Do you follow rabbinic tradition? If so, how far?
Because of the Babylonian exile, Judaism's primary emphasis is on obeying the Torah according to the traditions of the rabbis. Orthodox Jews understand intrinsically that disobedience to God's commands is what got them kicked out of the Promised Land in 586 B.C., and they have an underlying belief that if they obey the Torah really well, God will look on them with favor; they will gain back control of all of their land, and the Messiah will finally come. This led to the Pharisaic tradition of building 'fences' around the mitzvot. What is a mitzvah, and what is a 'fence' around one? Mitzvot (plural for mitzvah) are commandments concerning what God considers righteousness. In order to keep from violating a particular commandment in the Torah, the rabbis added traditions to the commandments that went further than the original instruction. These are often referred to as ‘fences’, which keep people from crossing into grey areas where they might be tempted to violate God’s commands.
A perfect example is the mitzvah found several times in the Torah, "Do not cook a young goat in its mothers' milk." (Exodus 23:19, Exodus 34:26, and Deuteronomy 14:21) Since the command appears so often in the text, the rabbis concluded that this was a really important mitzvah, but pondered over its meaning. So, over the centuries, they added the fence that no one should mix any meat products with any dairy products, regardless of whether they came from a goat—even chicken and milk products are prohibited. This way, no one could ever come close to violating the original commandment. Then, on top of this, Orthodox rabbis added the further fence stating that in order to keep kosher, one must have two separate kitchens, complete with different utensils and cookware, for cooking dairy dishes and meat dishes respectively, so that meat and dairy never will touch each other; beyond this fence, they added yet another fence: one must wait six hours after consuming one type of product before consuming the other, lest meat and milk somehow mix in the intestinal tract.
Jesus often spoke against the fences used by the Pharisees as unnecessary burdens that actually violated the original commands of God for the sake of tradition. Given that two of the three references of the original commandment, “Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk,” are not found in the immediate context of other commandments regarding food, one must wonder whether this commandment even pertains to food at all. The context surrounding Exodus 23:19 and Exodus 34:26 is about presenting pure/quality offerings with a pure heart; could it be that ‘cooking a young goat in its mother’s milk’ in this instance is about ‘killing’ the offering with bad/insincere intentions? Deuteronomy 14:21 is indeed tangent to commandments regarding kashrut, but even then, the surrounding verses both before and after are about the people of God being holy. In the larger context of the Ancient Near East, this saying was used to describe an ancient peasant practice of cheapening a tribute of grain by mixing grain from the current harvest with old grain from a previous year’s harvest, thereby ‘cooking’ the young goat of this year’s harvest along with yesterday’s old product. It’s not about food—it’s about wrecking the holiness of the relationship with God by through insincerity or deliberate uncleanliness.
This has an entirely different meaning; the obvious take-away is that we shouldn’t skimp on what we present to the LORD