“Rabbi” Samuel Holdheim (1806-1860) provided a conveniently simple answer: G-d Himself no longer wants us to keep most of the mitzvos. He explained: “with the destruction of the ancient commonwealth, G-d made known His Will that the civil and ritual laws were no longer to be in force.”
Voila, problem solved. G-d only expected us to keep the Torah when we had a Jewish state. Since He permitted Roman forces to destroy the state in 70 CE, that expectation no longer holds.
The Torah of course contains no such statement, and Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch actually sees an explicit rejection of it in the Torah’s prohibition against removing the poles of the aron with which it was carried (Shemos 25:15). The aron – containing within it the luchos that Moshe received on Mt. Sinai – represents the Torah, and the poles represent “the command and the mission to carry the aron and its contents, if it becomes necessary, away from the precincts of its present position.”
Indeed, the poles – “these means of transport” – were affixed to the aron even before “the luchos were placed in the aron and the cover placed over it.” Why? To “emphasize…that this Torah and its mission is in no way bound or confined to the place or existence at any time of the Temple and Sanctuary.”
No other vessel in the Mishkan – not the menorah and not the shulchan, for example – had poles that were required to be “permanently in place.” That’s because, Rav Hirsch suggests, “Israel’s Table and Israel’s Menorah – its material life in its full completeness and its spiritual and intellectual life in complete clarity and brightness – are bound to the soil of the Holy Land. Israel’s Torah is not.”
In other words, Samuel Holdheim was wrong. The Torah applies at all times and in all places.
Elliot Resnick, PhD, is the host of “The Elliot Resnick Show” and the editor of an upcoming work on etymological explanations in Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch’s commentary on Chumash.