Twice in this week’s parashah, we encounter instances of God giving stern commands without explicit reason. The first instance is that of the deaths of Nadav and Avihu at the beginning of chapter 10. The next is the following chapter’s list of permitted and forbidden animals to Israel for food. Nadav and Avihu are killed by a Divine fire after they bring incense offerings to God without God’s commandment to do so.

We might ponder whether it was just that God kill Nadav and Avihu for bringing an unsolicited offering. Why should service of God be punished? And why so harshly?

We see harsh penalties for other failures to conform to God’s unexplained will. Eating chametz on Passover carries a penalty of karet, or “cutting off”; whether this means social ostracizing, destruction of the soul, or death at the hands of God, karet is one of the most sever penalties in the Torah.

Most of the Torah’s harshest penalties come for transgressing commandments that have no clear rationale.

There is a classical division of mitzvot into chok and mishpat. Mishpat usually connotes laws that make sense to us; laws that we may have figured out for ourselves without a Torah. They are mostly ethical laws, such as prohibitions against stealing and murder, obligations to conduct business honestly and ethically, etc. Chok, on the other hand, is the type of mitzvah that a religious Jew must follow out of devotion to God, and to do so without finding a satisfactory reason for that particular mitzvah.

Keeping kosher is one of the classical examples of chok. There can be no rational explanation for why only the meat of a mammal with split hooves and that chews its cud is permitted to Jews. We follow that commandment precisely because it is just that, a commandment.

The spiritual value of chok is in keeping a purely devotional practice. We restrict our diet in ways prescribed by Torah law because it is part of our commitment to God via Judaism. We do it precisely because there is no rationale. It is simply a part of holier living through Judaism.

The question then arises: If conformity to irrational laws is part and parcel of Jewish religious commitment, how do we safely walk the fine line between taking on a practice that encourages humility and spiritual devotion on the one hand, and submission to human authority in the form of rabbis, and in the form of the trends of the religious community?

We must make sure that our devotion to God through Halachah not be a matter of “keeping up with the Goldsteins,” of following certain practices for fear of social consequence. We must remember that it is to the Creator of the world that we are committed when we practice mitzvot that govern our relationship with God. It is a question of intention and attitude. When we practice one of the laws of Judaism that carries no rationale, we must do so consciously, with the intent to acknowledging God. Without that conscious intent, we may fall into the traps of making our religiosity a set of empty habits, and of a conformism that is antithetical to spirituality.

We are commanded to “be holy.”

Shabbat Shalom!

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