What was Judaism if not an exacting, totalized system of laws handed down by the divine, then kitted out with redundancies and fail-safes by the scholars to eliminate any chance of an infraction—building a wall around the Torah, it was called, the process by which don’t cook a goat in its mother’s milk ballooned into never mix dairy with meat, buy two sets of dishes, wash them in different dishwashers—and then, finally, poked full of loopholes so the devout might obediently circumvent those laws?
