The Question of Mitzvot

Frequently as a Jew, I am asked by other Jews if I am shomer mitzvot. Inevitably I say no. This comes from an Orthodox Centric viewpoint, which is itself problematic. However, I sort of want to unpack this notion in a different way. What is the measure of the shomer factor.

Many in the community consider two sets of mitzvot as a sort of paramount. Shabbat, which I discussed in an earlier post, and Kashrut, the dietary laws. There are other sorts of weird things that are obsessed over, like fasting on all the fast days and other matters. We tend to get bogged down on a set of complex laws (which do not get me wrong, I enjoy studying them, and I often find them useful).

However, there clearly seems to be a hierarchy of mitzvot. Usually when we ask the question if someone is shomer mitzvot, we never imply those mitzvot of how do you treat your fellow human. How do you balance the particular and the universal in your human relations? How do you go about leading a moral life?

Part of this stems, I suspect, from a certain finitude and concreteness. While there are always debates, it is much easier to think about electricity on the holy sabbath than thinking about justice for people (ask any real lawyer about bright-line rules that devolve into squishy standards). These questions are inevitably difficult. No one too completely lives up to it.

Also, we are taught at least not to measure mitzvot against each other. Each one is unique. However, there does seem to exist a strong tension in the other direction as well. These mitzvot regarding how we treat others, whether we recognize the infinite potential in people while also balancing the sort of limited nature of humans, is also highly important as well, and perhaps even more important according to a lot of various Jewish thinkers. In fact, no matter how you slice it, either as a leitmotif or as a distinct separate mitzvah every time, there must be something to the highly frequently used phrases about caring widows, orphans, and strangers.

Perhaps I am wrong, but I remember in my readings of the works of Eliezer Berkovitz that these other mitzvot of ritual served as a sort of mediation between man and God, but also served as a sense of training for other things. If I can think so much about how this food got to my plate, then I can think about complex issues and hopefully look beyond the screen to question other matters of production. Likewise, I can think on shabbat how people have limited freedoms and cannot always take a day of rest.

In many sense, it is the sense of commandedness in a moral sense that drew me to Judaism, and the complex way in which it deals with these matters, tying people between fallible dust, and infinite in God's image, and seeking to find balance between the universal and the particular. I by no means meet these mitzvot completely either. However, I do seek to reach it (this of course creates some weird cognitive dissonance when I seek to apply cost benefit analysis or talk about comparative effectiveness)

This is perhaps why I find some of the tropes within the Jewish community, particularly some sectors of the religious community so troubling. For example, the matter of Rubashkins and the treatment of workers and even animals runs against many of these notions. I apologize for my bluntness and rudeness here, but I do find it horrifying that people who think highly of themselves religiously could support something like this.

The ethical mitzvot as I call them are more difficult. They are harder. And yet, in some sense they represent the ideals. I sort of hope that more people think more deeply and act on such ideas.