I cannot but help feeling that part of your difficulties are self-made. Is there such a difference between Jewish law and law in general? What is law--law in the abstract? What do you mean when you talk about laws of science or morality? Surely there is no such thing as law in the abstract. You really mean God's thought. All law existed long before this world existed, as the thought of God. This thought expresses itself, when the world is actually made, in animals, nature, man. But this thought is somewhat long before it expresses itself, because it is God's thought. With Him 'to think' is 'to do.' Before you and I were born, before men were made, man exists in God as a thought. Each of us is an expression of part of that thought. The whole thought is the image of God, not any one part. Now, when I speak of man as something in contra-distinction to men, I mean the thought of God in contradistinction to its individual realisation. So when I speak of law as distinct from special laws, I mean a thought of God as distinct from its special expressions. Otherwise 'man' and 'law' are abstractions and nonentities. The nominalist is right in so far as he denies that law as an abstract thing (considered apart from a person--as his thought) is anything: the realist is right in so far as he affirms that law, apart from {64} any particular manifestation, is an eternal reality. The reconciliation of nominalism and realism is found in God. Applying this to the case in hand--you admit that the Ten Commandments are the ground of morality; therefore, I say, they must be an expression of a thought of God, the Author of morality. But you are puzzled to find that the most trivial sanitary arrangements are considered by the Jew as equally a manifestation of God. Need we be? In every little sanitary precaution I recognise, or ought to recognise, an expression of that same mind as I see it in the Ten Commandments. God is Light, therefore the clean, the healthy, the decent is an expression of Him. God is Love, therefore the social, the self-sacrificing, is an expression of Him as well. But sanitary arrangements and the like, though an expression of an unchanging principle, change according to state of civilisation, climate, country. Therefore we take the principle, not the expression, as the ultimate reality in the case of these sanitary laws.