The fence around the Torah

The Torah was central to the symbolic world of first century Jews. Because the Torah was written under circumstances quite different from those in which it was applied, however, interpretation was necessary to understand its relevance for contemporary Jewish life. While the Essenes sought to recreate the isolated, rural self-ruled community of the early Jews, and the Zealots sought to fight for self-rule, the Pharisees sought instead to create a body of scholarship, called the Midrash, that would derive symbolic meaning and rules of conduct for a Jewish community. These rules would allow Jews living in urban environments under the rule of an occupying power to live in accordance with the Torah.

One of the important principles of midrashic interpretation was the idea of “building a fence around the Torah.” In order to ensure that the Torah would be obeyed, it was necessary to keep behavior at a safe distance so it would not accidentally veer into prohibited territory. For example, the Torah prohibits boiling a calf in its mother’s milk. The halakhic interpretation is that meat and dairy may not be prepared or eaten together.

When Jesus encounters the practices of the Pharisees, they immediately strike him as hypocritical. The Pharisees make their virtue very conspicuous, wearing long robes and praying long prayers in public to show their righteousness. And they demand to be respected, always taking the best seats at banquets and ceremonies. They show great concern for what they put in their mouths, but, Jesus objects, “It is what comes out of a person’s mouth, not what goes in the mouth, that makes a person righteous” (Matthew 15:11). What we eat goes down the sewer. But what we say comes from the heart. Rather than trying to purify the “outside of the chalice”—the robes, the foods, and all the external, material trappings of religion—shouldn’t we be trying, Jesus asks, to make the inside pure?

The contrast between inside and outside is apparent in the antitheses Jesus draws between law and faith (Matthew 5:21-48). It is not only murder, the external act, but also anger, the internal disposition, that is sinful. It is not only adultery, but also lust. Jesus also wants to build a fence around the Torah. But he believes the Pharisees have gone about it the wrong way. Rather than proscribing acts that, by some sophistical reasoning, seem to resemble the prohibited acts, we must, Jesus tells the Pharisees, cultivate a spiritual disposition that is as far as possible from the sinful spiritual disposition that leads to the acts prohibited by the Torah.

Those who have read the New Testament will be all too familiar with the failure of religious institutions to live up to the righteousness it demands of them. A large part of this failure, as I see it, comes as a consequence of the tendency of religious authorities to make elaborate interpretations of texts rather than seeking to proclaim and live in accordance with what they perceive to be the spirit that gave rise to the texts in the first place.

Within two centuries of the death of its founder, the Church had already begun to engage in precisely the same legalistic word-spinning for which Jesus criticized the Pharisees. And those who criticized the Church met the same persecution Jesus faced. Every doctrine has a tendency to evolve over time into a doctrine diametrically opposed to the spirit of the original. Christianity in this regard is no exception.