Perhaps the best-known quote of Rabbi Hillel is, "What is hateful to you don't do to others. This is the whole Torah. Everything else is commentary. Now go study."
When I quote Hillel's wording of the Golden Rule, I am not claiming it was his idea. Rather, I am using it to illustrate his APPROACH to understanding Torah and Jewish law. There is, IMHO, a striking difference between Hillel's principal-based approach and Shammai's legalism, and I think that Jesus very definitely adopted Hillel's approach. The phrase that Christians give to this principle-based morality is "following the spirit of the law."
The Cambridge dictionary defines legalism this way:
legalism
noun
us /?li?.??l.?.z?m/ uk /?li?.??l.?.z?m/
the practice of following the law very closely, especially by paying more attention to rules and details than to the intentions behind them
The Oxford dictionary defines it as:
le·gal·ism
/?l????liz?m/
noun
excessive adherence to law or formula
.
The "intention" behind those Torah laws which apply to how we treat our fellow human beings, aka the principle behind them, is the Golden Rule. If you recognize that the Torah itself teaches the Golden Rule as "Love your neighbor as yourself," you are absolutely correct. Hillel's wording simply articulates the same idea in different words. And Jesus echoed Hillel's emphasis on principal rather than legalism when he said, "Do to others what you would have them do to you." Indeed, it is worth noting that the Golden Rule is taught in some form by every major religion in the world. It is a necessary principle behind all moral law.
I believe there are two approaches to moral law. The first is legalism: an excessive adherence to the rules, excessive in that it loses sight of the intention or principle behind the law--these are people who will keep a rule even when doing so harms others. The second is the principle-based approach: being aware of the source of these rules and therefore able to break the rules when morally appropriate--this is, as I said, what Christians refer to as keeping the spirit of the law.
Let me begin by illustrating the conflict between these two approaches by using an example from my own life. It is not uncommon for grade schools to have a rule that they will not release a student before the end of the school day unless there is an adult to sign them out. This is for the safety of the kids. It is a rule that makes sense. But what happens when that rule means the suffering of the student?
My daughter developed a migraine headache during her day at junior high and went to the nurse's office. A school nurse is not allowed to dispense medication, so she couldn't even give my daughter a Tylenol. The school phoned me hoping that I could come and pick her up and take her home. The problem was, I had thrown out my back. I couldn't even get from my bed to the toilet, much less go pick up my daughter. I said to the school, "Look, I can literally see the school from my window. All she has to do is walk across the field between the school and her home, and she can do this with adults watching."
You see here my own adherence to principle-based morality. For me, the concern was my daughter's wellbeing: I don't want her to suffer. I could clearly see that while the "no release without an adult" policy is a good one, that in THIS particular instance the rule needed to be "bent." It was the "spirit" of the law that needed to be followed, rather than the letter of the law.
But do you think the school would release my daughter? Nope. It didn't matter that she needed her migraine medication and they couldn't dispense it. It didn't matter that she was throwing up from the pain. The highest priority for them was keeping the dang rule no matter what. They were perfectly willing to allow her to suffer to keep that rule.
I was absolutely livid. To me, their legalism, their insistence on keeping the rule even when it meant violating the principle, even when it meant harm to someone else, was IMMORAL. An OUTRAGE.
My daughter suffered terribly and needlessly for hours. Then at school dismissal time, it suddenly became perfectly okay to do EXACTLY what I suggested--allow her to walk across the field between the school and our home. To this day, it still makes me angry when I remember it.
We see this struggle between the two different mentalities both among Jews and among Christians.
Judaism has a long tradition of the principle-based approach. Yes, we see this in the classic triumph of Hillel over the legalistic Shammai.
And I'm not just talking about Hillel personally. There is, for example, the Rabbinical teaching that if a life is in danger, that the Jew is REQUIRED to break the Law in order to save a life. The problem arises in that there are many Jews who only adhere to that because the Rabbis explicitly articulated it. They lack the capacity to understand Rabbinical REASONING and are therefore unable to apply that principle in other unexpected and uncomfortable ways.
This conflict recently arose between me and an Orthodox Jewish friend of mine in an online religious forum over the issue of slavery:
To me, EVERY law bows to "Love your neighbor as yourself." Every single last one of them. And that includes those laws specifically spelled out in the Torah. If there is any law in the Torah that violates the Golden Rule, that is an instance where the Torah has made a moral error. To my Orthodox friend, there is no such thing as the Torah making a moral error. This led to a conflict between us over slavery. The Torah explicitly states that the slave is the property of the master (Exodus 21:20-21). While I'm willing to say, "You guys, that's just not true. It is immoral to view a human being as property." My friend's response was to do logical gymnastics to try to morally justify it, and in the end he basically accepted slavery rather than let go of the rule.
A Christian example of this conflict can be found in "The Hiding Place," an autobiographical account of Corrie TenBoom and her family's story of hiding Jews during the Holocaust. To Corrie, saving the Jews meant deceiving the Nazis, even lying to them outright. But her sister Nollie was unwilling to lie even when telling the truth meant the death of Jews. Corrie was principle based, keeping the spirit of the law. Nollie was a legalist, unwilling to bend the law to prevent harm to others.
I'm sure that all of us can think of examples in our own lives where people from each mentality have come into conflict. What I find personally interesting is that in both religions, our moral teachers are pretty clearly principle based, and yet the legalists within our respective communities simply can't see it and therefore can't take it to its logical conclusions.
