parts of halakhah (Jewish law) and why they exist can be difficult to explain because it’s like. think about western academia. think about how there’s a standardized format of an essay, of a paragraph, there’s established grammar and acceptable forms of evidence and research and formatting conventions depending on topic, different levels of expertise based on whose talking, all of that.
halakhah is a law code, but you can also think of it like a self-sufficient, self-enclosed academic system. when one tries to explain an academic argument or conclusion to someone who doesn’t, for example, know what the word dissertation means or how to present a thesis, they do so knowing their audience lacks the tools to evaluate this information according to its own standards of academic rigor.
now, it is not that halakhah is explicitly too mystical to explain, or that non-Jews are somehow not smart enough to understand it. anyone CAN come to learn all of the necessary information about how halakhah functions if they set their mind to it; but doing so is a lot of work that most people simply won’t dedicate to a topic they aren’t professionally interested in or which possesses no relevance to their life. Jews routinely dedicate that amount of work because it is indeed very, very relevant to our lives.
i only really know enough about the specifics of halakhah to know how much i don’t understand about it, and i was given a Jewish private school education from K-12! so when i say that the nuance of halakhah is typically ridiculously fucking dense and often requires simplification for an unfamiliar audience, i say that for good reason.
