Hukat (Rambam)

Hukim: Reason and Beyond-Reason

The commandment of parah adumah, the red heifer used for purifying those contaminated by contact with the dead, is the paradigm of a hukkah, a religious law that has no reason—or at least not one within the ordinary purview of human understanding. This concept is often invoked by Jewish moralists and philosophers to indicate the heteronomous nature of the law of the Torah in general—i.e., that it is external to the human being, his reason and consciences, and must be obeyed simply because such is the Divine will.

But is this in fact the case? Maimonides deals with the ramifications of this problem in the series of three passages with which he concludes those three books of the Yad that deal with the system of animal sacrifices offered in the Temple. First, Hilkhot Me’ilah 8.8:

8. It is fitting that a person contemplate the laws of the Holy Torah and comprehend their full meaning in accordance with his ability. And if there is some thing for which he does not find a reason and whose cause he does not know it should not be trivial in his eyes, lest he presume to break through to the Lord… [after Exod 19:21]; and his thought concerning them should not be like his thoughts in mundane matters.

The essential idea here is that, while it is desirable that a person attempt to understand the rationale for the mitzvot, his observance should not be contingent upon his understanding their reason, being personally convinced of the “legitimacy” of the mitzvah, or being able to “connect” in a personal way. He goes on to prove this point by means of an analogy from the laws concerning trespass against holy things, with which the Book of [Temple] Service concludes:

Come and see how strict the Torah is with the matter of trespass. For if sticks and stone and dirt and ashes become hallowed once the name of the Master of the Universe has been called upon them, [even] by means of words alone, so that whoever treats them in a mundane matter and trespasses regarding them [i.e., uses them for personal benefit], even inadvertently, requires atonement; how much more so is this true regarding the commandment that the Holy One blessed be He has legislated for us, that a person should not rebel against them it simply because he does not know their reason. Nor should he heap up words that are not so upon the Lord, and not think in them as he does in secular matters.

For it says in the Torah, “You shall observe all my statutes and all my ordinances, and do them” [Lev 19:37]. Our Sages said [in Sifra, ad loc.] that this verse is meant to teach that “observing” and “doing” apply equally well to the statutes as to the ordinances. The sense of “doing” is well-known—namely, that he should perform the statutes. And “observing” means, that he should be careful regarding them and not imagine that they are of lesser importance than the ordinances.

At this point, noting the distinction between “statutes” and “ordinances” (which he goes on to define more sharply), he cites a Rabbinic halakhic midrash proving that the reference to both types of law in the verse quoted here demonstrates that both types are equally binding and that both have an equal claim upon our allegiance. This is so, notwithstanding the possible objection that the hukkim do not seem to make any sense.

Now, the “ordinances” refers to those commandments whose reason is well-known and the benefit of whose performance in this world is self-evident, such as the prohibitions against theft and bloodshed, and the honoring of parents. And the “statutes” refer to those commandments whose reasons are not known. Our Sages said: I have decreed statutes for you, and you have no permission to question them. And a man’s [evil] impulse troubles him regarding them, and the nations of the world reprove us concerning them, such as the prohibition of the flesh of swine, or of meat in milk, and the law of the heifer whose neck is broken, and the Red Heifer, and the scapegoat.

From the definition of the two types it is clear that only the hukkim need to be accepted upon Divine authority alone; the mishpatim coincide with the human being’s innate sense of fairness, justice and morality, so that there is presumably no particular difficulty in applying one’s mind, heart and conscience to their understanding and implementation.

The distinction itself is a classic one in Jewish thought, that hardly originated with Rambam. Before him, Saadya Gaon divided all the commandments into mitzvot sikhliyot—“intellective” or rational laws; and mitzvot shimi’yot—“laws that were heard”—i.e., laws received from Sinai, or through tradition—meaning, that they could not have been derived through human intellect alone.

Even earlier, this distinction is found in the Talmud itself. In the course of a sugya dealing with the sa’ir ha-mishtaleah—the “scape-goat” sent into the wilderness on Yom Kippur to atone for the sins of the entire Jewish people (a mitzvah which, alongside the Red Heifer, is most often cited as paradigmatic of the hukkah)—we read the following beraita, cited in b. Yoma 67b:

Our Rabbis taught: “You shall perform my ordinances” [Lev 18:4]—those things that, were they not written, they ought by rights to have been written: namely, idolatry, sexual licentiousness, bloodshed, theft, and cursing God’s name. “And you shall guard my statutes” [ibid.]—those things that Satan reproves; namely: the eating of swine, [not] wearing lindsey-woolsey, the removing of the shoe of the levirate wife (halitzah), the purification of the leper, and the scape-goat sent into the wilderness. Lest you say, these are acts of emptiness, the Torah says, “I am the Lord”—I have legislated them and you are not permitted to question them.

What is the common denominator of those laws described as hukkim? Rambam lists a potpourri of laws that have no particular or obvious reason, and which are most often held to ridicule by the Gentile nations—such as the laws of kashrut, or various rituals that seem particularly bizarre. Those listed in the Talmud all entail some paradox or internal contradiction: the Red Heifer “renders the impure pure, and the pure impure”; the law of levirate marriage transforms what is ordinarily an act of incest (brother-in-law with sister-in-law) into a mandated commandment; shaatnez (lindsey-woolsey) is overridden in the case of tzitzit; and so on.

The mishpatim, by contrast, seem to coincide with natural law, being derived either from the innate makeup of the human conscience, or being the inevitable results of reflection on the matter. Interestingly, the list of laws described by our Talmudic passage as mishpatim seems to coincide almost completely with the seven Noachide commandments, which we suggested elsewhere might be viewed as a Judaic counterpart to the “natural law” concept of Christian moral thinkers (see our discussion of this, and of the entire problematics surrounding Rambam’s view on it, in HY V: Noah). Rambam, in the Eight Chapters, suggests that the reaction of the human being is in itself a sure indicator of which law belongs to what group. A rational man will not have any inclination to violate those laws that accord with reason; the hukkim, on the other hand, which are admittedly arbitrary, tend to evoke rebellion and refusal to accept them easily. Hence, the presence of the Yetzer Hara, the “Evil Urge” (brought by Rambam as an alternative reading to “Satan” in the Talmudic passage) is in itself a sign that a given law is a hukkah.

We now return to Rambam’s presentation in Hilkhot Me’ilah:

How much David was pained by the heretics and the pagans who mocked the statutes! Yet the more they hounded him with false questions, which they raised in accordance with their limited human intellect, the greater his devotion to the Torah. As is said, “Evil men weaved falsehood against me, but I guarded your statutes with all my heart” [Ps 119:69]. And it says there concerning that matter, ”All your commandments are faith, they pursue me falsely, help me” [ibid., v. 86]. And all of the sacrifices belong to the class of the hukkim. Our Sages said that the entire world is sustained by dint of the sacrificial worship. For by performing the statutes and the laws the upright merit the life of the World to Come. And the Torah gave precedence to the commandment regarding the statutes, as is said, ”And you shall guard my statutes and my laws, that a person shall do and live by them” [Lev 18:5].

Dedication to the hukkim is thus seen as a particular sign of love and devotion to the Torah.

I would like to return to the last sentence of the beraita from Yoma, “Lest you say, these are acts of emptiness (tohu), the Torah says, ‘I am the Lord’—I have made an edict and you are not permitted to question them.” This seemingly innocuous sentence opens an entirely new line of thinking. The argument that these laws are hukkim is seen here, not as an invocation of Divine fiat, a celebration of the irrationality of the Torah laws and a call for squashing human reason but, on the contrary, as an answer to the rational person who entertains the thought that “these are acts of emptiness.” To the criticism an intelligent person might bring that, “these rituals are a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, with neither rhyme nor reason,” the response is, “I have made an edict”—that is, the argument that God has legislated the hukkim and that they presumably embody Divine wisdom and authority is itself the best answer. Not magic, but commandments given by the Transcendent God, whose reason is beyond our fathoming. (For an interesting midrash that develops this approach more fully, see Numbers Rabbah 19.8, which we brought in HY III: Hukkat).

A commonly-heard view in contemporary Orthodoxy asserts that the mode of religiosity implied by the notion of hukkim embraces nearly all aspects of Judaism, in which an almost quietistic sense of submissiveness to the Divine will is seen as the ideal. Some thinkers of this school call for total suppression of human moral sensitivity, conscience, feeling, mind, intellect, etc., before the overwhelming holiness and awesome power of the Divine. The emphasis is on the law as totally external to man, on the one hand; and of man’s creatureliness and fallibility, on the other. Hence, legislation about the social order, or those that emerge from human reason or conscience, are dismissed as secondary to Divine fiat.

This approach is especially strongly felt in Hasidism and in other mystical approaches to Torah, which at times put forward a kind of quietism or determinism, a sense that everything that man does is “beshert”—predetermined (thus, for example, the rabbi of Izhbitz in his book Mei Shiloah, which is popular among many today). Not only the halakhah, but even those personal ethical decisions that a person makes in life that do not fall easily under any particular halakhic category, are also seen in this light.

But even rationalist, modernist streams invoke such ideas at times. Thus, for example, Rav Soloveitchik spoke more than once of how, in principle, even the mishpatim are ultimately experienced by the Jew as hukkim; that is, while the civil laws of the Torah are seemingly rational, based upon human ethics and reason, ethical understanding and insight, and in terms of their subject matter and even much of the contents of the law similar to secular law codes, our allegiance to them is rooted in the fact that the source of authority is ultimately God, and that in studying even such secular matters as the laws of “two men who grasped garment” or “a bull that gored a cow” we “rendezvous” with the Shekhinah.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz also had a strong “voluntaristic” element in his approach to law. He constantly referred to the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac, as a paradigm for the nature of halakhah. Human reason and conscience, and certainly any value given to human needs and wishes, are abandoned where halakhah is concerned. To worship or to serve God means—to perform a given act because God commanded it or, more precisely, because in doing one demonstrates submission to God. He downplayed the role of kavvanah, inner spiritual intention in tefillah; if God had commanded us to read the telephone book or to recite gibberish instead of the Shmonah Esreh, we would do so.

Yet it is by no means clear that this is the only, or even the predominant view, in classical Judaism. I was recently privy to a forthcoming paper by Yitzhak Benbaji, a researcher at the Shalom Hartman Institute, who asserts—and brings substantial proof to support this claim—that traditional Jewish thought did not require man’s absolute submission to the arbitrary Divine will, but saw the moral law as an autonomous realm, which God Himself is bound to honor. The Sages often evoked reason, and not only tradition, in their halakhic argumentation.

If so, why is the heteronomous nature of the law so strongly emphasized in the contemporary discussion? One explanation relates to the defensive posture of Orthodoxy in modern world. Much of the Jewish people today lives outside of the halakhah; moreover, the main practical differences between observant and non-observant Jewry seems to lie precisely in those areas that cannot easily by explained by reason, at least at first blush, and which often involve no little sacrifice. Some examples that readily come to mind are: kashrut, with the social awkwardness and inconvenience it involves (at least for those living in the Diaspora); the numerous particular details of Shabbat observance (as opposed to the beautiful general concept); the laws of family purity, with the insistence on mikveh; the arbitrary-seeming marital restrictions imposed upon kohanim (descendants of the ancient priestly family); even the fact that a religious divorce writ (get) is sine qua non for the termination of marriage, and that its absence taints any new relationship the woman may undertake with the stamp of adultery. While good reasons may be found, and have in fact been articulated, for all these things, they ultimately demand a commitment born of a certain degree of “blind” acceptance of the authority of the halakhah, arbitrary and “meaningless” as it may at times seem.

On the other hand, a certain optimism about human beings and the power of human reason, that had dominated Western culture from the Renaissance on, had the lie put to it by the events of the twentieth century. Not only the horrific destruction and warfare wrought by modernity, but the fact that seemingly rational and sublime ideals—e.g. the universal economic equality and building of a just society that underlay communism—proved catastrophic. Many of us grew up with the feeling that the human ability to dominate and control the environment far outstrips both our wisdom or our moral sense—and that hence, “There is none on whom we can rely, but our Father in Heaven.”

All this led many to fall back on faith; to create an either-or dichotomy: either humanism or theocentrism; either rational ethics and autonomous, informed ethical decision-making, or total surrender to God. And yet, in the end such a dichotomy is a false one. The lesson gleaned from Rambam’s presentation is a kind of synthesis: the commitment to the Torah and its laws must be a priori; but one’s mind may and should continue to be active, both in seeking out ever deeper levels of understanding of the reasons for the mitzvot, and in applying the general rules of the halakhah to the specifics of our own, often complex, actual situation. This is, perhaps, the deeper meaning of the Rabbinic adage, “a Sage is preferable to a prophet”—that is, given that in our day no human being has a direct pipe-line to the Infinite One, we have no alternative but to rely upon human wisdom, understanding and intuition (both or own and that of those with greater experience and learning) to deal with the dilemmas presented by life, both to the individual and to the community. (The alternative, which is appealing but ultimately dangerous, is the cult of personality: to say that the Divine will is channeled to us through the “great sage of the generation”—be it Rav Zvi Yehudah Kook, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rav Ovadiah Yosef, Rav Schach, etc.)

But unlike some prophets of a “modern” religious sensibility, who would advocate expanding the role of human reason and human community indefinitely, I would not dismiss the concept of hukkah too lightly. In the end, in the performance of a mitzvah there is a sense of mysterium tremendum; that one is confronting, not only the grandeur and mystery of the cosmos, but also that of the Divine law. There is an element of the holy to the process of Divine service, a sense of mystery and of the uncanny that demands that the law be somewhat opaque, that one knows that it has depth upon depth that cannot be fully comprehended by facile, humanistic, liberal ”explanations,” or dismissed as outmoded folklore or relics of ancient times. Regarding the mitzvot as hukkim implies, in the end, an attitude of reverence, of standing before something that is bigger than oneself.

The Depths of the Mitzvah: An Object Lesson

Rambam goes on, in the peroration to the next book of the Yad, to elaborate and provide a concrete illustration of the principle explained in Me’ilah 8.8: namely, that while observance may not be made contingent ab initio upon understanding of ta’amei ha-mitzvah, the rationale of the commandments, one is not only permitted to engage in this enterprise, but it is a good thing to do so, and even a kind of religious imperative. It seems to me that he certainly would include it under the rubric of gemara, of reflecting upon and understanding the underpinnings of the halakhic system, as he defines it in Talmud Torah 1.9 (see HY V: Shavuot), because doing so strengthens one’s faith in the wisdom contained in the Torah.

Here, he provides a concrete example, taken from the law with which he concludes Sefer Korbanot, to illustrate how a seemingly technical halakhic regulation is filled with profound understanding of human nature, shrewd understanding of psychology, moral lessons, etc. The context is the law, whose scriptural source is Leviticus 27:31-33 (appropriately enough, the very last law in Vayikra, the biblical “book of sacrifices”), against substituting one animal for another once it has been consecrated as a Temple sacrifice. Hilkhot Temurah [Laws of Exchanging] 4.13 (I have omitted the initial sentence, which is excessively technical for our purposes):

Even though all the statutes of the Torah are edicts, as we have explained at the end of [Laws of] Trespasses, it is fitting that one should contemplate them and to provide a reason for whatever you are able to do so. For our early Sages said that King Solomon understood most of the reasons for all the laws of the Torah.

It seems to me that when Scripture said, “And it and its substitute shall be holy” [Lev 27:33] this is similar to the matter of which is said: “And if the one sanctifying it shall redeem his house, he shall add a fifth of the money of its valuation to it” [ibid., v. 15]. The Torah penetrated to the end of man’s thought and to the limit of his evil inclination. For it is man’s nature to augment his property and to take pity on his money. And even if he took a vow and sanctified something, he may recant and [try to] redeem it for less than its value. Hence the Torah said that if he redeemed it for himself he shall add a fifth [of its total value]. Similarly, if he sanctified an animal, [conveying upon it] sanctity of its body [kedushat ha-guf; an halakhic concept], perhaps he will recant, and since he cannot redeem it, he will replace it with one that is of lesser value. And if he were to be given permission to replace the bad with the good, he might exchange the good for the bad, and say that it is good. Hence Scripture closed all these options to him so that he cannot exchange it, imposing a penalty upon him if he does exchange it, saying “it and its substitute shall be holy” [ibid., v. 33].

And all of these things are made so as to turn his [natural] impulse and to improve his character. And most of the laws of the Torah are naught but counsel from afar from the Great One of Counsel, to improve character and to straighten all of the actions. And it likewise says: “Have I not written to you words of admonition and knowledge, to show what is right and true, that you may give a true answer to those who sent you?” [Prov 22:21-22]

I cannot analyze this passage at any length, but the essential point is clear enough: even such seemingly “technical” details as when and whether one may substitute or redeem one sacrificial animal for another are based upon a profound understanding of human nature, and are designed to implant within the person sublime traits—generosity, willingness to forego his own interests, to transcend petty self-concern. In his words, “to improve character and to straighten all of the actions.” The third passage in this series (Mikvaot 11.12), concerning the meaning of ritual purification through immersion in water and the moral lesson to be derived therefrom, has already been discussed earlier this year (see HY V: Tazria-Metzora).