[pron]

Halakhic Judaism isn't about faith or what God knows. It's about obeying laws (Halakha [1]) made by people based on a God-given "constitution." Employing "loopholes" is fine -- it means you care about the law and try to obey it, which is the point. Worship is expressed not with faith but in a process of interpreting and creating laws and then following them.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halakha

[Majromax]

See also acoup.blog's series on Polytheism (https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polythei...). It's obviously not a direct analysis of Judaism, but the series discusses the idea of 'orthopraxis' (correct practice) as the relevant concept compared to the idea of 'orthodoxy' (correct belief). The latter, of course, is the central concept of modern Christianity.

[pbhjpbhj]

> The latter, of course, is the central concept of modern Christianity. //

I'd say that "salvation by faith" is the central concept of Christianity, faith does not require knowledge per se, not in the way that belief requires knowledge.

"Even the devil believes [...]" as the author of the Epistle of James writes.

Christianity as revealed in Scripture is far less about rigid concepts.

On a side-note Catholicism demands significant orthopraxis, but that is heterodox wrt Scripture.

Your supposition requires a form of gnosticism that's really not Christian and is quite contrary to the Gospel IMO, heretical some would say/have said.

[Udik]

It's more that for Judaism it seems God's laws are legal boundaries devoid of any ethical meaning. The important thing is to respect their letter, not their spirit.

[pron]

I wouldn't say that they're devoid of ethical meaning but rather that their ethical meaning might be unknown or can only be speculated, and whose understanding, in any event, is not pertinent to keeping the letter of the law, which is the central tenet. What you do is what's important, not what you believe or think or even what God thinks. Once His laws were given to humankind, they're out of His hands. There's even a famous story [1] in the Talmud where God argues with the Rabbis over Halakha, and the Rabbis tell God that what they say should prevail because Torah was given to man, and God concedes. From Wikipedia:

> [T]he work of law is a work of human activity, and... the Torah itself supports this legal theory. The Torah is not a document of mystery which must have its innate meaning revealed by a minority, but it is instead a document from which law must be created through the human activity of debate and consensus

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oven_of_Akhnai