@oratio: I don’t believe it to be paradoxical. I think God was telling his people to be pure and intentional about their lives. Sure one can choose not to cheat on his wife, but if you lust over other women and choke the chicken persay, to pornography then you really aren’t following my law. IMO, God wanted to tell the Jews that you need to have a good and pure heart not simply do something because I said so.
For example (relating it to the ‘80’s) if God wanted to teach us about hard work he could have said I want you to beat the Nintendo game Mario Brothers. So, as a good Jew, I go ahead and buy the Game Genie which gives me infinite lives and then I use all of the cheats to basically just walk through every level. I have done what God asked me to do by beating the game, but I learned absolutely nothing from that. In fact I probably learned the opposite; how to cheat. Now if God wanted to show me what he really wanted from me he would say no, I could care less whether or not you truly beat Mario Brothers, I wanted you to struggle through the game to show you that hard work pays off in the end (even though the end of Mario Bros. is kind of lame). I wanted to show you that it’s important to work hard at everthing in your life because if you do, it will pay off. This is what I want you to do. God would have fullfilled or eliminated this physical burden on me but he still wants me to work hard. So I could absolutely go back and play Mario Bros. again and again without the game genie, it wouldn’t matter. The important part is that I work hard at everything. Now if I go back and say this hard work crap is for the birds, I want beat Mario Bros again because the system locked up right after I beat it and I didn’t get to see the end. If I went through and used the game genie again I would still be cheating and learning nothing only to try and reap a reward at the end.
This, IMO (and I mean absolutely no offense), is where the jewish religion is at. They do these rituals over and over again, some half-heartedly, some whole-heartedly, but nobody realizes why they are doing it. They do it because someone told them to do it, because if they do then they are told they will go to heaven. God was telling the Jews that it’s not important what you do here on earth it’s whether you do the things you do with a gracious and loving heart. If you believe in this, then you believe in the writings of Jesus Christ.