Page:The old paths, or The Talmud tested by Scripture.djvu/413



"If a slaughterer, who has not had his slaughtering knife examined before a wise man [a rabbi], slaughters by himself, his knife must be examined. If it be found in good order and examined, he is to be excommunicated, because he may depend upon himself another time, when it has a gap in it and yet slaughter therewith. But, if it be found to have a gap, he is to be deposed from his office, and excommunicated, and proclamation is to be made, that all the meat which he has slaughtered is carrion." (Jad Hachazakah, Hilchoth Sh'chitah, c. i. 26.) Here we have the same slavery and the same cruel oppression. In the first place we see the intention to make the Jews entirely dependent upon the rabbies. The Jews are not to eat meat unless it be slaughtered as the rabbies direct, and the slaughterer himself is not even to do that, which he knows to be right according to the oral law, without the express sanction of the rabbies. All are to be in bondage, not merely to the oral law, but to the rabbi for the time being. They are to have no mind and no judgment of their own. In the simplest concerns of life they are to be entirely dependent upon the will and judgment of another. In the second place, we see the determination to maintain this tyranny by the severests punishments. The man who has slaughtered without showing his knife to the rabbi, even though they have no fault to find with him, is to be excommunicated—but if a rabbinic flaw in the knife should be detected, then not only the man himself is to suffer, but those who employed him, and also the Israelites themselves to be deprived of food. All that he has slaughtered is to be declared unfit for use. Who can deny that those who think their consciences bound by such laws are in miserable bondage? Who, that has his senses and God's Word to guide them, can believe that a small gap in a knife is sufficient to make meat unfit for food? Who ever saw a knife, or even the finest razor that ever was manufactured, without a series of such imperfections? Let a rabbi, who has just pronounced, concerning a knife, that it has no gap in it, apply a microscope, and he will soon find out that a knife without gaps never existed. He will be convinced that the oral law requires what is impossible, and therefore cannot possibly be from God. Who then can deny that those who are bound by it, are the slaves of superstition? There never was, and never will be in the world, such a thing as a knife without the least possible gap, and