It's Not About the 613 Laws

We Are Missing the Entire Point of the Torah and it is heartbreaking!

There are 613 mitzvot (commandments) in the Torah. Rabbinic Judaism counted them and built a careful fence around them. Western Christianity counted them too and ran. It has taught for centuries that these laws are invalid.

Both responses miss the entire point.

The Torah is not a rulebook. Yes, there are instructions in it. Yes, there is a submissive posture toward the Maker of the universe that runs throughout the entire Bible, and you ignore it at your peril. But submission is not the point of the Torah. Submission is a posture inside a relationship. The point is the relationship.

The Torah is the only documented direct engagement we have with the God of creation. It is the only sustained record of His own voice given to humanity, in His own words, with His own emphasis, with His own choice of which things to record and which things to leave out. Read that sentence twice. There is no other text in human history that claims this and is taken seriously as such by the largest civilizations to ever exist. The Torah is humanity’s only sustained encounter with HaShem’s own self-disclosure.

That changes everything about how we are supposed to approach it.

It is a love letter. It is the testimony of a Father whose face we have not yet seen, given so we can begin to know who He is. When He tells us to put His words on our heart and on our mind (Deuteronomy 6:6), He is not asking for performance. He is asking for intimacy. He is asking us to know Him the way a son knows the father he loves, not the way a servant memorizes the master’s instructions.

Paul understood this. When he tells the Romans that creation itself testifies of HaShem (Romans 1:20), he is not contradicting the Torah. He is amplifying the same point Moses was making at Sinai. Look around. The sky. The birds. The trees. The whole order of things is shouting at you about who HaShem is. The Torah is the formal verbal disclosure. Creation is the surrounding evidence. Both point to the same Person.

Now look at why each tradition did what it did.

Rabbinic Judaism, fearful of failing the commandments, built a seyag (fence) around the Torah. Layer upon layer of interpretive safeguard designed to make sure no one accidentally breaks a command. The intention is reverent. The effect is that the Person behind the words gets buried under the apparatus that was built to protect the words.

Western Christianity, terrified of legalism, did not build a fence. It burned the letters. It threw out the Father’s own words because someone decided those words were too demanding, replaced the disclosure with a system of doctrines about the disclosure, and then wondered why the relationship felt thin.

Both responses are about submission. The Jewish response wants to succeed at submission. The Western Christian response wants to escape submission. Both reduce the Torah to a question of submission, and both miss what the Torah actually is.

It is not a rulebook. It is a love letter from the Maker of the universe to the humanity He made.

When He tells us to put it on our heart, He is not asking us simply to memorize statutes. He is asking us to come close enough to recognize His voice. To have reverence for Him because we know who He is, not because we have been told to. To obey what He loves because we have come to love what He loves. To know Him the way a son knows a father.

The 613 commandments are not the point. They are the structure of an intimacy that was offered before the structure existed. The Father wrote the letter first. The instructions are inside the letter. Read the letter as a letter, and the instructions will read themselves correctly. Read the letter as an instruction manual, and you will miss everything that matters in it.

That is the warning to the Jewish reader, who knows the letter exists but has covered it with so many fences that the Voice has become muffled.

It is the warning to the Christian reader, who decided the letter no longer applies and has therefore never read what HaShem actually said about Himself.

And it is the warning underneath both. When Yeshua (Jesus) turns people away in Matthew 7, people who were certain they belonged to Him, His words are not “you broke the rules.” His words are “I never knew you. Depart from me, you workers of anomia,” which means, in the plainest reading of the Greek, you who lived without Torah. Sit with what He joined together in that one sentence. The charge is Torahlessness. The verdict is a failure of knowing. He does not say they failed an exam. He says there was never a relationship. They had His name in their mouths and had never met Him.

That is what a misfiled letter costs. Read the Torah as a law to be guarded or a law to be escaped, and you can spend an entire life close to it and never once know the One who wrote it. And the most painful thing a person could hear from the Maker of the universe is not “you failed.” It is “I never knew you.”

So this is the invitation to all of us. The category was wrong from the start. The Torah is not the law we were handed. It is the Father introducing Himself. The letter is open. He is still speaking. Read it as a letter. Come and know Him, so that you are never someone He has to say He never knew.

Shalom v’shalvah,

Your brother in the Way,

Sergio

P.S. There is one more thing, and I simply cannot leave out, because it is the most beautiful part.

Listen to what the Father promises in Jeremiah 31. He says a day is coming when He will put His Torah within us and write it on our hearts, and then He says the reason: “they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.” Read that again. The same heart He asked us to lay His words upon, He now promises to write upon Himself. We could not carry Him there on our own, so He says He will do the carrying.

The whole arc closes here. The tragedy of Matthew 7 was a Father saying “I never knew you.” The promise of Jeremiah 31 is the same Father swearing that one day no one will have to say “know HaShem” to anyone, because every last one of them already will.

That is what he is sharing. Not a code to keep. A Father who would rather write Himself onto your heart than leave you guessing about who He is. He gives Himself. That is the whole transaction. He gives Himself!

And this is what should stop every believer cold.

We have held that promise in our hands for twenty-six centuries and simplified it an idea called law. We have hungered for a hundred lesser things and walked past the one document in human history where the Maker of the universe says, in His own voice, I want to be known by you. If we saw it clearly for even one moment, taking it lightly would feel like what it actually is. An atrocity. You do not yawn at a Father offering you His own heart. You weep, and you open the letter with a hunger to know Him at the deepest possible level.