The following is a growing list of questions that I have been asked or have read about Judaism. I have also asked many of these questions. It is not a source of halachic guidance to any area of practice, just thought. Comments warmly accepted.
Questions
- Should Orthodox Jews update Judaism to better accommodate the population?
- Does the Torah prohibit mixing meat and dairy for health reasons?
Answers
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That depends on if Judaism's goal is to accommodate or improve peoples' spiritual health or not. For example, doctors don't change their opinions on things to better accommodate people. They do, from time-to-time, change their views based on evidence and statistics. For example, in the 1900's bleeding people was considered a remedy for healing certain ailments. This view has since been disproved. The nature of the medical field is different than Divine Revelation, which does not change. Circumstances and culture certainly change, and halachic authorities had always to apply the Torah's unchanging Law to changing circumstances. The world changes, people do not. The Torah serves as the unchanging anchor.
This question also assumes that Orthodox Jews have the right or means to update Judaism. I have a feeling that people probably wouldn't ask this question if they knew that Orthodox Jews believe that the Torah was Divinely revealed. We are not allowed to tamper with it. Practices currently found in Orthodox Judaism that might or might not have been practiced during the Biblical era still have halachic authority. One of the reasons for this is that God granted this authority to the Rabbinic institutions, as it says: If a matter eludes you in judgment... and you shall come to the Levitic kohanim and to the judge who will be in those days... and you shall do according to the word they tell you, from the place the Lord will choose, and you shall observe to do according to all they instruct you. According to the law they instruct you and according to the judgment they say to you, you shall do; you shall not divert from the word they tell you, either right or left." (Deuteronomy 17:8-10) If Judaism had accommodated everything people wanted, it probably wouldn't exist today.
Another reason is necessity.Somebody I know once explained to me his view of why the Torah instructs not to mix meat and dairy. The large intestine is composed of cells dedicated for absorbing different types of food. The cell dedicated for absorbing meat happens to also be the cell dedicated for absorbing dairy. This means that if a person eats meat before dairy, the body cannot receive nutrients from it. For this reason the Torah prohibited mixing them.
I'm not sure if this is even true, but if it is, there are two problems with it. The first is that God did not prohibit Gentiles from mixing meat and dairy, which either implies that Gentile bodies do not operate like Jewish bodies, or that God doesn't care about Gentiles in this respect. Neither seems feasible. The other problem is, assuming that the Jews wrote the Torah on their own, how did they know that the large intestine operates in this manner? It nevertheless implies something special about their knowledge of the natural world.
Comment below.