Entryist attack

Let me take this point by point.

First, the relationship between the Torah, the Talmud and the Jewish people: the Torah is our foundational document. It is very concise. The Talmud is the practical expansion of the Torah, which details how the Torah should be applied. The follow-on commentators resolve conflicts and detail concrete applications in specific circumstances.

The physics involved in running a large city can fit into a handful of books. The engineering involved will take up a room’s worth of bookshelves. The Standard Operating Procedures would take up a library.

The Torah, the original source document, treats Shabbat and Kashrut as absolutely foundational, with the death penalty prescribed in the case of the willful violation of the first and spiritual cutting off in the case of the second. The two great waves of destruction of Jewish communities that did not involve physical liquidation, the Reform movement and the Soviet Yevsekciya, both focused on getting Jews to violate these commandments, because of their very foundationality. Hundreds of years before the codification of the Talmud, during the post-Alexandrian Greek occupation of Israel, a sizeable group of Jewish rebels died rather than violate Shabbat in fighting the Greeks.

The Talmud sets out the boundaries of both Shabbat and Kashrut in such a way that you can live with them. For instance, it says that keeping Shabbat is not required during wartime, or for activities that are necessary to save lives-in fact, it is forbidden insofar as it interferes with these activities. Thus, you see Orthodox Jews routinely driving military vehicles, using radios, carrying weapons on Shabbat. It also says that during a war, soldiers who don’t have Kosher food readily available can eat non-Kosher captured supplies. Incidentally, the Talmud also spells out the different kinds of war and their priorities. For a war of mitzvah, the entire nation is mobilized, including the rabbis and those normally exempt from fighting, like men in the first year of their marriage. And a war of mitzvah include scenarios like the enemy coming to a border city and demanding something worthless, like straw and chaff. That is to say that the Talmud frequently deals with applications of Torah that can only happen in a sovereign Jewish state, and places the preservation of that state and its sovereignty above the most fundamental commandments of Shabbat, Kashrut and preservation of life.

As to your point about the character and applications of the Torah and Talmud varying between exile and existence in a sovereign state, the Talmud itself points that out in detail. For instance, the Babylonian Talmud, which is the prototypical exilic compilation and exegesis, says of itself that the Torah of Bavel (Babylon) is darkness, juxtaposing itself with the Jerusalem Talmud, its Israeli predecessor. But they are different applications of the same principles, just like a nuclear engineering and mechanical engineering textbook reflect different applications of physics.

Regarding a holier-than-thou Kashrut and Shabbat: I do not know any Orthodox Jews, from Haredim to the most relaxed Religious Zionists, who have major disagreements on the applications of these laws, or confusion regarding their applications. They are, in practice, pretty simple and straightforward, much like driving a car (which of course takes many volumes to describe in any detail, yet any normal adult can do it with no thought whatsoever.) And about the need to include the maximum amount of Jews possible while excluding entryists and so forth, the Talmud addresses this at length, creating a very basic and inclusive framework. It takes a lot to be excluded-basically, public and spiteful desecration, with the explicit understanding that you are doing this for desecration’s sake, not for some benefit (i.e., mowing your lawn on Shabbat because that is your free time and your grass is getting long doesn’t count,) or serious, Jews For Jesus-style Entryism.

Any expression of Judaism as a state religion which throws out the basic requirements, such as Shabbat and Kashrut, is doomed by definition, because it’s no longer Judaism. On the other hand, the laws of Shabbat and Kashrut were built not a suicide pact, but as essential pillars of Jewish existence, so it is not necessary to throw them out, just to apply them in context.

Well, enough about our system’s insides. Let’s talk about the framework of the conversation. The very problem of the Dork Enlightenment is this attempt to step outside of “memetic systems.” As a result, you get paralysis by analysis. If I understand Godel, even math requires an act of faith to get started. If you want to get somewhere, you have to choose a system, and you have to choose correctly. I chose this one exactly because of its track record of surviving natural selection in all kinds of circumstances while not allowing temporary difficulties to shoehorn it into a dead-end path. To me, that suggested a divine origin-human engineering tends to be very limited and inflexible when it goes outside its envelope.