Rules and Regulations

There is a religious trap of subordinating oneself and then feeling superior for subordinating oneself.

‎There is a Jewish religious status called בעל תשובה (ba’al teshuvah), literally “master of repentance,” that I find often highlights this trap.

‎It denotes one who was not observant but chose to become so. The term is meant honorifically, but the way it plays out is instructive.

Truly pious people do honor this status, but there aren’t many of those. In practice, some people born into the lineage tend to treat baalei teshuvah as a little slow — or, sometimes, as a little EXTREME, overly zealous in their haste to integrate… and sometimes they are. Both.

Meanwhile, human beings being how we are, baalei teshuvah may take complicated feelings about all this out on their community of origin, especially if it’s a non-Orthodox Jewish community, for all their woeful inadequacies in living up to their own (new) ideals.

It’s just one familiar example of places where encoded explicit values are meant to elevate a community above its base behaviors, but people find ways to return to those behaviors using the concessions the rules must make to practicality of implementation.

The alternative is not “better rules” (see: history) but rather “regulation” in its more physical sense: recognizing the way propositional laws of conduct symbolize the Natural Law of causes and conditions, and practicing ongoing, living regulation of Shared Being In Accordance.