"And you should be careful to do them, because it is through
this that you will be considered wise and understanding by
the peoples [of the world], who will hear about all these
laws and say, `This great nation is definitely a wise and
understanding people.' " This posuk in parshas
Voeschanon (4:6) is well known.
Now that the wisdom (if not the understanding) of the world
has increased so much, it is actually easier than in the past
to appreciate the wisdom of the Torah. Chazal say that at
least one thing this posuk refers to is our knowledge
of the calendar. It is certainly remarkable that our calendar
is still continuing without correction. The West was not able
to devise a calendar with comparable accuracy until some 400
years ago. In all areas, wherever they have been truly
tested, the insight and knowledge of the Torah have proven
themselves.
However the world has changed. If this information is
presented to a typical person today, he or she is not likely
to be impressed. They would want to know what is in it for
them. No one is impressed anymore with wisdom and insight.
All they want is pleasure and indulgence.
This change is spreading and affecting other areas as well.
It is not confined to areas of abstract learning but affects
areas of basic public morality.
A very well known division of the mitzvos of the Torah
partitions them into chukim and mishpotim. The
first group, the chukim, include subjects that,
regardless of their importance -- are only known to us
through the Torah. We cannot discover them on our own, and
even after we are told about them by the Torah, we may not be
able to understand the reason behind them. A very prominent
example is the laws of tumah. Without the information
of the Torah, we could not discover these on our own. A
related example is the poroh adumoh, which the Torah
itself calls a chok, something that we cannot
understand.
The other group includes mitzvos that everyone understands
are reasonable and proper. Rashi (Bereishis 26:5)
calls them, "Matters that, if they had not been written,
would have been worthy of being commanded, such as theft and
bloodshed." For much of civilized history, amidst varying
levels of morality within society, there has been a very
broad consensus about what these reasonable principles of
behavior are. Even when people did not observe important
moral principles in their own lives, they understood that
what they were doing was wrong and that there is a proper,
natural way to behave.
In many key areas, this consensus has broken down in the last
generation. Basic morality, such as the prohibition of
murder, has been undermined. Now many jurisdictions allow the
murder of the unborn and the infirm. Many are willing to
justify or overlook the targeting and murder of innocent
civilians if it is done by those they sympathize with.
The basic vision of what life is about, the understanding
that the normal life path includes marriage and children as
it does for all creatures in the world, is absent in the
centers of modern Western civilization. The birthrate
throughout Western society has plummeted to way below
replacement rate -- in most of Europe the average woman has
only one child -- and people not only live immoral lives, but
also they insist that their immorality should now be
recognized and approved by society as legitimate.
It is important to realize this, since it means that we must
recognize more than ever how even the basic thinking of the
non-Torah society around us is strongly at odds to the basic
truths of human existence. We must take extra care to build
all our thinking on Torah sources alone. When things have
deteriorated to such a broad extent, even those things that
may appear at first glance to be untainted must be strongly
suspected.
Now, perhaps more than ever, we can see immediately before us
how the way of the Torah is blessing, and any other way is a
curse. We can appreciate how important it is to dig deeply
and uproot all vestiges of avodoh zora, as it says,
abeid te'abdun (Devorim 12:2), and instead, to bring
everything to Hashem.
