The Torah in this week’s double portion contains some of the concepts many of us find very challenging. As Rabbi Sacks taught, “The Torah’s greatness is that it trusts us with the hard questions, inviting us to wrestle with its laws to refine our moral vision and grow as ethical beings.”

Let’s wrestle!

As a parent, and as a person of faith, I sometimes wish religion were clean and uncomplicated—black and white, always palatable to the modern world we live in. But it isn’t. And life isn’t either. G-d doesn’t ask us to live in simplicity—He asks us to live in truth. He challenges us, because challenge is the foundation of growth. Free will is the very basis of this world: for every impulse to do good, there is a voice pulling us the other way. We therefore have to learn to fight these impulses and that at some level requires us to grapple with tough stuff.

It is of course easier to write about uplifting values and moral teaching that slot into today’s environment perfectly, but when the Torah presents us with laws—on war, vows, gender roles, and justice—that we find hard to understand in our modern context, we must not look away. We must wrestle with them. That’s what it means to be in covenant with G-d.

The Torah doesn’t pretend life is simple. It gives us a framework to navigate complexity. In a world of volatility, it is a constant—a moral anchor that helps us hold steady when everything else shifts.

In this context we also have to consider that society’s view of what is acceptable is constantly changing as I illustrate below, against which we have a very strong anchor.

An Example of Shifting Ground: Sheffield, 1997

An example of the shifting of the ground in a matter of years is something I experienced personally. I remember my first day of work in Sheffield, England, in 1997. A new, female,........

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