These rules are known as mitzvot aseh. There are negative mitzvot, which explain what Jews should not do. Alternatively, the mitzvot can be divided up according to their purpose: Ritual mitzvot explain what Jews should or should not do to avoid offending God and cover areas such as worship and festivals.
These mitzvot form a personal covenant between a Jewish person and God. The first four of the Ten Commandments are the most important of the ritual mitzvot. Moral mitzvot explain how Jews should act when dealing with other people. They help Jews to live as a community in a way that God finds acceptable. The Ten Commandments are important mitzvot as they are the basis for moral behaviour. Some laws are judgements from God, for example "you shall not steal".
These are known as mishpatim. The order is my own, as are the explanations of how some rules are derived from some biblical passages. For each mitzvah, I have provided a citation to the biblical passage or passages from which it is derived, based primarily on Rambam. Commandments that cannot be observed today primarily relate to the Temple , its sacrifices and services because the Temple does not exist and criminal procedures because the theocratic state of Israel does not exist.
I can't correct my mistakes or add new material if it's on your site. The are special blessing that are uttered when an Jew eats, smells a flower or puts on clothes in the morning.
Websites and Resources: Judaism Judaism jewfaq. There are, famously, commandments in the Torah alone at least as counted by one of the authors of the Talmud, one of the major books of Jewish law. In Hebrew, these are the mitzvot — the plural of mitzvah, which is one of those Hebrew words that's crossed into English via Yiddish. In English-via-Yiddish, a mitzvah sounds like a favor: "It would be a mitzvah if you did the dishes after Seder. A mitzvah is really a commandment, just like tzedakah — often translated as "charity" — is really an obligation to give.
Think about it — shellfish can often make you sick in hot climates, especially at certain times of the year, and it was probably safer to avoid them. Judaism forbids graven images? Think about it — the earliest Jews lived among polytheistic tribes with idols for everything; worshiping only one god, a god too powerful to have a face, was certainly one way to set themselves apart.
But it worked as far as it went. The problem is that some rules simply cannot be logicked. Often, that's a fancy word for arguing — one of the stories in the Haggadah, the script for the Passover Seder, ends with the so-called "punchline" of four rabbis being interrupted in a heated discussion by their students telling them the sun has risen and it's time for breakfast. The real punchline is that subsequent Jewish scholars have tried to explain away the unfunniness of this joke by dissecting its symbolism in the margins of the Haggadah.
Diaspora gave rise to the Askhenazi tradition of Eastern Europe and Russia, and the Sephardi tradition of the Mediterranean — distinctions of culture that nonetheless gave rise to certain differences of interpretation. Ultra-Orthodox clothing and hairstyle are derived from Jewish laws and East European traditions. We can abide by it unquestioningly, for the simple reason that if it was good enough for our ancestors it is good enough for us.
You might be familiar with the song "Tradition" from the musical Fiddler on the Roof, but you might have forgotten that this too is ironic — "Why do we do these things?
Faced with the difficulty that multi-story apartment buildings posed to the rules against operating machines on the Sabbath, the rabbis and the engineers devised a solution: Pressing an elevator button was forbidden, but riding in an elevator programmed to stop on every floor would work. We can kvetch about it. Moses hears a voice from the heavens: "Thou shalt not boil the kid in its mother's milk. Finally, the voice sighs thunderously: "Fine.
Have it your way Among Conservative Jews and those of us less observant still , the question is simply how many of the rules we ignore. It can be hard to grasp that the distinctions among various sects of Judaism not to mention the wide and growing variety of Jewish practices outside established synagogues aren't about theology but about observance: how many, and which, rules are followed.
The technical term for this is orthopraxy — correct actions, as opposed to orthodoxy correct thoughts. It's a key distinction between Judaism and Islam, for that matter and Christianity. So is the commitment to social justice inherent in the obligation of tzedakah. No one would argue that these values are unique to Judaism.
But their expression within Judaism is a big part of why they're so important in so many Jewish homes — and to many people who grow up in those homes. To orthodox Jews, this is monstrous: a sickness of modernity. They can't abide the idea of Jews going through the motions to serve a deity in whom they may not believe; to them, this is precisely how Judaism gets reduced from a religion to a culture.
They find no meaning in the rituals themselves, and "because your ancestors did it" doesn't carry much more weight than "because I said so. But few people are introspective enough to know the precise origins of every trait they've inherited from their parents or been raised with in their homes. People can't always judge what, in their upbringing, was Jewish and what was not. They're cutting off an alternative mode of inquiry: thinking about what they have inherited because of Judaism.
I'd argue that even if it were trivializing, it wouldn't be less so than simply foregoing the practice entirely and dooming it to die. It's orthopraxy.
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