Beyond the Regulatory Vision of Law

#whatireadovershabbat Chaim N. Saiman's Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law (Princeton UP, 2018)

What if Jewish law (halakhah) isn’t law as Westerners typically understand it? We tend to see law as a regulatory system, a set of norms you must abide by or else. Halakhah sometimes looks like that. Religious Jews live their lives according to a set of divinely given norms, in part to avoid spiritual punishment. But as Chaim Saiman argues in Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law (2018), that’s only one slice of a much larger picture. And while Saiman’s main purpose in the book is to distinguish halakhah from law as it’s typically understood, he ends up revealing our own system of law as more expansive than it seems.

One of the chief distinguishing factors between halakhah and law as typically conceived is that for at least two thousand years halakhah hasn’t governed a sovereign society. The last time Jews lived in a society ruled by halakhah was before the Romans destroyed the Second Temple and ended Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel (if even then). It’s true that religious Jews since then have observed the laws handed down in the Scriptures, but they have nevertheless been a minority wherever they lived, ruled by others’ laws. In the ghettos of Europe and elsewhere, Jews were often given some authority over their own community, but ultimate legal authority always lay with the rulers of a given society.

So what is law that doesn’t govern, except privately or in limited ways within a community...?

To read the rest, see the full post on my Substack