Attaching tassels to the hems of clothes was impractical, as ancient clothes commonly stretched to the ground. Numbers 15:39 enjoins us to look at tzitzit rather than touching them; they were placed too low to touch or pull, as modern tassels can be pulled. Tzitzit should be attached to all clothes, even at night. The rabbinical interpretation that looking is only possible during the daytime is implausible. Tassels are inconvenient to walk with, and even more so to sleep with.

Jesus accused the Pharisees of making their tassels long; the customary length of tzitzit appears to be short.

Deuteronomy 22:12 introduces a synonym for tzitzit: “Make yourself gdilim.” This rare word has to do with majesty, thus in 1Kings 7:17 it means wreaths. The common meaning of tzitzit and gdilim seems to be fringes; long tassels surely have nothing in common with wreaths. Num 15:38 speaks of tzitzit (singular) on canfei (plural), suggesting a single piece of tzitzit rather than four tassels. The Karaite reading of gdilim as “chains” (thus having tzitzit as plaids) is also possible.

Another hint comes from Exodus 28:33: the high priest’s clothes were hemmed with “pomegranates of blue, and purple, and red” threads. Though it is possible that high priests wore pomegranates while laymen satisfied themselves with tassels, no less likely is that common Israelites also wore pomegranate-like skeins, but only of blue threads. The skeins would be small—essentially knots—but many rather than four.

The same verse speaks of tzitzit of each edge (canaf). That is, if the garment has two bottom edges like a tunic, then tzitzit must be attached to each edge, namely two of them. Deut 22:12 changed that to a tzitzit on (presumably each of) the four edges.

Deuteronomy 22:12 mandates attaching tzitzit to four canfot of one’s clothes. That is traditionally interpreted as “four corners,” and clothes which lack four corners are exempted. In Isaiah 11:12, however, the same phrase refers to four ends of the earth. Isaiah didn’t imagine the earth to be cross-shaped or rectangular, but used the term “four corners” figuratively to denote directions. In 1Samuel 24:4, David cuts the canaf off of Saul’s robe—clearly a considerable piece that David later waved to Saul. In line with its main meaning of “wing,” canaf is a skirt of clothing, loosely its end.

In Samuel 24:4, the robe (meil) has canaf. A similar robe (meil) is described in Exodus 28:31-34, where its bottom is called shulim. The word shulim only comes in plural and seems to mean “folds.” The folds are many, not four: Exodus 28:34 describes their decoration as “round about.” The most expensive robe (meil) worn by high priests (Ex28:34) and kings (1Sam24:4) was likely a single-piece cloth. The meil robe lacked corners but possessed canfot, which therefore must denote bottom edges rather than corners.

At the same time, Deut22:12 attributes four canfot to csut (cf csui), which means any covering, from the covering of the Ark to a poor man’s sackcloth. In connection with csut, canaf can mean “corner,” but for the sake of consistency with other uses of canaf this word should be assumed to mean “edge.”

Num15:38 relates the commandment of tzitzit without mentioning the four canfot. Every instance of the commandment is presumed to be intelligible on its own. It is unlikely that the lawgiver omitted an important detail. The mention of the four canfot is merely a metaphor for “along the bottom edges.”

If such diverse clothes as sackcloth and high priest’s clothes possess canfot, then modern clothes likely possess canfot, too. Deut 22:12 concurs, using csut to relate the widest range of applicable clothing. The only restriction possibly implied by Deut 22:12 is that canfot should be attached to covering rather than just any clothes—that is, to the outermost piece of clothes. Num 15:38 speaks of a still wider range of applicable clothes: bigdei, any clothes, though most commonly outer clothes. By the time Deuteronomy was recorded, the inconvenience of attaching fringes to all clothes had become apparent, and Deuteronomy sensibly clarifies that the commandment is limited to outer clothes. It is wrong to limit the tzitzit only to garments which have four corners.

The rabbinical insistence on four corners created a need for tallit, a special piece of clothes with the required number of corners. It also conflicted with shaatnez commandment, a prohibition of wearing linen and wool simultaneously: woolen tassels are commonly attached to linen tallit. Sages recognized the problem, but instead of admitting that their tassels are incorrect, they lifted the shaatnez ban in this particular instance.

Mishna Kiddushin 1:7 exempts women from time-fixed commandments, including wearing tzitzit. The rabbinical law is ostensibly meant to free women for household work. That nonsensical approach flies in the face of the Torah, which addresses the commandments to the entire congregation. It is because the Torah speaks in masculine gender (a mixed gender in Hebrew) that we can be sure that women are under the same yoke as men—and must wear tzitzit. Rashi accepted women wearing tzitzit and ruled they must say blessing when donning it. It is unlikely that ancient women wore tunics, since a tunic reveals one’s legs. Women’s clothes lacked four corners, but likely included tzitzit.

It seems superfluous to discuss the connotation of bah in Deut 22:12: cover [yourself] in it. Though modern people don’t usually cover themselves in clothes (bathrobes and long coats are rare exceptions), the commandment clearly relates to any suitable clothes.

Tzitzit fringes are made with enigmatic ptil tekhelet.

Ciseh—to cover (with a tzitzit garment)—is related to cisa, throne. Tekhelet, blue sapphire, the ancient for lapis lazuli, the color of God’s throne. That traditional reading is supported by the etymological meaning of tekhelet, the color of dark-blue sunset sky.

Exodus 28:28: patil tekhelet is sufficiently strong to wear as a breastplate. Here patil is a noun. In Genesis 38:25, patilim is a plural noun. Numbers 19:15: tzamid patil alaiv—cover bound to it; here patil is used as an adjective.

Patil is an object made by a specific method, seemingly by twisting. Patil seems to be braid rather than thread. It should be put on the fringe (Num15:38) which does not quite imply plait into (betoh), as the tradition has it. Plausibly, the patil blue braid runs horizontally across the fringes which are attached throughout the bottom edges of garments. A horizontal blue line is consistent with the tradition of tallit: it has specifically horizontal lines which, according to some commentators, are reminiscent of the patil.

Fringes are not necessarily white, but can be of any color. They are not necessarily woolen, but being an extension of the garment, the fringes are of the same textile as the garment.

Tekhelet was available in quantities large enough that a high priest’s meil robe and various ritual clothes were fully dyed with that color. In Exodus 35:6, tekhelet is implied to be widespread among Hebrews, who are enjoined to bring it as an offering. The commandment to attach tekhelet fringes to each cloak would impose hardship on Hebrews if the dye had been produced in minuscule quantities from shellfish, as rabbis assert. The production of dye from shellfish presented a problem of kashrut, because shellfish is non-kosher, and extracting considerable amounts of shellfish meat could tempt the workers to eat it. Hebrews in the Sinai would have found it problematic to procure a sufficient quantity of shellfish dye. The dye is not particularly strong, and fades away with wear and washing, necessitating occasional replacement.

A possible source of deep sky-blue dye is woad, known as Asp of Jerusalem. Woad is produced from a plant common to steppe and desert zones, and thus common both to second-millennium B.C.E. Sinai and later to Judea. A chemically identical indigo dye is another possible source: expensive but sufficiently widespread in the Middle East and Africa that Hebrews could afford it.

The commandment to wear fringes with blue braid—the two signs of royalty or affluence—dispels the myth of mandatory Jewish humility.

Two-letter root cells form three-letter root cells by two major methods. One, combining two two-letter root cells where the second letter of the first cell and the first letter of the second cell are the same: bet-reish (cleanness) + reish-aleph (standing above, thus, seeing) = bet-reish-aleph. Two, adding a third letter to two-letter root cell. The further down the alphabet is the third letter, the lighter is the action: nun-shin + aleph (move), hey (dislocation), iod (loan), caf (bite), lamed (fall), mem (breeze), kuf (kiss), reish (bird), tav (exhale).
Two-letter root cells are semantically meaningful and seem to follow a similar pattern of decreasing intensity the further down the alphabet is the second letter: aleph-vet (to give birth: av—father, aviv—spring, beginning of the year), aleph-gimel (to bind: aguda—wisp, egel—drop), aleph-dalet (to raise: ed—steam, adon—master, the raised one), etc.

The root structure is artificial. Hebrew roots were consciously constructed rather than evolved naturally.

Words in the Torah commonly have multiple meanings. No large extra-religious texts in Hebrew survived from antiquity, and it is often impossible to reconstruct the meanings precisely from various contexts. We know how the sages understood the words at the time they translated the Torah into Greek, but they might not preserve the original meanings.

The correct approach to understanding the Torah is etymological. As long as the root meaning makes sense, it should be used. Whether the sense derived from the root meaning complies with exegetical requirements is unimportant; exegesis should follow etymology. Whenever several meanings are equally plausible etymologically, the most common meaning should be assumed.
The common approach to the Torah is to put exegetical requirements first, and then see if the required meaning of a word is plausible, or even remotely possible. Given the scarcity of ancient texts, a wide range of meanings is at least remotely possible, which often allows for wild exegesis. The etymological approach puts a stop to that misreading.

Consider Genesis 1:1. Bereshit is universally translated as “in the beginning.” The primary meaning of reshit is main, principal.

Several instances of reading reshit as “beginning” are dubious. Genesis 10:10 says, “And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh…” It is odd that several kingdoms are named one beginning. The phrase makes more sense if we substitute principal for beginning: The enumerated towns were the principal places of that land.
Proverbs 8:22-23: “The LORD made me [wisdom] as the beginning of His way, the first of His works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.” Such reading presumes that the account of Creation omits the immensely important episode of creating the Wisdom before other things. More plausibly, “The Lord made me [wisdom] his principal way, put forward [distinguished] from his acts of the old. From the old time, anointed from the head, from the eastern [types of wisdom; sf. Is2:6] of the earth.”
Leviticus 23:10: “You shall bring the sheaf of the first-fruits of your harvest to the priest.” Reading reshit as first-fruits makes the commandment counter-productive: the first fruits are the worst. It’s rather, the choice fruits. Similarly, in Deuteronomy 33:21 it means that the ruler receives the best, rather than the first part of the animals.

For ancients, the terms beginning and principal were related. Firstborns were the principal children; antiquity was equated with authority (time-tested and therefore true, in the absence of other tests for truth). The original sense of reshit as principal was extended to beginning.
Bara is usually translated as “created.” It is a rare word with no cognates. The root cell bet-reish relates to cleaning or choosing. The third letter, aleph, being the first letter of the alphabet, suggests the strongest action. The root cell reish-aleph relates to standing above or seeing.
Etymologically, bara doesn’t mean creation ex nihilo, but rather separation or cutting from something. Sort of like Michelangelo releasing his statues from pieces of marble.
The traditional reading “In the beginning, God created” contradicts the context. Every day, God made a single type of work. On the first day, he made the light; there was no beginning before the first day. When therefore was the “beginning,” when God made heaven and earth? Etymological reading does away with that incongruity.

Genesis 1:2 clearly describes the starting point of Creation: “And the earth, [it] was unformed and void,…. and spirit of God, [it] hovered above the waters.” If God had created the heaven and the earth in Genesis 1:1, how come they are still void in the next verse? Etymological reading makes sense of Genesis 1:1: “Most importantly, God shaped the heaven and the earth.” They were initially without form (Genesis 1:2) and God shaped them—not in the beginning, but in Genesis 1:6-8 and 1:9-10, respectively. (God is external to the World Created rather than permeating it, or he would have had to shape himself.)
Isaiah 65:18 similarly employs bore et with unmistakable sense of re-creation: “For behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing…”
Genesis 1:1 emphasizes the in regards to the heaven and the earth. The Torah makes clear that the universe is not limited to this heaven and this earth

What is the heaven created? Genesis 1:6 describes it as “rakiya inside waters.” Rakiya is often understood as firmament, but it is not. This rare word occurs only in the context of heaven. Lacking a variety of contexts to compare, its meaning can only be reconstructed etymologically. The root cell reish-kuf means “broken, empty.” The immediate cognate reish-kuf-ayn means “to stamp upon,” thus the relevant hiphil flexion, “to spread out.” In Exodus 39:3, the cognate means “to flatten (to empty out),” rather than “to beat [the gold into thin sheets].” That rakiya lacks the sense of firmament is clear from Job 37:18, where the hiphil flexion is joined with dust, or Psalm 150:1, which says, “praise him in the rakiya of his power” instead of “on the rakiya.” Rakiya is a shaped space. The author of Genesis doesn’t espouse the primitive concept of a firm heavenly sphere.
Rakiya is not a heavenly sphere like Aristotle’s spheres. Genesis 1:7: “divided the waters below rakiya from the waters above rakiya.” Rakiya, therefore, spreads from sea surface unto the upper clouds. God created the lower atmosphere.
While Genesis 1:1 insists that the heaven and the earth were shaped, the atmosphere was established (Genesis 1:7). Unlike the other acts of Creation, the formation of the atmosphere lacks the addendum, “And God saw that [it is] good.” A metaphysical explanation is that the heavenly realm is above good and evil. On a practical plane, God is not said to have created heaven, but to have established it from chaos. Only the act of creating something truly new merited the appellation “good.”
The text’s unusual insistence on the prepositions mem and lamed necessitates a stricter reading of Genesis 1:7: “And God established the atmosphere, and divided the waters which are in the deep relative to the atmosphere from the waters which are in the high relative to the atmosphere; and it was so.”
The atmosphere in question is the lower troposphere—the level below the clouds (“the water which is above”). The Bible is clear that clouds are made of water (“water above”) and are very heavy (Job 37:18: “… dust [clouds], strong as molten mirror”). Hebrew etymology of heaven (shamaim) is shm+maim, “there” + “water.”

Wayomer should not be translated as “And he said,” but “And he conceived.”
In Genesis 1:9, ikavu is usually translated, “let them [waters] gather.” In other contexts, kuf-waw-hey always means, “to hope for someone.” Jeremiah 3:17 is properly read, “and all the nations will set hopes onto it [Jerusalem]…” Obviously, the prophet didn’t imagine all nations actually moving into Jerusalem. The waters were directed (“longed”) to a single region. The preposition el also conveys a sense of moving to, rather than statically gathering at.
The ancients thought of the earth as an island surrounded by sea. The land could be called “gathered to one place” but the water was obviously not “gathered in one place”—there are many watery places around.
Makom is not necessarily a geographical place, but rather an area. It is conceivable that waters were directed to heaven in the cycle of evaporation and rain. The water was originally in a chaotic state everywhere—perhaps after a major upheaval—and God first calmed down the atmospheric storms (divided heaven and earth), and later calmed down surface storms, allowing for earth to reappear. Genesis 1:10 disproves this conjecture, explicitly calling the “water gathering,” seas. Genesis 1:10, however, is an interpretative text, employing a newer word, mikveh, which means “pool.”
Genesis 1:9: “And God conceived, ‘The waters under the heaven will be directed to a single area, and dry land will be seen.’ And it was so.”

In Egypt, Moses was a fugitive wanted for murder. The return from Midian to Egypt in order to save the Hebrews spelled tremendous danger for him. But when God told Moses to go back to Egypt, Moses didn’t ask for miraculous proof. True, there was the burning bush, but very few Orthodox Jews would have been convinced by a bush fire. Moses, we can deduce, had faith in God. Not so the pharaoh: he demanded a miracle. The Jews of Egypt sided with the pharaoh and also demanded a miracle: like their modern brethren, they lacked faith. And just like the generation of the Holocaust which refused to move to the Promised Land, no less than 80 percent of Egyptian Jews rejected the Exodus and perished.

Lot believed the angels who came to take him out of Sodom. They offered him no miracles, but he acted on his common sense: the sin around him surely suggested imminent destruction. Not so the great rabbis and pious Jews who refused to leave the Sodom of Exile for the Promised Land before 1941.
Sages have said that God doesn’t perform miracles violating the laws of nature and the Scripture mentions miraculous events only for the sake of their rational interpretation. Every miracle can be explained away, and on the other hand, everything that God demands of us can be deduced rationally, without circus-like miracles.

God performs miracles without violating the laws of nature but by adjusting probabilities. The miracle consists in making the improbable happen repeatedly. When assimilation skyrocketed and the desecration of God’s name reached its peak, God gave Jews the solution. He started the Redemption, proved it with a string of improbable events, and expected us to follow on.

As the ultimate empirical proof of divine action, a miracle is the antithesis of faith. And what miracle do you imagine? When Hebrews crossed the Reed Sea, an eastern wind made the marshes shallow and allowed them to cross on foot while heavy Egyptian carriages stuck in the mud; not much of a miracle, huh? Or would you believe an erupting volcano on Sinai giving you the law? Surely not. Hey, you don’t believe David Copperfield’s miracles, why would you believe any other ones are for real?

Faith involves the readiness to make a leap of faith, to believe that God must have done this or that. And when we see a mass of events so improbable as those which have taken place in the last sixty years, it makes sense to have faith.

Of course we can bring sacrifices without the Temple. In fact, we must offer them even when Levites are absent as, for example, Samson’s father Manasseh did. But Jews should stop waiting for the heavenly Temple—none is forthcoming. Go build one yourself.

From the experience of the penitentiary system we know that punishment rarely leads to correction. Even when it does, the person merely abstains from evil behavior, but doesn’t embrace the ways of righteousness. It is impossible to punish someone into doing something.

Punishment can also be intended to reinforce the governing authority, but in order to do so the connection between the authority and punishment has to be clear. Police represent the government, but who can be sure that Babylonians, Romans, or Germans were God’s instruments? The refugees explained their misfortune by geopolitical circumstances rather than divine punishment.

King Solomon advocated the middle way for a reason: too few people can cling to their beliefs in the face of extreme circumstances, whether poverty or riches. Between the sufferings of Auschwitz and the riches of America, many Jews lost whatever small faith they had.

The sufferings imagined for the messianic period just cannot bring Jews to God. Even with the whole world against us and no one to flee to, Jews would still harbor the hope of befriending Gentiles rather than repentance. Which is only natural; a person in dire circumstances seeks the most credible and immediate solution rather than far-flung theological explanations.

Rabbis have written that God regretted creating the exile because it failed to improve the Jews. He might also have rethought the prophetic promise of immense sufferings. Instead of waiting for the final signs of the Messiah—which might not come—why don’t we take shovels and go rebuild the Temple?

I submit that people loathe accepting beings higher than themselves. Even the highest politician is still a human like you in the same sense that a top model is very much like your girl-next-door. A counter-example is obvious: people willingly denigrate themselves for their leaders and sacrifice their lives for the likes of Stalin. The apparent self-abasement of this is, however, misunderstood. The people actually elate themselves by uniting in militant masses; they deify the leader, but then attach themselves to him. In a sense, the same is possible with God: deeply religious people abrogate their free will and identify themselves as his instruments, which is a supposedly prestigious position. The bridge from atheism to deep religiosity is the most dangerous ground: proselytes accept their insignificance compared to God but are not yet ready to merge into him. That precarious position takes many aspirants aback: they don’t want to feel themselves inherently lower than someone else. This is also the attitude behind anti-Semitism: naturally, everyone hates the Jewish status of chosen people.

Going through the inconvenience of developing faith in God is practically worthwhile. Instead of fencing with Israel’s detractors over the technicalities of the British Mandate or historical rights, how much easier it is to state that the land is ours in its entirety because God gave it to us. How much more pleasant it is to fight “for the cities of our God” rather than the whims of yet another corrupt Israeli government. The enforcement of basic commandments in Israel would solve many problems: enforcement of Shabbat and prohibition of extra-Temple sacrifices and non-Orthodox worship would make the country off-limits to Arabs. How incorrect is that? There is no foreign worship in Saudi Arabia or the Vatican, why should be there in Israel? We might not construct the Temple, but preparing for it would allow us to raze Al Aqsa—and what Western Christian government can argue with religious Jews who simply go according to the book? We might not execute for homosexuality, but banning it in accordance with the Torah puts a firm lid on libertarianism and its destructive ideology.

And besides, it is so good to have Shabbat dinner with candle lights.

Stricter does not mean better. Rather, it often means abrogation. The rabbis virtually eliminated the Torah’s punishments by erecting impossible rules of evidence. An unruly son cannot be condemned because his parents cannot accuse him “in a single pitch of voice” as the rabbis demand. Even mundane murderers cannot be punished because all the circumstantial evidence is rejected: the rabbis need two people who witnessed the murder, which is clearly an impossible requirement in many situations. In Tanakhic times, Jew freely brought sacrifices when the Temple was not available; by making the rules of sacrifices stricter, rabbis prevent us from bringing them even though we must. The red heifer, an animal so common in antiquity that its ashes were available in every village, has by now acquired impossible qualities: the heifer was required to have no more than two hairs of another color; in consequence, all Jews persevere in a state of ritual impurity.

Or, take the de facto marriage. Isaac married Rivkah simply by “taking her in his mother’s tent.” She now lived with the clan’s women, and that was it. No conversion (she had been pagan) or rabbinical marriage. The Torah offers full support for de facto marital relations: if an unmarried couple has relations, they only need to marry to avoid a death sentence. Thus, the Torah explicitly sanctions pre-marital relations. Now, we might guess whether the lawgiver lauded such relations. Monarchy and slavery are similarly allowed, though frowned upon and heavily restricted.

God’s reasoning, however, is not our business. A wise midrash tells us that when Hebrews enthusiastically accepted the law on Sinai, God hanged the mountain above them and demanded that they accept it out of fear. Sages prohibited us from extolling the law as merciful—for oftentimes it is not. Once we tread on the sleazy slope of rationalizing commandments, we cannot avoid the rabbinical trap of setting ourselves above the Torah. Indeed, we’re better than the one whose reasoning we understand, because besides his knowledge we also have our own knowledge.

A refusal to analyze the Torah is really insulting; we’re used to analyzing everything. Or do we? Where does the aesthetic rule of eating with knife and fork come from? In fact, we take the majority of laws for granted without questioning them. Moreover, we can try analyzing the Torah, but never to change it. The principles which we imagine in it can guide us in developing secular law. The Torah is silent on charity to urban dwellers, for example. But whatever is laid down clearly in the Torah is not for us to bind or loose.

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.