For the Love of God and People: A Philosophy of Jewish Law (review)

Elliot N. Dorff is the rector of the American Jewish University (formerly the University of Judaism), a leading member of Conservative Judaism's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, a prominent spokesperson for Conservative Judaism, and a prolific and effective writer on a wide array of theological issues.

Dorff argues that many features of Jewish law can best be understood by thinking about Jewish law as if it were a human organism, possessing both a body and a soul which interact with each other as well as with external influences. In referring to the "body" of Jewish law, Dorff uses the term "corpus juris," suggesting the collection of Jewish law's rules. By "soul," Dorff is less clear, at times (e.g., p. 46) referring to the law's "beliefs, values, emotions and goals" while at other times (e.g., p. xiv) referring to the "covenant between God and the People Israel."

Dorff devotes most of the book to developing, expanding, and illustrating the implications of this vision of Jewish law and in articulating its differences from, and supposed superiority over, competing theories. He draws upon a wealth of classical and modern sources and offers a good number of interesting and controversial contentions, which he skillfully, and at times poetically, presents.

Nevertheless, the books seems to me to suffer from a number of significant flaws. Given the limited number of words allotted to this review, I can only mention a few of the problems and, even so, cannot explore them in depth. This is potentially unfair to Dorff, and I therefore emphasize that readers should not accept my criticisms as correct but, instead, should simply keep them in mind as they read the book themselves.

Perhaps the most significant problem is Dorff's failure to articulate his overall vision clearly. Time and again, what he seems to say at one point, he appears to distance himself from at another. This happens not only from chapter to chapter, but within individual chapters and, sometimes, within a single sentence. For example, it is unclear whether Dorff believes that God created the universe. He writes (p. 31): "…because I hold that the world was divinely created at least in the sense that its creation involves powers beyond our control, I think that God informed us about divinity and the world and gave us Jewish law in an indirect way—specifically, by creating the world in such a way that certain formulations of thought and practice fit the pattern of creation better than others" (emphasis added). Does the belief that the world was created by powers beyond our control mean that it was "divinely created"? (Does an atheist believe that the world was created by powers within our control?) Incidentally, what is the implied causal relationship between the belief in creation by powers beyond our control, and the succeeding clause of the sentence, beginning "I think"?

Furthermore, irrespective of any causal relationship, what is the meaning of the succeeding clause, "that God informed us about divinity and the world and gave us Jewish law in an indirect way—specifically, by creating the world in such a way that certain formulations of thought and practice fit the pattern of creation better than others"? According to Dorff, God did not author the Torah ("The text of the Torah is thus for me a human document" [p. 29]). Indeed, Dorff is uncertain that there was any substantive revelation at Sinai ("I cannot unequivocally affirm or deny belief in a verbal communication at Sinai …" [p. 35]). Consequently, according to Dorff, it is unclear what makes Jewish law more authentic, or more the result of divine revelation, than the laws of other religions, especially when those other religions assert that their laws arose from what the members of that religion interpret as revelatory. After all, Dorff does not perceive divine revelation as a purely objective reality. He declares (p. 29), "In...