Jewish Values for Israel's Codex

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,

Moshe Feiglin

http://www.jewishisrael.org/eng_contents/update/5771/7140.htm#Holy