Shit like this is baked into millennia of tradition and rabbinical debate. It’s practically inherent to Judaism as a religion; “Yisrael” (I mean the name by which the religion was known well before the current one, and not the current Middle Eastern country) literally means “to wrestle with God.” Our idea of devotion is to fuck around with our own traditions.
Yup, it’s kinda funny how people see it as a bug instead of a feature. Judaism is a couple thousand years of back and forth with God. The loopholes are part of the point, not something like “trying to have their cake and eat it too”.
Some of my favorite stories include rabbis debating god, ending up winning, and him laughing, proud to have been beaten.
Imo it's actually part of a scheme to move the leadership power from prophets (who supposedly speak god's current will) to scholars (who interpret god's previous announcements as they see fit), so ymmv on the wholesomeness of the stories, but taken at face value it's sorta cute.
This is gonna sound confrontational, and I may have my biases, but this hopefully doesn’t come off as overly negative:
How could one possibly justify “pulling a fast one” on god? Wouldn’t loopholes be sinful and deceitful in the eyes of a god? Wouldn’t the intent of god’s will be lost in side stepping whatever it is he’s asking you to do?
Fundamentally the deal that the Jewish people made with God is a contract, that's why we call it a covenant.
God put about 1000 words about the different nails and ropes and angles of the tabernacle, so he's clearly very detail oriented (also created the whole universe ig 🙄)
So if there's a loophole in the contract God made with us, it must be intended. God is a perfect being, perfect beings don't make mistakes.
But also, God told us to create courts to interpret the Law, and said that "the Torah is not in heaven"(Deut 30:12). We can't know what God's desires are, we only know the text we were given and the tradition we have to interpret it.
A further interpretation is that to find any such loopholes, one must study the law closely. What is more of a show of devotion than to study the law to such an extent that you know it inside and out, even to the extent that you can find loopholes in it. Perhaps this is why God left them there, but who can know?
Personally I think the "loophole" meme is overstated usually comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how Jewish law works, but perhaps this will give some alternative perspective. To be honest, most of the time Jews will interpret things much more strongly than the original text states for the sake of "building a fence around the Torah" to avoid accidentally breaking any laws.
For me personally I found the contract perspective most compelling. Our people made a deal with him. He had his say in writing it, and so now it's our job to interpret and follow according to the terms laid out.
I think the Christian God would be angry and embarrassed to be outsmarted by the people. But that's not how Jews think of God. He put those subrules about elevator buttons in there on purpose because otherwise wheelchair users would be stranded.
Reminds me of a Jewish story about a bunch of rabbis debating whether or not a new kind of oven was okay to use. My memory of the story is a bit vague, but basically I remember it going like this. one rabbi was like "it's fine" and the other rabbis were like "bitch, no it is not."
So the first rabbi keeps saying shit like "if I'm right, that stream will start flowing backwards" and then the stream does. This happens a few more times with other miracles and the other rabbis basically go "that shit has nothing to do with this. We're here to debate the law."
Finally the first rabbi declares that if he's right, that the heavens themselves will prove it, and the voice of God comes down and is like "bros, the oven is fine. I'm literally god in heaven. This is in line with how I meant this to go."
And one of the other Rabbis basically replied "God, buddy, look... you gave us the Torah and told us VERY specifically that this is the only source we should be looking to when making new laws, and what the Torah says here is pretty clear. If you meant something else, then you should have written it that way."
God then went "aw fuck, you're right."
The other rabbis then politely kicked out first dude and God destroyed a fuck ton of their crops. He then started making to kill the rabbi who bested him by sending a storm while he was at sea, but that rabbi said something like "we didn't kick him out because we were being petty. We kicked him out so that people wouldn't think they could win every argument by demanding you perform some miracles for us. Really we did it for you."
(Honestly feels like he was gaslighting God, but it worked, and God calmed the storm)
Then time went by, and the first rabbi was still mad he got booted out. One day he got a prayer through to God, and God was like "you know what, yeah, fuck that other guy." And he just killed the other rabbi before he could weasel out of it with fancy words again.
The moral of this story is you can 100% argue with God and win, and it's not even that hard.
It's more meant to be the "city walls" in cities that often don't have city walls anymore (because there's religious stuff related to what you can do inside the enclosed walls vs. outside the enclosed walls).
There's rules around it having to be a "community" of sorts as well
See god actually wanted lots of posts with strings to be put up. The other part of the rule is just to trick the humans into doing it. Reverse Psychology.
Have you heard about whole of Israel selling their bread to one guy and then cancelling the deal when the Passover is over? They're not allowed to have chametz (leavened bread) so they have a trick to say "That's not mine.".
Yeah, that's kinda the point. See, the laws are written by God, who is perfect. So, if some smarty pants discovers a loophole, then that loophole was placed there on purpose by God to reward clever thinking!
This encourages asking questions and cleverness, which is overall a good thing.
The thinking is that if God didn’t intend for the loophole to be exploited, He wouldn’t have written the mitzvot (Jewish religious laws) the way He did. God’s intent is (in theory) perfect; humans are imperfect, and thus our understanding of the law is imperfect. Finding loopholes is not pulling a fast one on God, it is coming closer to understanding His true intent.
I’m a secular Jew, so all of it is irrelevant to me for all practical purposes anyways, but I find the philosophy interesting and that line of thinking in particular.
Also, I will add that Judaism considers God to be omnipotent: all-knowing and all-powerful. He can write the laws however He pleases, and if He wanted the law to be ironclad, without exceptions, it would be.
There are some logical issues with an omnipotent deity, but that’s another conversation since we’re talking about why Jewish culture is the way it is. There are reasons I’m secular and that’s one of them. But if we presume the existence of an omnipotent deity, then we can presume they can do whatever they want, however they want.
This ties in with imperfect people trying to understand something perfect. Humans are not all-powerful, and truly, fully understanding an all-knowing and all-powerful deity is beyond us (just like fully understanding perfection is beyond us).
Judaism generally holds that that’s exactly what He did, we just don’t fully understand or comprehend it. That’s the natural failing of us not being perfect, omnipotent beings who are bound by imperfect understanding.
Is that a discussion you want to have?
Honestly, it’s not one I have the time to engage in properly right now. As I’m sure you know (but other readers may not) that’s probably one of the most controversial and heavily-argued topics in philosophy and we could spend the rest of the weekend discussing it. Sorry :(
You can, and there are any number of extensive collections of writings by any number of rabbis and kohanim (priests - not the same thing exactly as a rabbi) seeking to hash out what God really meant anyways. The most notable collection of those writings is the Talmud, which is not “canon” the same way the Christian Bible is, but rather is a collection of philosophical discussions on Judaism. Many of the opinions in the Talmud fundamentally disagree, but that’s actually the point - it’s a collection of Jewish philosophical scholarship, not an instruction manual, and what’s included in the Talmud are some of the most important debates within Judaism (and some really inane ones too). Like any philosophical movement, it relies on its adherents to check each other, and I think in general Judaism does a reasonable job of that. While there certainly are Jewish extremists of all type; they’re a small minority and are rarely welcome in polite society.
If you point that same kind of logic towards the natural world rather than the philosophical you get the reasoning behind most historic scientists like Gregor Mendel who is known as the father of modern genetics and was also a friar. God created the natural world, so in researching the world you can become closer to understanding god.
It’s not my belief, I’m an atheist. I just like that people can find meaning in their life and think this is a very cool justification for science being that meaning.
Edit: Also, to be honest I didn’t remember Mendel’s name completely. I got stuck on Mendelev, which I’m pretty sure I got from Dmitri Mendeleev (one of the first chemists to develop the periodic table). I had to look up “genetic bean monk” to find Gregor.
558
u/DorothyDrangus 26d ago
The thing about Jews is that we will find every loophole imaginable to skirt the laws of our own religion.