What place have we left for God after the innumerable technical and scientific advances of the last 200 years? Many still call themselves "believers."
Many people think that all the teachings of the Torah are accessible to the understanding and conclude that none of its words can escape the logic and intelligence of man.
This is how parishioners sometimes give too fast opinions to radically define this or that commandment. It is often heard that the laws of Kashrut (biblical food) are laws of hygiene. People are surprised to hear that Kashrut is part of the divine decrees, whose only explanation given by the Torah is access to holiness.
Recall that on the other hand hygiene itself is a precept. Our sages of the Talmud said: "Avoid danger antedates to avoid the forbidden", and therefore we should not eat a food of dubious quality that could compromise health.
Maimonides writes that it is a commandment to remove all obstacles that involve mortal danger, and also to take care of oneself as much as possible. As it is written: "Take care of yourself and you will protect your life".
But how can we pretend that all the detailed and meticulous laws of Kashrut are simply meant to provide us with a healthy diet? To see it in this way is to want to rationalize the Torah and its commandments at all costs. It tends to be forgotten, that although the Torah was conceived for man, it was created by God, whose degree of wisdom, knowledge and discernment is immeasurable.
Does the human being, creature of finite nature and limited in its faculties, can come to possess and contain all the wisdom of the Torah, which is compared to an immense ocean?
This is the main reason why there are divine privileges that regularly remind us of the infinite origin of the Torah. This does not mean that we should live in an unreflective way: certainly people who practice the commandments without having studied much are admirable, but their lives would have been much richer if they had tried to study each precept in all its foundations.
On the contrary, how demoralizing are those who take advantage of the ignorance of some to denigrate and ridicule the observance of the precepts, which they declare archaic and obsolete, as if the Torah, symbol of eternal truth, could be subjected to the "wrinkles of the weather".
The Torah never ages. The aging is the man, who is unable to fight against time, and observes how it escapes from his hands, when it would have been possible for him to retain it, and in a way preserve an eternal youth, thanks to the continuous renewal that the Torah proposes.
This particular dimension that can be a life of principles, and that takes us above time and its implacable laws (without being able to arrive at corporal immortality in this world), is in the divine nature of each one of the precepts, the which open the doors of a world where we can feel and feel the eternal truth of God.
If the whole Torah were rational, what would then be the place that God would occupy in our lives? Is not one of the characteristics of our time, the unbridled will of man to affirm and exert the force, often devastating, of his technique and his science in all the domains of the Universe, which nevertheless never completely reveals to him his secrets?
