Halakha


Halakha, is the collective body of Jewish religious laws that are derived from the Written and Oral Torah. Halakha is based on biblical commandments, subsequent Talmudic and rabbinic laws, and the customs and traditions which were compiled in the many books such as the Shulchan Aruch or Mishneh Torah. Halakha is often translated as "Jewish law", although a more literal translation might be "the way to go" or "the way of walking". The word is derived from the root ה–ל–כ, which refers to concepts related to "to go", "to walk". Halakha not only guides religious practices and beliefs; it also guides numerous aspects of day-to-day life.
Historically, widespread observance of the laws of the Torah is first in evidence beginning in the second century BCE, and some say that the first evidence was even earlier. In the Jewish diaspora, halakha served many Jewish communities as an enforceable avenue of law — both civil and religious, since no differentiation of them exists in classical Judaism. Since the Jewish Enlightenment and Jewish emancipation, some have come to view the halakha as less binding in day-to-day life, because it relies on rabbinic interpretation, as opposed to the authoritative, canonical text which is recorded in the Hebrew Bible. Under contemporary Israeli law, certain areas of Israeli family and personal status law are, for Jews, under the authority of the rabbinic courts, so they are treated according to halakha. Some minor differences in halakha are found among Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Sephardi Jews, Yemenite, Ethiopian and other Jewish communities which historically lived in isolation.

Etymology and terminology

The word halakha is derived from the Hebrew root halakh – "to walk" or "to go". Taken literally, therefore, halakha translates as "the way to walk", rather than "law". The word halakha refers to the corpus of rabbinic legal texts, or to the overall system of religious law. The term may also be related to Akkadian, a property tax, rendered in Aramaic as, designating one or several obligations. It may be descended from hypothetical reconstructed Proto-Semitic root *halakh- meaning "to go", which also has descendants in Akkadian, Arabic, Aramaic, and Ugaritic.
Halakha is often contrasted with aggadah, the diverse corpus of rabbinic exegetical, narrative, philosophical, mystical, and other "non-legal" texts. At the same time, since writers of halakha may draw upon the aggadic and even mystical literature, a dynamic interchange occurs between the genres. Halakha also does not include the parts of the Torah not related to commandments.
Halakha constitutes the practical application of the 613 mitzvot in the Torah, as developed through discussion and debate in the classical rabbinic literature, especially the Mishnah and the Talmud, and as codified in the Mishneh Torah and Shulchan Aruch. Because halakha is developed and applied by various halakhic authorities rather than one sole "official voice", different individuals and communities may well have different answers to halakhic questions. With few exceptions, controversies are not settled through authoritative structures because during the Jewish diaspora, Jews lacked a single judicial hierarchy or appellate review process for halakha.
According to some scholars, the words halakha and sharia both mean literally "the path to follow". The fiqh literature parallels rabbinical law developed in the Talmud, with fatwas being analogous to rabbinic responsa.

Commandments (mitzvot)

According to the Talmud, 613 mitzvot are in the Torah, 248 positive mitzvot and 365 negative mitzvot, supplemented by seven mitzvot legislated by the rabbis of antiquity. Currently, many of the 613 commandments cannot be performed until the building of the Temple in Jerusalem and the universal resettlement of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel by the Messiah. According to one count, only 369 can be kept, meaning that 40% of mitzvot are not possible to perform. Of these 369, 77 of these are positive mitzvot and 194 are negative.
Rabbinic Judaism divides laws into categories:
File:Köln-Tora-und-Innenansicht-Synagoge-Glockengasse-040.JPG|thumb|Sefer Torah at Glockengasse Synagogue, Cologne
  • The Law of Moses which are believed to have been revealed by God to the Israelites at biblical Mount Sinai. These laws are composed of the following:
  • * The Written Torah, laws written in the Hebrew Bible.
  • * The Oral Torah, laws believed to have been transmitted orally prior to their later compilation in texts such as the Mishnah, Talmud, and rabbinic codes.
  • Laws of human origin, including rabbinic decrees, interpretations, customs, etc.
This division between revealed and rabbinic commandments may influence the importance of a rule, its enforcement and the nature of its ongoing interpretation. Halakhic authorities may disagree on which laws fall into which categories or the circumstances under which prior rabbinic rulings can be re-examined by contemporary rabbis, but all Halakhic Jews hold that both categories exist and that the first category is immutable, with exceptions only for life-saving and similar emergency circumstances.
A second classical distinction is between the Written Law, laws written in the Hebrew Bible, and the Oral Law, laws which are believed to have been transmitted orally prior to their later compilation in texts such as the Mishnah, Talmud, and rabbinic codes.
Commandments are divided into positive and negative commands, which are treated differently in terms of divine and human punishment. Positive commandments require an action to be performed and are considered to bring the performer closer to God. Negative commandments forbid a specific action, and violations create a distance from God.
A further division is made between chukim, mishpatim and eduyot. Through the ages, various rabbinical authorities have classified some of the 613 commandments in many ways.
A different approach divides the laws into a different set of categories:
  • Laws in relation to God, and
  • Laws about relations with other people.

    Historical analysis

The antiquity of the rules can be determined only by the dates of the authorities who quote them; in general, they cannot safely be declared older than the tanna to whom they are first ascribed. It is certain, however, that the seven middot of Hillel and the thirteen of Ishmael are earlier than the time of Hillel himself, who was the first to transmit them.
The Talmud gives no information concerning the origin of the middot, although the Geonim regarded them as Sinaitic.
The middot seem to have been first laid down as abstract rules by the teachers of Hillel, though they were not immediately recognized by all as valid and binding. Different schools interpreted and modified them, restricted or expanded them, in various ways. Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael and their scholars especially contributed to the development or establishment of these rules. "It must be borne in mind, however, that neither Hillel, Ishmael, nor Eliezer ben Jose sought to give a complete enumeration of the rules of interpretation current in his day, but that they omitted from their collections many rules which were then followed."
Akiva devoted his attention particularly to the grammatical and exegetical rules, while Ishmael developed the logical. The rules laid down by one school were frequently rejected by another because the principles that guided them in their respective formulations were essentially different. According to Akiva, the divine language of the Torah is distinguished from the speech of men by the fact that in the former no word or sound is superfluous.
Some scholars have observed a similarity between these rabbinic rules of interpretation and the hermeneutics of ancient Hellenistic culture. For example, Saul Lieberman argues that the names of rabbi Ishmael's middot are Hebrew translations of Greek terms, although the methods of those middot are not Greek in origin.

Views today

holds that halakha is divine law laid down in the Torah, rabbinical laws, rabbinical decrees, and customs combined. The rabbis, who made many additions and interpretations of Jewish law, did so only in accordance with regulations they believed, as Orthodox Jews still believe, were given for this purpose to Moses on Mount Sinai.
Conservative Judaism holds that halakha is normative and binding and is developed as a partnership between people and God based on the Sinaitic Torah. While there is a wide variety of Conservative views, a common belief is that halakha is, and has always been, an evolving process subject to interpretation by rabbis in every time period.
Reconstructionist Judaism asserts that halakha is normative and binding; however, it also views halakha as an evolving concept. The traditional halakhic system, according to this perspective, cannot produce a code of conduct that is meaningful and acceptable to the majority of contemporary Jews. Reconstructionism's founder, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, believed that "Jewish life meaningless without Jewish law." One of the planks of the Society for the Jewish Renascence, of which Kaplan was a founder, stated: "We accept the halakha, which is rooted in the Talmud, as the norm of Jewish life, availing ourselves, at the same time, of the method implicit therein to interpret and develop the body of Jewish Law in accordance with the actual conditions and spiritual needs of modern life."
Reform Judaism holds that modern views of how the Torah and rabbinic law developed imply that the body of rabbinic Jewish law is no longer normative on Jews today. Those in the "traditionalist" wing believe that the halakha represents a personal starting point, holding that each Jew is obligated to interpret the Torah, Talmud, and other Jewish works for themselves, and this interpretation will create separate commandments for each person. Those in the liberal and classical wings of Reform believe that in this day and era, most Jewish religious rituals are no longer necessary, and many hold that following most Jewish laws is actually counter-productive. They propose that Judaism has entered a phase of ethical monotheism and that the laws of Judaism are only remnants of an earlier stage of religious evolution and need not be followed. This is considered wrong, and even heretical, by Orthodox and Conservative Judaism.
Humanistic Judaism values the Torah as a historical, political, and sociological text written by their ancestors. They do not believe "that every word of the Torah is true, or even morally correct, just because the Torah is old". The Torah is both disagreed with and questioned. Humanistic Jews believe that the entire Jewish experience, and not only the Torah, should be studied as a source for Jewish behavior and ethical values.
Some Jews believe that gentiles are bound by a subset of halakha called the Seven Laws of Noah, also referred to as the Noahide Laws. According to the Talmud, they are a set of imperatives given by God to the "children of Noah" – that is, all of humanity.