselves.

One consequence of this is legalism, the adding of moral commands to a theology that is conceptually incompatible with philosophical additions or changes in this sense.  Whereas contemporary Christian legalists add to, selectively ignore, and distort both the Old Testament and the New Testament, legalistic adherents of Judaism do so mainly with the Torah, which is all the more ironic since they, as people who supposedly are more familiar with the Torah than the typical shallow Christian, would be more likely to have more exposure to its contents that include a strict, very clear command to not add to God's demands in Deuteronomy 4:2.  Christians have the same opportunities for exposure to the Torah as practicing members of Judaism, of course, as all they have to do is read the text in their own Bibles, but Christians are generally not pressured by their churches to have the same level of familiarity with the Torah that one might expect in Judaistic circles.  Those who have read it have even less of an "excuse" for being too irrational to voluntarily distinguish their assumptions and traditions from the actual obligations prescribed in the Torah.

Rather than obey this simple but vital command of Deuteronomy, many historical proponents of Judaism, like many Christians, have ignored the actual teachings of the Bible and the philosophical foundations of Biblical theology (some of which is demonstrably true regardless of whether Christianity or Judaism is itself true), pretending like contra-Biblical moral ideas or writings are somehow consistent with the Bible just because they are used to embracing all of the at once or associating one with the other.  In fact, Matthew's account of the life of Jesus sees him publicly rebuke Pharisees specifically for ignoring the actual obligations outlined in the Torah and pretending like social constructs are morally and logically valid (Matthew 15:3-9).  Even in the Bible itself, legalistic perversions of Judaism are out in the open and condemned.

The appeals to authority for even the most basic aspects of the beliefs of legalistic Judaism adherents about the Bible reveal irrationality so deep that they do not choose to avoid assumptions even when they stare at the words written by Rabbis that blatantly express assumptions, without likely even once recognizing that the ideas behind the words they are reading do not match the ideas behind the words of the actual Torah.  Even in the context of Judaism divorced from its completion in Christianity (genuine Judaism is just a subset of Christianity with purely secondary differences in the obligations that would still be binding after Christ, like sacrificing animals no longer having obligatory status, as opposed to matters of criminal justice), legalism is still condemned in Deuteronomy 4:2, and it would already be philosophically asinine to think that arbitrary traditions could be provable obligations alongside divine commands or that tradition has any validity anyway.  If something is true, it is not true because it is familiar or traditionally embraced.  Similarly, if something is false, it still is not distortions of the concept.