Rabbis made rich biblical characters into plain vanilla saints.

The story of Ruth, a model proselyte, is fraught with oddities. Tanakh denigrates Jews often: the forefathers committed unsavory acts, Rachel stole idols, Moshe failed to circumcise his son, the Hebrews in Sinai rebelled against God time and again, and fell into idolatry as soon as they entered the Promised Land. In line with this exceedingly strange attitude, Ruth’s grandson David essentially murdered his military chief to take his wife, and was forbidden to build the Temple because he had shed too much blood in wars of expansion beyond the Promised Land. Even in biblical times, racketeering, though typical of Bedouin, hardly won David admiration among settled Jews, especially given his murderous behavior (1Sam25:22).

Rabbis, of course, offered ingenious explanations for each of these incidents. They assert that Batsheva was destined to marry David, and the blood in question was that of sacrifices rather than people, though the Psalms show David to be a rather bloodthirsty ruler. I prefer the literal reading.

Ruth’s father-in-law Elimelech left his people during a drought, though the climate could only have been worse in Moab (modern Jordan). Seeing that Naomi did not rush to meet her relatives upon their return, we can imagine her family had some serious problems in Israel.

The problem with Ruth’s account is that the Torah explicitly forbids Jews to marry Moabites. In every country kings cleansed their birth myths, but the most important Jewish king is a product of a prohibited marriage, essentially a bastard ineligible to join “the assembly of the Lord.” Whether the account of his Moabitan descent represents the king’s astonishing honesty, the chronicler’s surprising independence, or the king’s detractors’ attempt to smear him is unknown. According to the psalms, David had a lot of internal enemies, and it is perfectly plausible that they spat on his grave by proclaiming him a Moabitan bastard.

The Sadducees, the Temple priests, did not include the Deuteronomy in the canon. They would accept that the prohibition against marrying the Moabites was inserted there specifically as a slap at David. The reasoning is decidedly odd: the Moabites are proscribed because they did not meet the invading Jews with bread.

The Rabbis solved the problem by reading “Moabites” as “Moabite males.” That is nonsense, as Hebrew uses the male gender for neuter. Indeed, the rabbis try to explain why mitzri means all Egyptian people, while moavi means only Moabite males. They note that the Moabites were cursed because they did not meet the Jews with “bread and water.” According to the rabbis, men rather than women were expected to offer bread to strangers. But in Judges 4, Sisera asked Yael for water and she gave him milk. Ezra apparently did not know of the rabbinical view that Moabite women might be taken for wives when he broke the interfaith families (Ezra 9:2).

Ruth never converted. Many believe that she did with her statement to Naomi, “Your people is my people, and your God is my God,” but later (2:10) she calls herself a foreigner. Why would Ruth have needed to convert before Naomi if she were supposed to convert ten years ago upon marrying Naomi’s son?

Upon returning to Beth Lehem, Naomi and Ruth set out to find a husband for the Moabitan. Ruth went out specifically to engage Boaz rather than glean, a gross immodesty. She asked Naomi, “Let me now go to the field, and glean among the ears of corn after him who would like me.” Adding to her bizarre behavior, Ruth “tarried a little in the house” during the harvest, closing herself with men. Only in the next verse the author rushes to correct himself, saying that she had been with maidens. Boaz’s injunction to his men not to touch Ruth (2:9) also suggests that they were touching each other before.

Ruth “fell on her face” before Boaz in a sexually provocative gesture. It is very rare for women in Tanakh to take such a position. Abigail fell thus before David, and he took her for his wife. Ruth bowed to the ground rather than prostrated herself, as women apparently did before the big shots (2Sam14:4).

On Naomi’s sly advice, Ruth “uncovered the legs” of drunk Boaz and lay down with him (3:4). The Torah sets no restrictions on the behavior of widows, implicitly recognizing their need for casual sex and even prostitution. Still, Ruth’s actions are less than commendable. Ruth directly offered Boaz sex (3:9) and called him her “goel.” In its standard meaning (“redeemer”) the term does not call for sex. In its strained reading as a “relative,” Ruth’s proposition lacks legal foundation: only her late husband’s brother must marry her, and certainly not in the barn.

Boaz praised Ruth for coming to her senses: she showed “more kindness in the end than in the beginning” when he allowed her to glean a bit extra. Even Boaz recognized the situation as highly indecent (3:14) because women were not expected at the threshing floor, where drunk males slept.

Elimelech is traditionally thought to be her uncle-in-law, and the Torah positively bans such relations. But the attempt to call Boaz Elimelech’s brother (4:3) runs contrary to all other mentions in which he is described as a remote relative at best. Indeed, if he were a brother, why would Naomi trick him into marrying Ruth instead of asking directly? The first mention of Boaz describes him as an acquaintance. Noting the incongruity, the author added in the same verse that he was a family member.

Boaz, for his part, tricked a closer relative who had a preferential claim to Naomi’s field. Boaz told the unsuspecting relative that the field only comes with Ruth, which is not congruent with the Torah’s law. We know too little of the actual legal system of the time, and can only guess what the relative meant when he refused the deal, “lest it destroy my own inheritance.” The destruction issue only surfaced when Boaz mentioned Ruth, and is therefore unrelated to the land plot itself. Plausibly, the relative was concerned about marrying a Moabitan woman, a prohibited relationship. Contemporaries did not consider her conversion valid.

The Torah’s law of halitza is built upon the story of Ruth. When Boaz’s relative refused to take Ruth into a Levirate marriage to restore his relative’s seed, he gave his shoe to Boaz as a sign that the land deal was confirmed. Later, taking off the objector’s shoe became a ritual way of punishing him. There is nothing wrong with the idea that Jewish law developed over centuries of national existence rather than having been preordained.

There was something fishy about the land plot to boot. Unlike the Arabs, who had communal ownership even in modern times, the Jews had a system of private ownership of land. Land plots could be mortgaged, sold, leased, and redeemed. Though the clan could have taken over Elimelech’s land during his leave, the plot was legally Naomi’s. Yet she claimed no profits from the clan upon returning, and sent her daughter-in-law for lowly gleaning.

In antiquity, a woman after ten years of marriage was hardly attractive. Boaz, an affluent landowner, certainly had better alternatives. It seems likely that he sought to marry Ruth in order to avoid returning Elimelech’s land plot to Naomi. The property was apparently considerable, since Boaz flouted the prohibition against marrying Moabites.

The elders also doubted the permissibility of the marriage. They blessed Boaz and Ruth to be like Judah and Tamar. Judah, of course, impregnated Tamar, mistaking her for a pagan prostitute. They also mentioned Leah and Rachel as the role models, a tongue-in-cheek reference to their problematic marriage and Rachel’s idolatry.

Rabbis, too, remained skeptical when they compared Boaz’s marriage to Ruth with Lot’s illicit relations with his daughters.

Tellingly, Naomi took Ruth’s child “into her bosom” (4:16). The rite harks back to Gen30:3, in which childless Rachel appropriated a concubine’s child by placing him on her knees. Ruth’s dubious conversion necessitated the child’s formal adoption by Naomi.

The child was named by neighbor women rather than by Boaz or Ruth. One possible reason is that Boaz’s relations with Ruth were limited to Levirate marriage, a single act of conception, and he wanted nothing to do with the Moabite afterwards. Rabbinical sources assert that Boaz died the day after the marriage, and rush to explain that he was not thus punished for marrying a Moabite, but that his years had actually been lengthened before so that he could meet Ruth and restore the line which would give birth to David. That explanation is way too twisted to pass the Occam Razor test.

Isaac and Jacob were not firstborns. Moses was not raised as a Jew. King David’s birth-narrative continues this puzzling line of contempt for the Jewish leaders.

A king can become enraged at the lowliest slave. This example is said to be inapplicable to God, who is infinitely above humans, wherefore any human influence on him is negligible. In mathematical terms, the human effect on God is infinitely small. But we know from mathematics that infinitely small quantities still have the power to affect.

Moreover, God is omniscient, and things that are negligibly small are not too small for him. Resorting again to mathematics, the product of infinitely large knowledge and infinitely small importance can be anything. Logically, there is no reason to rule out God’s mutability.

Our best approximation for God’s qualitative difference from humans is dimensional: we can safely assume that he exists beyond our four-dimensional world. But a cube’s plane side is critically important to it; there is therefore no reason to assume that humans are unimportant to God—especially, again, when the Torah offers us abundant evidence to the contrary. And the importance of something to someone can only be defined through his reaction to that thing.

There is no reason to presume that God is infinite. The Torah is clear: his spirit hovered above the primordial waters; thus he is not all-pervasive or bigger than everything. The Universe and time-space, too, are limited.

There is strong textual evidence that God is not omnipotent, but only acts through the laws of nature. All his miracles have natural explanations. I think God performs miracles by influencing probabilities: he can make a coin land on its rim but not hang in the air. He commanded the Jews to blot out the memory of Amalek for a personal affront to God, though he was in the better position to do that on the spot.

God is much closer to us than we want to admit. Clergy want God to be immutable so that he does not care about their atheism, abrogation of his commandments, and usurpation of power.

Afterlife reward and punishment is a rabbinical tool to keep the flock at bay. After the rabbis heaped a load of new rules on Jews, they needed to frighten the flock into compliance. That constituted a break with the Torah, which trusts humans to do good things on their own conscience.

In order to teach resurrection, the rabbis read literally a poetic metaphor of God breathing life into dry bones. The scriptural basis for paradise is still slimmer: Moses is said to “join his forefathers” upon his death, which is again interpreted literally as them being alive in a sense. Rabbis insist vehemently that the Torah lacks poetry and that every statement is literally true, but interpret rather parabolically when they need to: thus, “an eye for an eye” became a doctrine of just compensation. No one would treat literally the Genesis accounts of God flying above the primordial waters, forming man from dust, and breathing life into him.

The early Pharisaic rabbis held that good people are reincarnated while evil people are not; that was hard to correlate with the notion that Abraham resides in paradise rather than on earth. The doctrine was later adapted to state that good people will be resurrected to eternal life at the end of days while the evil ones will remain dead. Even such a far-fetched doctrine lacks afterlife punishment.

Numerous oddities ensue. Since the end, according to rabbis, will come when all Jews have gone bad, it follows that good souls depend on the bad people for pleasant resurrection. Souls presumably enjoy the eternal bliss and want no part in the resurrection—thus the souls of good people are actually punished by resurrection. There is a fundamental injustice in slapping a soul with eternal punishment for evil deeds in the temporal world; logic tells us that finite things are negligible compared to infinity.

The problems mount when we consider the incorporeality of souls. There is the famous Sadducean example of a woman who married several husbands; the question is whom she would be with in the afterlife. The Sadduceans, the Temple priests, rejected the folk tales of resurrection. The rabbis countered that the afterlife lacks human feelings and attachments. But if that is so, then what is there human about souls? In the afterlife, your soul would glide past the souls of your wife and children, unmoved and emotionless. This isn’t exactly a paradise. Perhaps there is something better, like a total unity, but that is still not a reward for your earthly life in any meaningful sense. Life as we know it only exists in this world.

It seems that souls are not purified from their earthly attachments immediately. Some wander around, and others reappear time to time. After some period, when their attachments to the earth are gone, souls seem to lose any touch with this world and firmly descend into Sheol, the place of eternal sleep clearly described in the Scripture.

Lacking forms or attributes, souls cannot be distinguished from each other. As Rambam argues in regard to God, something which lacks distinguishable hypostases is necessarily one. If all souls are actually manifestations of a single soul, then it cannot be good or bad; it would be illogical to praise one’s right hand and curse the left one. Souls—or the soul—exist beyond good and evil, and cannot be judged for their deeds committed while in human form.

This is something we cannot fully comprehend: all souls are instruments of God’s will, Moses and Stalin alike. It seems that their exercise of free will is commendable in itself despite the way they exercise it. A hammer is good whether it builds or breaks.

We arrive in this world to do the things which God cannot do directly: physical actions according to his will. His influence in this world after the Creation can be remotely likened to a magnetic field: he moves the things, but the things must be there. He created the world with its laws of nature like a board game with its rules; we’re the participants who must play according to the rules.

Consider this: a researcher who conducts experiments on mice is moved by them. Depending on the behavior of the mice, he changes his subsequent actions, conducts different experiments. A card player is influenced by the cards; his moves depend on them. The strictest ruler is influenced by his subjects: if they riot, he proceeds to punishing them. The suggestion that God influences things on earth, that he rewards and punishes humans according to their behavior, denigrates him: by violating his commandments humans must be able to provoke him into rage. But we imagine God immovable, above all influences. Some avoid the contradiction by imagining that the Creator and his creations are one. The Babylonians, too, thought the world was created out of the proto-deity. For the purposes of our discussion, that also means the similarity of all souls: they all abide in God and cannot be distinguished as good or bad, subject to paradise or punishment.

There is no contract between God and us: he can do whatever he wishes, down to destroying his Temple and exiling his people, but we must still observe his commandments—or rather, his commands.

We do not enter this world to study the Torah; God does not need our knowledge. We are here to act upon his will.

But Orthodox rabbis are in no position to criticize the reforms. The pharisaic rabbis instituted major changes in Judaism, compared to which the Reform’s reforms pale. Let us not argue here about the Oral Law, which is apparently unknown to the Temple priests. Even if Mishna is of divine origin, transmitted orally through centuries, the Gemara is unquestionably a product of learned discourse, and the subsequent halacha is a heap of man-made restrictions. Maybe one in a thousand of the Orthodox halachic rules is directly traceable to the Oral Law.

Orthodox Judaism abrogated the central pillar of our religion, sacrifices. The rabbis deliberately viewed them as insignificant because the Pharisees lacked access to the Temple where the Zadducean priests officiated. Unable to officiate the sacrifice, the rabbis denigrated them. Contrary to the facts, they also denigrated the priests, proclaiming them Hashmoneans, the descendants of Maccabees rather than the priestly family of Zadok. Never mind that the Maccabees were of Zadokite descent. If the high priests’ descent could be questionable, the clergy was doubtlessly kohanim.

The rabbinical skepticism won incidentally when the Temple was destroyed. Before then, they were popular as any anti-establishment clergy, but far from dominant. The Temple’s destruction left the Zadducean priests without business and income, and the Pharisaic rabbis triumphed. In subsequent centuries, they shaped a Temple-less Judaism. On one hand, they preserved Judaism in some form. On the other hand, they quenched Jewish demands for rebuilding the Temple. As Emperor Julian’s example demonstrates, the Jews could have rebuilt the Temple if they were persistent enough.

Given good relations with our Muslim occupiers, we could plausibly have built a Temple long ago. That, however, would have spelled the end of rabbinism. When the Temple stands, synagogues—the extraneous houses of worship—will unquestionably be banned, and scores of rabbis will be unemployed. Jewish donations would flow to the Temple rather than to the yeshivas. The priests would take the rabbis’ halachic jurisdiction. Most rabbis, therefore, oppose the Temple construction much more forcefully than any Arab.

But look, we can strike a middle ground between the Torah and the rabbis. For a long time, Jews brought sacrifices without a Temple. Even when the Tabernacle stood, Jews sacrificed in the open, as Samson’s father did habitually at a stranger’s suggestion. The rabbis’ appeal to Hosea’s statement, “I desired zealousness and not an offering,” is mistaken: the “offering” refers to unauthorized sacrifices on mountaintop altars (Hosea 4:13) rather than proper sacrifices. A prophetic pronouncement cannot justify abrogation of the clear law on sacrifices; note that the Temple priests rejected the prophecies altogether, regarding them as folk tales. The rabbinical position was never wholehearted, as they symbolically interpret the Shabbat table as an altar of offerings. If God does not desire sacrifices, certainly much less he desires gefilte fish.

What’s the big deal about sacrifices? They stop leftism like nothing else. Sacrifices run against the basis of leftist ideology—reforming societies, ostensibly for the better. Returning to the ancient practice of sacrifices, unquestioning and savage, is the best barrier to liberal views. And the liberals are not so liberal: they resent sacrifices but love steaks. They kill animals for food; we would kill for a better reason—and eat the cake, too. Sacrifices develop a different kind of person: the priest who smears his fingers and ears with sacrificial blood is not your typical leader, but a cruel and relatively fearless Jew.

It is a small step from sacrificing the animals to killing our enemies, which is a commandment, too.

Cain, our progenitor, killed his brother Abel, the firstborn. Abraham, we surmise, was not a firstborn since he readily abandoned his father’s estate to go to Canaan: presumably, he was not an heir. Isaac and Jacob were secondary to their brothers Esau and Ishmael. Jewish patriarchs, heads of the tribes, were born in a curious order: the firstborn came from a slave girl while Joseph, Jacob’s most beloved son, was his youngest. On the maternal side, both Rivkah and Rachel weren’t the oldest children in their families. Abraham and Jacob had their first children by slave girls, which also seems to be the case for Isaac, who obviously had some relations before he married Rivkah, well into his adulthood.

The Torah makes a point of the foremothers’ wrong behavior. Sarah’s name meant a shrew, and Rachel was an idolater. Though the sages assert she stole her father’s idols to destroy them, such an explanation does not pass the test of Occam’s razor: a simpler explanation is that she stole the idols to put them to their regular use, worship.

The forefathers’ immorality is also pointed out. Abraham abandoned Sarah to hostile rulers on two occasions, Isaac married Rivkah when she was a child, and Jacob contracted Rachel from Lavan similarly in her childhood. The patriarchs sold their brother into slavery. Moshe, also not a firstborn, married two foreign women and did not circumcise his sons.

Jews as a whole abandoned God for the golden calf just days after miraculous salvation, and continuously leaned toward idolatry. They were ungrateful for being saved from Egypt and doubted divine commands all the way.

The reason for such a clear pattern of denigrating Jews eludes our understanding unless we entertain a revisionist concept that Jews mostly descended from the “mixed multitude” who left Egypt along with the original bearers of Judaism. Indeed, our ancestors in Egypt “did not know God” by his name and apparently did not circumcise as they had to undergo the procedure before crossing Jordan. A pure conjecture, of course.

The story of Genesis was never meant to be taken literally—and in fact it wasn’t. Rabbis have postulated that all historical accounts in the Torah (presumably including Genesis) were given only for the purpose of interpretation. Midrash Rabba also says, “To reveal the power of the act of creation to flesh and blood is impossible… Therefore, the Torah text, ‘In the beginning God created’ is worded vaguely.” What did you expect to read in Genesis, an article on DNA? Obviously, the description was worded for people with very primitive knowledge. The phrase “and God rested” is not taken literally; why is the phrase “and God created” any different?

The Genesis account relates the idea that idols have no place in the world and deserve no worship; everything else is an illustration, with hints at deeper meaning.

The Torah doesn’t speak of the world’s age. The rabbinical calendar is based on highly ambiguous calculations of the life spans of early humans, starting from Adam. Gentile theologians derived different calculations from the same texts. The major presumptions behind such methods are that Adam was created during the creation, and each day of creation is a normal day. Both suggestions are problematic. There is no reason for God to divide his work into human or earthly days. The Adam account, taken literally, refers to the saving of mankind from a drought rather than to creation. The Torah speaks truths only, and it is impossible to read into it that the world’s age is only several thousand years.

Even if we consider the rabbinical age of the world, it doesn’t refer to planetary events. Tellingly, Genesis lacks anything on the creation of sun and stars, the obvious objects of pagan creation tales. The first verse specifies carefully that *this* heaven and *this* earth were created. The waters were not created at that time, but were already there, and God only divided them. The whole thing was there, formless and void. “God created” is a gross mistranslation; the word “bara” means “formed.” We may surmise that God brought the earth back into the order after a major upheaval.

No other reading makes sense of Lev24:15-16, “Every man who curses his god will bear his sin, but the one who utters the name of God shall surely be put to death.” The law allows resident aliens to curse their deities but not God. The verse then reiterates that the law applies both to Jews and to resident aliens.

Pressed to explain Lev24:15-16 in light of the matrilineal doctrine, the rabbis had to overtly twist the text. They read it, “the one who also utters the name” that is, curses God by his name. That is kind of absurd: how come a stronger punishment is meted out for cursing the name rather than God himself? In a secular analogy, a murderer is sentenced for killing John, not for saying “John” during the murder. That’s besides the rabbinical assumption that Jewish commoners did not know the name of God, though abundant historical evidence to the contrary exists.

Read as a support for maternal lineage, Lev24:15-16 contradicts Deut23:8-9, “You shall not abhor Edomites and Egyptians… children born to them can enter the assembly of the Lord in the third generation.” The word Egyptians is in male or neuter gender, thus in any case includes males. Their children are not Jewish, but can become Jewish by living among us for three generations – presumably, a sufficient time for assured assimilation. The Torah clearly rebuffs the rabbinical doctrine of maternal lineage: children of Egyptian father and Jewish mother are not Jewish.

Rabbis suggest that the third-generation barrier only applies to Egyptians and Edomites (akin to Palestinian Arabs). Such reading is uncertain. If children of any other foreigners may enter the Jewish community immediately, then the third-generation barrier is a form of discrimination, abhorrence barred by the Torah. Not impossibly, even the children of Egyptians can enter the Jewish assembly after three generations, as children of any other foreigners.

Be it as it may, according to Deut23:8-9 Jewishness is not matrilineal at least in some cases. The example of Egyptians and Edomites shows that children of the nations which were hostile to Jews even centuries ago cannot become Israeli citizens immediately, but only after living among us for three generations. Their conversion to Jewishness is de facto, through loyal residence in Israel. During that period, they enjoy full personal rights, but not political rights – they are not part of the assembly of the Lord. After three generations, we can safely assume that they have assimilated.

As always, the commandments fully apply to modernity.

Nor is there a requirement that the Jewish state must be pious. Many times during our history, Jews lapsed into paganism, but no one doubts that the ancient kingdom was Jewish. The messianic Deut30 clarifies that conquest comes first and the circumcision of heart later (vv.5 and 6, respectively). The correlation is reasonable: people first become passionately patriotic and then search for their roots, rather than the other way around.

Some require monarchy as proof of the state’s Jewishness. But how does a legitimate monarch prove himself? Rambam treads the issue at length and arrives at a sensible conclusion: we would know the king by his deeds. If he succeeds at driving away our enemies and rebuilds the Temple, then he’s the king. Thus, we can only find out the king by actually going up the Temple Mount and building the Temple. That doesn’t really require a supernatural effort.
Rabbinical commentators also allowed that the king won’t be of the Davidic lineage, so we shouldn’t break our heads over the impossible genealogical feats. Though Maimonides suggests that Messiah will identify priests and the seed of David, the process is highly unlikely. A nice Jewish guy calls himself a Messiah, names the monarch—but refuses a miracle to substantiate his claim of authority. Even Moses recognized that the Jews wouldn’t believe him without a miracle. But Maimonides is categorical: Messiah will perform no miracles.

Nor is the requirement of monarchy self-evident. According to Deut17:14, when the Jews ask for a monarch like all the neighboring peoples, that ruler should be Jewish. That’s it, nothing more. We’re not obligated to set up a king, especially given that the Prophet Samuel, speaking in the name of God, had roundly condemned monarchy. Just like slavery, monarchy is a concession to prevailing customs rather than an obligatory commandment, a permission rather than an obligation. The permission is contingent on the neighboring peoples having their own monarchs. As today they don’t, the permission has become inoperative. Indeed, in the existing Jewish society monarchy would be unworkable; it would result in a haredi rabbinical council appointing a pious king who would direct all taxes to the non-working lifetime Torah students.

Many Orthodox Jews cite the absence of a Messiah as proof that the current Jewish state is not divinely ordained and is not worth fighting for against the government of rodef and malshin. Their attitude resounds with atheist Israelis who hate to hate. They cannot bring themselves to shoot the traitors of Jewish origin who capitulate to Arabs or evict the Jews. In the small and deeply interconnected Israeli society, the Messiah thing provides everyone with a welcome excuse for inaction.

The doctrine of Messiah is virtually non-existent in the Torah. At most, it is traceable to the promise to send “someone like Moses.” But rabbis routinely apply that definition to themselves in order to assert their right to judicial activism. There is wild disagreement among rabbinical commentators on the status and details of Messiah. Though many demand of him supernatural capabilities, Maimonides ruled such views ignorant and silly. He ascertained that Messiah will not change any laws of nature and will be just a man like any other—his measure of success being the proof of his divine mission. Indeed, in Judaism even God doesn’t perform miracles by violating the laws of nature; rather, he adjusts probabilities. A coin thrown into the air landing on its rim is a legitimate miracle, but one hanging in the air is not. The common Orthodox demand for Messiah to miraculously deliver the Third Temple from heaven is not just absurd, but obscene in terms of normative Judaism.

Nor should a Messiah necessarily succeed. The doctrine of two Messiahs presumes that an enemy kills Messiah ben Yosef, Rabbi Meir Kahane qualifies. Even if Messiah comes today, who would believe him? He performs no miracles—how’s he different from Rabbi Kahane?
The Torah does not connect the final redemption to Messiah. That could not be an omission because other promises are very detailed and conform to the current and only the current situation. Jews will be gathered from all corners of the world—it has only happened now, and the leftovers in the Diaspora assimilate quickly. Jews will dwell secure—and astonishingly we defeated the Muslim hordes armed by Christians. Jewish borders will reach the Promised Land positions—and we received them to the last inch: Transjordan within a tactical reach from Euphrates through the Mandate, Lebanon up to Litani River, Sinai unto Suez, and the coast.
The only doubt is about the promise that all hearts will turn to God—but that event is promised after we take over the land (Deut 30:6). A similar verse in 30:2 is out of chronological order, as commentators readily recognize for many places in the Torah. The text is highly reasonable: secure and victorious Jews will seek a theoretical basis for their patriotism, and will find it in Judaism.

Extra-Torah details also conform fully. Just as Zecharia prophesied, one third died in Europe, another third died in the American assimilation oven, and the final third is being purified in Israel through many ordeals. Just as Maimonides asserted, the only difference between the messianic age and the previous one shall be the absence of a foreign yoke on Jews—which, notwithstanding the UN mob, has happened.

“Everything is in the power of heaven except the fear of heaven.” God can turn the wheels of probabilities but he cannot do everything himself. Every precondition is there, but Jews must still act against their own traitors and external enemies. Then a Messiah would not be necessary.

It’s not just that in the worst leftist fashion they twist the terms. The policy they are trying to expedite cannot meaningfully be called a “peace process.” We already have peace with Arabs in the only practical sense: they are afraid of attacking us. The issue is, rather, the surrender of Jewish land for a piece of paper the Arabs have no intention of honoring; it is a “piece process.” These “rabbis” do not care a bit about saving Jewish lives: the whole process actually puts Jews in graver danger, both by provoking Arab terrorists into a last-ditch effort and crowding the Jewish population on a strip of beach eight miles wide.

The “rabbis” do not want the Jews to own the land of the utmost biblical importance because they don’t want Jews to be religious: their belief is in Western leftism dressed up in misinterpreted religious terms. They want Jews to fail in our national-religious enterprise—which necessarily supports Orthodoxy—and assimilate, as they have done.

Contradicting their own pronouncements of the pikuah nefesh-type supremacy of Jewish life, they champion the rights of Palestinians. Of course the American “rabbis” care not a bit about the Arabs, whom they detest as non-Americans. Of course, the whole nonsense about “occupied lands” is ridiculous emanating from America, an occupied land thousands of times the size of Israel; return your own country to the Native Indians before lecturing us.

It’s not just that the dishonest “rabbis” justify their political leanings with a Talmudic rule while rejecting the Talmud’s authority in every other thing.

The thing is they grossly misquote the Talmudic rule. It only applies to groups of less than ten Jews. There is logic there: when a gentile forces a Jew to transgress a commandment in private, it’s usually better to do so and save one’s life. Not so in public: there we have the Book of Maccabbees’ example of the old Jew who endured deadly torture rather than eat pork, or even beef that the onlookers believed to be pork. Public transgression amounts to a call on others to abandon Judaism, which is the grave sin of idolatry. Again: rather than supporting the peace process and abandoning Jewish land to Arabs, the Talmudic rule commands Jews to die rather than publicly violate even the smallest commandment. Holding onto the Land of Israel is a great commandment.

The “three sins” rule is further qualified: a Jew cannot transgress even in private when the transgression benefits gentiles. In Maimonides’ example, a Jew must choose death rather than build a house for gentiles on the Sabbath. The politically incorrect logic is this: benefiting gentiles at the cost of transgressing Judaism amounts to making sacrifices to idols. In Maimonides’ opinion, bringing meat to an idol and building a house for gentiles on the Sabbath is the same thing. Now, some may not like it, but this is Judaism, and no rabbi of learning has ever disputed this rule.

Pikuah nefesh erroneously presumes all life to be valuable. If that is so, we should become pacifist vegetarians. No. God specifically commanded (not just allowed) us to eat certain animals and to kill certain humans: enemies, criminals, and transgressors. This shows that Jewish national well-being, domestic well-being, and religious purity are more important than life.

The peace process is a transgression as public as one could be: in the open view of the entire world’s Jewry we’re being forced to give away the land God commanded us to conquer upon returning there (Deut30:5). The transgression benefits non-Jews, and even enemies. When apostate “rabbis” seek to promulgate their political agenda, no one can bar them from doing so. But they must not call their lies Judaism.

Nor is theocracy or monarchy practical today. A Jewish monarch has to be recognized by rabbis, and has to be Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox. Such a king would channel national tax revenues to support an unlimited number of religious adult schools and their lifetime students. In a mixed religious-atheist society, theocracy or monarchy would translate into exploitation of economically productive atheists, which they would not accept.

The Rabbis’ reference to several commandments to justify their authority is dubious. Deut17:10: “Do as they tell you” refers to judges, including priestly ones, not to rabbinical legists. The preceding verses speak of civil and criminals cases with no implication whatsoever about the setting of religious laws. Oddly enough, v.11 speaks of “teaching and judgments,” though the context is unrelated to teaching. It is not impossible that this phrase is late similarly to v.15, which allows Jews to set up a king, even though centuries later the prophet Shmuel had no idea of this permission when he lambasted Jews for demanding a king. Allowing for the authenticity of v.11, it requires judges to speak from the Temple (v.8 ), obviously to unify the case law rather than to invent new laws.

Tens of thousands of halachic authorities dispersed throughout the world lack the power allotted to the Temple judges. Looking at the hair-splitting and often vengeful halachic disputes, it tests credulity to impute divine authority to the rabbis.

The biggest question is whether rabbis are the judges mentioned in Deut17. Why them, rather than the Sadduceans, the temple priests? Deut33:10 explicitly allocates the power of teaching to Levites, the priests. 2Chron31:4 relates of legal studies by Levites, and Mal2:7 confirms that they engaged in legal interpretation. In 2Chron19:8, judges are apparently equated with clan elders, and even much later Jer18:18 records for the “wise” only the power of counsel, rather than binding power of ruling.

The rabbinical legend of the Temple-based Sanhedrin defies common sense. The Temple was ruled by priests (Sadducees) who were nominal descendants of the High Priest Zadok. Sadducees rejected the Oral Law and persecuted Pharisaic rabbis now and then. Why would the priests allow the rabbis to sit in court in the Temple and apply the Oral Law which they, the priests, thought to be fake?

It is impossible that the rabbis were so popular that the priests could not refuse them a chamber. Priests blocked even Herod the Great’s reconstruction of the Temple until he reached a compromise with them by training Levites for the construction works, lest the Temple be polluted.

Why would the priests defy the Oral Law, had it been given on the Sinai? The rabbinical explanation of the priests’ malice cannot stand: there is no imaginable reason for them to reject a sound and profitable body of legislation. By embracing the Oral Law, the Sadducees would have displaced the competing Pharisees and re-assumed the power of religious legislation and civil jurisprudence. It cannot be that tens of thousands of Levites were all evil atheists who purposely rejected the divine word.
Rabbis were the layman’s priests, anti-establishment preachers not unlike the founder of Christianity and the later Franciscans. Indeed, in the synoptic gospels, Jesus’ teaching is a carbon copy of the rabbinical doctrine, with every one of his synoptic pronouncements directly paralleled in the Talmud. He praised rabbinical teaching: “Do as they teach, but not as they do, because they don’t do what they teach.”

Even if one accepts the purported powers of rabbis under Deut17, the two classes of rabbinical legislation are entirely without scriptural basis: the power to enact protective legislation (“a wall around the law”) and the power to abrogate commandments. Regarding the latter, Maimonides only accepted temporary suspension and only to avoid greater evil, including a threat to Judaism (Hilkot Mamrim 2:4). Almost none of the abrogations pass that test: rabbis rejected womens’ obligation to observe the commandments, the blue tzitzit, ad nauseam.

Rabbis advance another argument for the truth of their teaching: it has survived for two thousand years. That’s a bad benchmark because Christianity has survived for the very same length of time, and indeed has become more widespread. The earth-is-flat theory was also around for thousands of years. The triumph of Pharisaic rabbis over Sadducees is entirely due to the Temple’s destruction: the Levites could not adapt to the Temple-less world. Radical Sadducees joined or constituted Essenes, a monastic order, and lingered on for centuries after the Temple’s destruction. The rabbinical victory over Karaites was due to the rabbis’ better control over their flock, which was bounded in halacha; more flexible Karaites assimilated. This shows that rabbinism is not bad at all, it benefited the Jewish nation greatly. But regardless of its utility, rabbinism does not equal Torah Judaism.

We may lobby to change the rabbinical laws, but as long as those laws are efficient (they have preserved Jews for a long time), valid (somewhat rooted in the Torah), commonly accepted (by many doubtlessly Jewish people), and not massively opposed (by the people who honestly wish to live Jewish lives, rather than atheists) we must adhere to them. It’s similar to driving at 65 mph because the law says so, while lobbying to change the law in favor of increasing the speed limit.

The clearly oppressive laws might not be obeyed: someone who lives on the 50th floor can hardly be forced to observe the dubious rabbinical prohibition against using the elevator on Shabbat.

The existing rabbinical laws should be observed until changed—unless they are clearly oppressive.