Fences

Just a brain-meld on “fences” – the Rabbis building guidelines around issurim from the Torah to make sure they are not transgressed…

On the one hand, the need for fences is obvious. With no boundaries, it’s exceedingly easy to make all sorts of mistakes. Anyone building a bridge knows there must be guardrails. Well, if life is “gesher tzar meod” – a very narrow bridge – it makes perfect sense to erect guardrails and create a cushion between the bridge and the abyss. The argument that “it was an honest mistake” is certainly understandable, but in many situations the counter-argument that “you should have had the foresight to take precautions” also holds. So I don’t have a problem with fences per say.

The question now becomes more sticky. How high should the fences go, and how wide should the cushion be? Safety is an issue, but so is feasibility and maneuverability. Granted that in this schema the borders of the bridge are defined and cannot be widened – the daled amos (four feet) of halachah – the more cushion, the less room to actually walk. Using the metaphor of the bridge as four feet across – if the cushion is 6 inches on the outside, you have 3 feet left in which to move. If the cushion is 1.5 feet, you get only 1 foot to walk in.

It seems to me, that in the Rabbi’s minds, safety was the only consideration to be made. Every generation has extended the cushion, so that today there is only a tiny amount of room left to walk in, and leeway in halachah and lifestyle is extremely limited. The extent to which the cushion can be extended is practically limitless provided there’s still one person who is willing to accept it all and call it Torah (e.g. a Rabbinical opinion that in order to be absolutely sure one is fulfilling the mitzvah of eating matzah on Pesach, one should eat an entire pound!). And the Torah, which should be freeing and light in our arms, has become a burden, literally a yolk tied around our necks.

This results in the majority of the people who don’t fit the one mold left find themselves alienated by their own heritage. Those who don’t buck the entire system choose some other model that leaves them more room to be themselves. However, these systems also choose to ignore or change many halachos outright. Hence, in the name of safety to never transgress anything in the Torah, to never veer outside of the daled amos accidentally, the vast majority of Jews choose to refute the entire system and ignore daled amos altogether. If you’d like to argue that many Jews never learn about halachah growing up (I know, I grew up Reform) I’d like to point to their grandparents – and to the throngs of Jews leaving Orthodoxy in their teens and early adulthood as well.


What about current Modern Orthodoxy? My current issue is that a significant chunk of people who consider themselves to be Modern also don’t seem to be within daled amos on a number of issues. Maybe I’ve just never heard these opinions – I am planning to delve into them more in the coming months - but it seems in an effort to expand the framework of halachah, people have gone too far here as well. Moreover, in the effort to embrace secular thinking, the purpose has been forgotten – to use the secular to expound on Torah, to bring the elements of truth from the big wide world into our understanding of Torah. What I have experienced is a certain amount of the secular taking precedence over Torah, not being integrated. For example, I have found many more “modern” Shabbos table conversations centered around TV shows and stocks than around Torah or even something secular but meaningful to life, which to me still fulfills the purpose of a reflective, restful Shabbos. This doesn’t cut it for me either.

I think the main answer is that there should be no one answer. There needs, instead, to be a framework, a much-widened framework, that does not compromise halachah to secular ideas, but does compromise halachah to the fact that people should be living joyful, healthy lives that give them room to channel their G-d given gifts, not be told they have no place in Judaism. I don’t believe in a system that desires I give up the essential self G-d gave me in the name of the safety to never transgress anything, but I can't stand TV shows as a stand-in for Torah on Shabbos either. There must be some way to give people more room to live without losing the essence of halachah and Torah.

So I'm exasperated and looking for answers. But these are my thoughts. Feel free to comment.