My Dad sent me this quote on the subject of one of my recent tweets about the tyranny of nuance and exceptions:
“In the interpretation of the law there was always a tendency to eliminate vagueness by exact definition. The commandment to love your neighbor as yourself invited the lawyer’s question, ‘Who is my neighbor’ (Lev. 19:18; Luke 10:29). If the law forbade work on the sabbath, the rabbis would naturally ask what the law intended by ‘work’ and answer their own question with a list of thirty-nine catregories (Mishne, Shab. 7.2). Yet there can be dangers in too great of precision. Jesus’ reply to the lawyer denied him the right to limit his liabilities by definition. At other times Jesus attacked the Pharisees because, in their determination to know exactly what the Torah meant so that they might live in total obedience to it, they concentrated on the minor and practical pieties, to the neglect of the broad and inexhaustible principles, ‘justice, mercy and good faith’ (Matt 23:23). A sound ethical system cannot dispense with the vague generality of the unattainable ideal.”
G. B. Caird THE LANGUAGE AND IMAGERY OF THE BIBLE
Mike Bull says
This practice by Jews continues today. In one suburb of Sydney where many Jewish immigrants live (most South Africans in this case), the Orthodox wanted local council to allow them to put up territory marking posts to show the boundaries of where they are allowed to walk on the Sabbath.
All this is a corporate refusal to come to any sort of judicial maturity or true wisdom.