Jeremy Rosen
Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Deuteronomy 4, Why are the Laws so Important?
Summary
Study the text of the Bible weekly with Jeremy Rosen through a combination of traditional, critical, and personal perspectives. No knowledge of Hebrew or the Bible is necessary. You may use any Bible text you may have or you can go to sefaria.org. This week will begin with Deuteronomy 4, why are the laws so important?
Jeremy Rosen
Manchester-born Jeremy Rosen was educated at Cambridge University England and Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem. He has practiced as an orthodox rabbi, as principal of Carmel College in the UK, and as professor at the Faculty for Comparative Religion in Antwerp, Belgium. He has written and lectured extensively in the UK and the US, where he now resides and was the rabbi of the Persian-Jewish community in Manhattan.
Well, the straight answer is because there are exceptions. There’s been mercy in general to the people and then there is in a sense punishing to those people who do something wrong.
Maybe this explains some conflicting voices coming out of the Jewish community now. On some level I think we should expect more of ourselves. But to avoid people being envious of us, we’d have to remain failures. And the answer is, no, we should and we have an obligation to try to succeed. There’s a book published recently about only people love Jews when they’re down and out or in trouble.
There’s never been a cutoff time. We continue to interpret and every year hundreds of books of new interpretations of Jewish law are produced. The problem is not with the ability to interpret but rather it’s always with the humans who interpret them and the mood that exists in interpretation. Unfortunately, when the Enlightenment began 200 years ago, people started undermining and abandoning Judaism, or randomly reinterpreting it. In response, the ultra-Orthodox world refused to make any concessions, viewing such actions as a betrayal of their values and a form of paganism.