4

I'm not Jewish by any interpretation of the term, but curiosity frequently leads me to click on Stackexchange's Hot Network Questions. Questions on judaism.stackexchange.com often stand out because of its rich and --to me as an outsider-- exotic vocabulary, as well as the almost surreal --to me at least-- problems that seem to arise in day-to-day Jewish life.

For example, the question I viewed a few minutes earlier titled What defines “hard cheese”, which seemed to have arisen from the minhag that after "hard cheese", one must wait for 15 minutes before one may eat meat.

Let me be clear that I have no intention whatsoever of questioning anyone's faith, in God or otherwise, or making any related value judgments. Rather, I can't help but wishing to understand, at least on a rudimentary level, what thought-processes tend to drive the faithful followers of the doctrine/customs/tradition of a religion such as yours.

Specifically, I wonder about the answers to such questions as "Why does God care if the cheese I consumed was hard or soft? Why does it matter to Him whether there was 14 or 15 minutes in-between hard cheese eating and meat eating? Why is this so important to Him?"

Moreover, is there any form of consensus in the Jewish community on how such questions should be resolved?

Community
  • 1
Will
  • 141
  • 1
  • Your final question is a good question, and in-scope for Mi Yodeya (though I'm not sure it hasn't been asked already). The question in your second to last paragraph is off-topic because it's primarily opinion based (="what do you think?"), although the actual content of the question ("why does God care about hard cheese?") is fine. – MTL Jan 18 '15 at 02:28
  • @Shokhet. Thank you for your feedback. It would be more than fine with me if you or anyone else edited the question to make it a better fit for this site, also with regard to terminology and tags. – Will Jan 18 '15 at 02:32
  • I didn't want to edit the question in case I was misunderstanding your intent. One last thing to clarify: I did not tag the question [tag:meat-and-milk] or [tag:dairy], for example, because I think that these are just examples in your question, and not the focus of your question. Was I right? – MTL Jan 18 '15 at 02:44
  • 1
    ("minhag" means "custom") – Double AA Jan 18 '15 at 06:16

0 Answers0