—from ¨The Pentateuch and Haftorahs¨, Dr JH Hertz, CH, Late Chief Rabbi Of The British Empire....
¨God had suffered the heathens to worship the sun, moon and stars as a stepping stone to a higher stage of religious belief. That worship of the heathen nations thus forms part of God´s guidance for humanity.
But as for the Israelites, God had given them first hand knowledge of Him through the medium of Revelation. It is for this reason that idolatry was for them an unpardonable offence; and everything that might seduce them from that Divine Revelation was to be ruthlessly destroyed.
Hence the amazing tolerance shown by Judaism of all ages towards the followers of other cults, so long as these were not steeped in immorality and crime. Thus the prophet Malachi declares even the sacrificial offering of heathens to be a glorification of God (Mal 1:11).
Equally striking is the attitude of the Rabbis toward the heathen world. War had been declared against the Canaanites not because of matters of dogma or ritual, but because of the savage cruelty and foul licentiousness of their lives and cult.
But the Rabbis never regarded the heathens of their own day as on the same moral level with the Canaanites. Their contemporary heathens in the Roman and Persian Empires obeyed the laws of conduct which the Rabbis deemed vital to the existence of human society, the so-called ´seven commandments given to the children of Noah´. They wisely held that in their religious life these heathens merely followed the traditional worship which they had inherited from their fathers before them, and they could not therefore be held responsible for failure to reach a true notion of the Unity of God. Such followers of other faiths – they taught – were judged by God purely by their moral life. ´The righteous of all nations have a share in the world to come,´ and are heirs of immortality, alongside the righteous in Israel.
A later midrash proclaimed: ´I call heaven and earth to witness that, whether it be Jew or heathen, man or woman, freeman or bondman – only according to their acts does the Divine spirit rest upon them. And in the darkest days of the Middle Ages, Solomon ibn Gabirol, the great philosopher and Synagogue hymn writer, sang
´Thou art the Lord,
And all beings are thy servants, Thy domain;
And through those who serve idols vain
Thine honor is not detracted from,
For they all aim to Thee to come.´
This is probably the earliest enunciation of religious tolerance in Western Europe.¨
That is incredibly interesting, but one thing that I noticed that I have a problem with is that it seems certain Rabbis down through the ages have shifted their focus away from what the Torah actually says and more towards what other Rabbis have said that it means. Perhaps you or some of the others here who are knowledgable of such things could help me with this.
For example, I know that the Priests, as descendants of Levi, have authority to weigh matters pertaining to the Law, much like the Judges did, and I have heard that Rabbis, as a sort of subset of the Levitical tribe, were to be teachers of the Law, but no where have I seen in the Torah where Priests or Rabbis have authority to add to or take away from the Law.
Or, more bluntly put, if the Rabbis are exercising their authority correctly, why do they say that the Jews do not need to sacrifice for the remission of sin when the Torah is explicit in this regard? I understand that there is no Temple currently, and that in the past the Jews had to deal with not having a Temple, such as when they returned from their exile in Babylon to Jerusalem and found the Temple destroyed, but their reaction was always similar. They immediately set about rebuilding the Temple so they could perform the required sacrifices. Why has that changed now and, more importantly, by what authority did the Rabbis and/or Priests change it?
Can you help me with this?