re: #30 Sergey Romanov

Respectfully, you are being purposefully evasive of the points.

All you’ve said is that you don’t have to believe in Judaism. I agree! No one is [putting a gun to your head. However some discussion of how you don’t have to believe what the oral law is and you can still reject it in terms of the written law is daft.

If you are interested in what the Written Law is even talking about in the first place, you must have the Oral Law. This is not something abstract. You literally have no clue what much of the written part is saying (forget interpreting, even just saying) without it and no these are not minor ambiguities. Without that framework, you really have very little.

Then you write this. Respectfully, this is shockingly ignorant.

You give the example of tefillin - good example. Yes, we don’t know what the original author meant by that. Yes, we have an explanation in the OL. No, this explanation is not necessarily what the original author meant and we don’t have to accept it. So basically, we still don’t know what the original author meant, but as a matter of religious practice some people choose to follow specific instructions. But tefillin (or, rather, totafot) is a specific example - it’s an obscure word. There is nothing obscure about the texts I cite.

Tefillin is a major part of observance. It isn’t a little detail. So for that matter is mikveh and all of the other examples I pointed out. These aren’t little details. This is day to day observance and meditation of being Jew. You have absolutely no call or cause to minimize these things just because they do not fit your narrative. That little thing with vowels that you are willfully ignoring ends up being a cornerstone of Kashrut.

If you want to actually be Jewish, rather than write about it, you need to know these things. It is utterly wrong of you to say what you are saying.

Finally, what insane chutzpah you have!

You do not tell a group of people who formalized their written and oral tradition thousands of years ago, and stuck by that for those thousands of years that their interpretation of their own books is moot!

Who do you think you are!

You don’t debate what tefillin is with a Jew! We tell YOU. You don’t debate what the laws of Shabbos are. They are our laws. We tell you. You don’t tell us what our language says and what is or is not important for observance, we tell you. What you believe and how you decide you like what we tell you is your business, but don’t dare to presume that any opinion you have on the matter outweighs who owns the material and has owned it for 3,000 years.