In this play based on two fairly unrelated teachings of Jesus, I present a thought I’ve long had about the intricacies of Judaic law and practice. In the conservative Evangelical tradition I grew up in, the countless rules and careful distinctions involved in obeying conceptually simple Jewish laws like, say, the Sabbath, were seen as human additions to the pure word of God that curtailed liberty, fostered hypocrisy, and obscured the “true” meaning of those laws. I always thought, though, that if any religion were really true, that it ought to be complicated and oddly shaped and not easily amenable to any simple summary.
Newtonian physics, for example, is an extremely simple and beautiful system that just about anyone can learn enough math to seriously work with. Using it, you can hit a target ten miles away with an artillery shell. You can land a man on the Moon. However, if you try to use it to determine your GPS position, you’ll be off by miles, and if you try to use it to map the stars, you’ll be off by light years. Newtonian physics accurately describes the actual Universe we live in only up to a point. Beyond that point, you have to start using Relativity, which only a small percentage of people understand, and whose math is doable by an even smaller percentage of those people. And, of course, Relativity isn’t the final answer, either. Beyond a certain point, you’re in the world of quantum mechanics, which hardly anybody truly understands.
The pattern here is that the closer we get to the true nature of Reality, and more complicated and non-intuitive and even impossible the laws we formulate to access that reality become.
The other theme I touch on in this play is the dark side of the parable of the salt and the teachings about the Law: the possibility of damnation. In that conservative church I grew up in, we had no problem with such teachings, but as I experienced other flavors of Christianity, I encountered more and more discomfort with them. Like them or not, however, they are there in the texts, in this complicated, self-contradicting, often non-intuitive, and sometimes even repellent theory of spiritual physics that we call the Gospels.