Sabbath Means
To the Editor:
I wish to congratulate Rabbi Rackman and COMMENTARY on a brilliant article “Can We Moderns Keep the Sabbath?” (September). But unless Rabbi Rackman succeeds in elucidating the larger problem of the nature of the Oral Law in which most of the precepts of the Sabbath have their source, there will always be authorities to whom “the Law is the Law,” and who will continue to reconcile texts. Halachah is indeed an “a priori idea system,” but each detailed prescription of the Sabbath is itself Halachah. Halachic ways and means, no less than Halachic ends, are to the devotee divine and revealed.
(Rabbi) J. Lilke
Guelph, Ontario
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