By Moshe Feiglin
"This is the statute of the Torah that G-d has commanded" (From this week's Torah portion, Chukat, Numbers 19:2)For the past twenty years, former Chief Justice Aharon Barak and his associates have been working on a self-contained legal codex for Israel. There is no doubt that the existing situation in which the Israeli legal code relies on a disjointed cornucopia of court decisions and Roman, Ottoman and British laws must change. Israel deserves a genuine codex of Israeli law.
But there is a poison arrow lurking here. The group that undertook this monumental task made sure to completely purge itself of any person who may have furnished the new codex with even a hint of Jewish law.
Barak and his cohorts are not stupid. Nobody understands better than them that even when a law seems logical and good, there is a spirit of the law that goes above and beyond the specific, technical legal solution for a given problem. Every body of law - and certainly a harmonious legal codex - is predicated on values. It is no coincidence that Barak and his cohorts did not even open a crack for Jewish values to infiltrate the Israeli codex.
A Jewish legal codex would highlight our connection to our Jewish sources and Jewish roots here in the Land of Israel. And that is something that the extreme Left cannot stomach - not even a little bit.
Shabbat Shalom
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