If I teach the Laws of God (Noah and Moses inclusive) and don’t live by them, I’m a hypocrite. If I teach the Laws and tell you I obey them, it would probably sound arrogant. So I won’t tell you that. I’m transcending the Laws by communion with the Lawgiver.
Most of the time we can ascertain without much difficulty the why behind some portion of the Laws. Moses warned about boiling a baby goat in its mother’s milk because that was a pagan practice, not because it was bad for you. He warned about sexual promiscuity partly because it destabilizes the community. It’s also something God takes very seriously, and has since the Garden. There were a lot of provisions which were almost entirely about respecting your fellow humans, about being civilized.
Other things are entirely fundamental to human nature. Torture is altogether evil, and nothing justifies it, even with lesser creatures. Homosexual relations fits in there, too. Nobody is surprised when a carnally minded fellow seeks his pleasure just about anywhere, but we still keep in our minds this truly threatens something fundamental to human existence. Promoting art forms which desensitize and expose us to repulsive and shocking experiences are also in that box.
If you don’t see it from the Lawgiver’s perspective, you don’t quite grasp how it opens the doors to the deepest darkness. Just about anything normally regarded as simply naughty can be taken to extremes, so that it becomes just downright nasty and evil. When you invite Satan to join your party, he will surely oblige you. God’s justice has bumpers laid out in the Law Covenants to provide some practical limits. It’s one thing to use good logic and education in ANE culture to deduce the intent of the Laws. You should certainly be doing that. It’s another thing entirely when you rise through mysticism to the level of consciousness which defies words and laws, to the place where a part of you simply knows instinctively when you, in that time and context, are too near the invisible spiritual bumper.
When you get there, something inside you rebels, and won’t go any farther without some effort to silence the warning. Most of the time, people are so wired into the obvious logic, they aren’t ready to be told something so apparently harmless is actually evil at that particular time and place. So they don’t hear the spirit cry out until, perhaps, it’s too late. So while you certainly train to think broadly in terms of God’s sense of justice as revealed, be aware you simply never will have a full appraisal of every factor involved. There are spiritual factors tied into the entire universe. They aren’t easily seen, even for people with a mystical bent.
It can’t be taught; it has to be caught. You have to hang out with people who tend to catch these things, and don’t react with mere superstition. We have a jillion religious idiots out there assuming they have this spiritual gift of discernment and it’s bogus. I can’t imagine what is driving their reactions, but in end, I am under no obligation to take them seriously. Too often they say things which are preposterous, usually to draw attention to themselves. It’s the old “follow the money” — see the trends, and you can usually figure it out when someone is full of themselves instead of the Spirit.
There are no shortcuts, no magic formulas, no books of rules. The Laws were written because the majority of humanity will never reach the spiritual plane of existence. Those who take Laws seriously will often be your biggest problems. Still, that’s the best they can do, so we try to avoid conflict. It could be a whole lot worse. But if you have any part of your soul connected to that other side, that Spiritual Realm, then by all means, it’s worth anything you have and all you are to make the most of it.
Evil days are coming, when just being spiritually honest is going to cause you trouble, and might get you killed. God’s wrath will fall on most of this world very soon, and that last dying spasm of sin is going to make an awful mess. Many of us will be caught as collateral damage, simply because we are called by God to be where the action is. We don’t fear that end, but we have to keep a spiritual perspective, keep seeing with mystical faith-eyes so we understand and can walk and talk according to the Living Lawgiver.
You wrote “Moses warned about boiling a baby goat in its mother’s milk because that was a pagan practice, not because it was bad for you.”
I’ve wondered about this before (Moses’ warning). How did you determine it was a pagan practice? Did you come across some archeological reference? or do pagan’s still do this today?
Sometimes I will look to modern Jewish explanations of why certain laws exist, but it seems that modern Kosher rules indicate you can’t even have a drop of milk fall into your beef stew or you have to throw the whole thing out (if the drop is greater than some fraction (1/64th maybe? I don’t recall exactly) of the larger volume it fell into). Seeing how they have taken the one sentence and extrapolated it out gave me serious misgivings as to their understanding of the intent in the original command.
Two primary reasons for that interpretation. One: The context of that passage is Moses telling Israel not to mimic pagan practices of the Canaanites (Exodus 23, esp. v. 19ff and 34:11-26). Two: Archeology has found references to the practice in the ANE as a distinctly pagan practice, usually with some very unsavory connotations. You probably understand by now my condemnation of the Jewish legalism and literalism, so I don’t take modern Orthodox Kosher provisions seriously.