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Christian Patriarchy Movement Shackles Daughters to Fathers, Homes

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Nyet12/01/2010 1:53:49 pm PST

Part 1:

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.

This is simply not true - the text is available and readily translated, just like numerous other ancient texts - without vocalizations, I must add. Your assertion that we somehow cannot understand the text without a helper in the form of the current Oral Law is prima facie absurd - yes we can.

Whatever ambiguities there may be in the text either stay ambiguous or can be discussed and analyzed. Moreover, you haven’t shown any ambiguities in the cited verses.

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.

You’re purposefully mixing together separate issues. Today neither the details of tefillin, nor of Kashrut are little details. From this you assume that this has always been so - starting from the Torah’s “release”. But you have no idea what the mode of observance of the earliest followers of Torah was (you may have religious beliefs on that point and I have no quarrel with that - but don’t state them as proven fact).

You’re repeatedly projecting the practices of rabbinic Judaism on the period of the Torah’s appearance.