As far as the hair-splitting, there are a couple of ways to view it. On one hand, Talmud has a concept of “being despicable (person) with torah’s permission”, meaning technically following the law but not its intent. This refers to cases where some moral violation is involved, such as stealing, or, as in your example, defeating the purpose of Shabos (which would be reflecting on creation) by setting up the tv timer. In other areas, where the law has no obvious moral intent finding a hack is considered praiseworthy. So why have these amoral laws in the first place? Maimonides held that besides formalizing the moral principles (how to treat stealing in a system of courts) the law is to train the mind, which makes you think through a lot of things you do throughout the day.
Orthodox judaism has a lot of reasonable answers for a lot of things. This is why I found it so damn hard to abandon, it’s so surprisingly consistent in many places. I think there is something to be said of meme survival that causes religions to become close to reasonable over time, and judaism probably had the longest run out of all of them.
David Friedman has just posted on this. As it turns out, the debate about finding “creative” loopholes of Biblical law is isomorphic to the controversy over constitutional interpretation in the U.S.
Yes, I misunderstood the conservative reference.
As far as the hair-splitting, there are a couple of ways to view it. On one hand, Talmud has a concept of “being despicable (person) with torah’s permission”, meaning technically following the law but not its intent. This refers to cases where some moral violation is involved, such as stealing, or, as in your example, defeating the purpose of Shabos (which would be reflecting on creation) by setting up the tv timer. In other areas, where the law has no obvious moral intent finding a hack is considered praiseworthy. So why have these amoral laws in the first place? Maimonides held that besides formalizing the moral principles (how to treat stealing in a system of courts) the law is to train the mind, which makes you think through a lot of things you do throughout the day.
Orthodox judaism has a lot of reasonable answers for a lot of things. This is why I found it so damn hard to abandon, it’s so surprisingly consistent in many places. I think there is something to be said of meme survival that causes religions to become close to reasonable over time, and judaism probably had the longest run out of all of them.
David Friedman has just posted on this. As it turns out, the debate about finding “creative” loopholes of Biblical law is isomorphic to the controversy over constitutional interpretation in the U.S.
Is there a rabbinical school analogous to the “living constitution” school?
The left wing of the Jewish Committee on Law and Standards, which is in turn a part of the American sect called Conservative Judaism, comes close.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Halakha#Difference_in_methodology_from_Orthodoxy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Jewish_Law_and_Standards#Process