Today's Scripture Reading (January 31, 2022): Deuteronomy 30
Six-hundred and thirteen. If you want to keep all of
the Jewish Law, the number that you need to know is not ten; it is 613. According to the Jewish rabbis, the Bible contains 613 commandments that God
expects us to follow. Of course, keeping all of the Law is not easy. And sometimes, they are even contradictory. For instance, the Law clearly states that leadership should "designate a place outside the camp
where you can go to relieve yourself" (Deuteronomy 23:12). From the
point of view of cleanliness, the rule makes sense, and it was a bit ahead of
its time. Part of the cleanliness problem of a century ago was that outhouses
were often way too close to the house, something that was done for the sake of
convenience. In the process, diseases present in the excrement of the outhouse
often found it easy to make the jump to the kitchen of the house. The Law says
that such an area should be designated outside of the camp.
But a problem arose when Rabbis designated Jerusalem as the "Camp
of Israel." Laws that applied to a camp in the wilderness now also applied
to the City of Jerusalem, which meant that the place you went to relieve
yourself had to be outside of the city. Of course, for some people living in
the heart of the city, that meant a long trip to the closest available
washroom. The journey to the nearest designated area was sometimes too far to
walk on the Sabbath without violating Jewish Sabbath laws. But the rabbis had a
solution for that problem. They made it illegal to relieve yourself on the
Sabbath. Our human reality is that when the Law becomes too hard, the people
begin to ignore the Law.
And that was the reality in Israel during the days of Jesus.
The Law of Moses had simply become to hard for the people to keep, and so they
stopped trying. The Pharisees prided themselves on their ability to keep the Law,
but they had devoted all of their time to that one task. For the average person
who had to do the necessary things of life, keeping the Law was simply beyond
their capability, as I suspect was not using an outhouse on the Sabbath as had
been decreed by the Rabbis.
But that was not the way it was supposed to be. The laws of
the rabbis had actually begun to violate the Law of Moses. Moses clearly says
that the Law he was giving to the people was not too difficult or beyond the
reach of the people. But that was precisely what the Law had become, and the
reason why Jesus had to come to fulfill the Law (Matthew 5:17); to make the Law
available to the people once more.
Whenever we make rules upon rules until they are too
difficult to understand or obey, we are going against the desire of God, who
wants the Law to be easy enough to be understood and kept even by the least
among us.
Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Deuteronomy 31
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