We are told at Deuteronomy 32: 51–52 why Moses was not permitted to enter the Promised Land:

Even the lives of ordinary people can serve as useful indications of how we should, and should not, behave, of course, and perhaps that is what the more historical parts of the Five Books are meant to suggest. When it comes to the actual legislation, we can distinguish between two types of rules. Some have an obvious point, while others do not and we are not told what their point is. We are often told to be nice to strangers, and this is linked to the experience that Jews had of being strangers in Egypt, although it is not clear how this serves as a reason since presumably the rule of being nice to strangers does not only apply to Jews, or to groups who in the past had themselves been strangers somewhere else. Some rules are fairly obvious, any community that did not have a rule against murder would be a difficult place to live, and indeed we see today that there are parts of the world that are largely in the power of criminal gangs, sometimes unofficial and sometimes not, and life there is nasty, brutish and short for many of the unfortunate inhabitants. But the dietary laws do not have an obvious reason, except to separate the community from other communities, which is also often given as a reason for establishing rituals. Some other rules which are to do, for example, with the cloth covering the ark of the covenant are entirely arbitrary, or so it seems, as are the later rules about how to conduct sacrifices in the Temple.

There are advantages to such an approach, since if we think that the reasons for the rules are available to us, it becomes plausible to change them in certain circumstances. That might seem to be an advantage since in changing circumstances the rules can then adapt to those changes. For example, it is a rule that ten men are required for many important prayers and they need to be physically present in the same place where the prayers are recited. During the COVID-19 emergency it became very difficult and unsafe to gather ten people together, let alone men, and yet prayers needed to be said. Was it possible to create a virtual minyan where the right number of people are available online but not actually present in the same space? During the pandemic some Jewish groups refused to distance themselves because they wished to continue with their traditional communal practices, including rules of prayer, and they then suffered major casualties as a result. For them the rigorous application and preservation of rules is of primary significance. Of course, in Judaism the preservation of life is also of primary significance, so there is scope for a discussion here even among the haredi community about how adaptations might be made in certain compelling circumstances. From their point of view there is a determination to try to avoid the slippery slope. Once a rule is set aside or changed then perhaps everything will gradually be changed or the attitude of respect for rules in general will be weakened. That is a very real question and although those hostile to traditional lifestyles may accuse them of unthinking conformism, the desire to maintain rules is an important part of many religions, including Judaism. One of the entertaining aspects of the haredi lifestyle is that the rules they follow actually are not that traditional, they often go back to some community in Eastern Europe from a few centuries ago, and to the religious authorities and their successors who organized that community. They do not extend much further into the medieval or biblical past. It has often been pointed out that there is nothing as modern as tradition and anyone who seeks to stick to a traditional lifestyle has nonetheless to constantly make choices about what to do, and other choices about whom he or she follows in making those choices.

When we think of punishing people, we come across two ways of justifying what we do, one based on the consequences and one entirely focused on what people deserve. This dichotomy represents nicely two different approaches to justifying the rules we find in the Bible. They often seem to be there in order to differentiate one community from others. One community has been chosen and has a covenantal relationship with God, while the others do not, and some way must be found to distinguish them from each other. Hence the very specific rules for the Israelites, they might be important not because of what they are inherently but due to their power to distinguish between people. It is a bit like a country’s flag, it is in itself of little significance, merely a piece of cloth with a design on it, yet what it symbolizes is immensely important in the eyes of those who live in a particular country, and who either are attached to that symbol or may have a variety of negative emotions about it. This is not a very good example since flags do have some sort of rationale about them, in the sense that different colors and images often are taken to represent something about a country. Take the stripes that represent different ranks in the army, they have an entirely arbitrary meaning, they are allocated to different ranks just so that everyone knows the status of everyone else by just looking at their uniform or cap.