How to Explain Inexplicable Biblical Prohibitions

While God-belief provides relief
to many, it engenders grief
in dissidents who think mankind
was quite illogically designed,
denying that there was a plan
by any God to create man,
rejecting beliefs of believers
as uncool symptoms of brain fevers
in those who such beliefs’ persistence
reflects to logic a resistance,
thinking in straight line ignoring,
immune to logic they find boring.

Although belief in Him is hard,
it’s wrong for people to discard
the possibility that He
wants us to think orthogonally
like Him, His moves, like knights in chess
from straight lines straying  with noblesse.

Orthogonal thoughts can pull weird wool
away from eyes, explaining shatnes,
which, rationally explained, is full
of unmidrashic metamadness.

Robert Aumann, when receiving
the Nobel Prize, said something like
ideas with which I’ve been conceiving
rhymes that science superpsych,

mixing them up just like fine linen
that is shatnes, flax that’s spun
with wool, and thereby sinnin’
theoretically, for fun.

Meir Soloveichik in his Bible 365 podcast describes how Robert John Aumann. an Israeli-American mathematician, and a professor at the Center for the Study of Rationality in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, refused to wear clothes made of shatnes (linsey-woolsey) when receiving the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2005 because of the prohibition in Lev. 19:19 and Deut. 22:11.  The prohibition of shatnes has no rational explanation, but when asked why he observed biblical laws that seem to be irrational, Aumann replied that he believed it vital to be able to think not just in straight lines but orthogonally.

Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.