Thread by @Delafina777

I've seen a lot of people praising this as willingness to not be bound by rules, or caring more about people than "2000-year-old religious laws"

but I think it's important to note that prioritizing saving a life is *actually a rule with formal legal weight* in Judaism

https://twitter.com/MisfitTorah/status/1496681251771756550

The idea that throwing out rules to obey your heart is the highest form of virtue is actually a very Christian take on things--Christianity has always had a strong antinomian bent, at least on paper

But Judaism *isn't* about tossing everything out the window if you think you're obeying a higher calling

it's about recognizing that Grand Moral Principles are useless without a strategy for implementation

So for us, having a legal principle that supersedes almost all others

AND spending time in the weediest of weeds for edge cases and details and working out what the rules actually look like

are not opposed

it's not about "the letter of the law vs. the spirit of the law"

it's about understanding that "the spirit of the law" is basically just blather unless you've worked out what it looks like when *put into* letters

we care about *practice*

Pikuach nefesh--the Jewish principle that saving a life trumps almost every other obligation--isn't about "throwing the rules out the window"

It is, itself, a rule, and it's part of a *system* of rules.

It's not throwing away the entire system of rules.

There are things that you still can't do even to save a life: e.g. premeditated murder or forcing someone to have sex with you.

And that only makes sense as *part* of a system, not a dismissal of systems.

And working out details of how to put rules into practice is actually the work of *living in a community* where people have different needs and preferences and experiences and just airily saying "do unto others" actually results in people getting hurt.

Prioritizing saving trans kids' lives over rules about gender presentation is actually *very much* a systemic, rule-based Jewish approach.

Rules aren't inherently bad or oppressive. They're part of how humans avoid harming each other.