To respond to Rabbi Derovan, whose writing I have long admired, I believe
that the other respondents to this topic have been working under the tacit
assumption, recently made most eloquently explicit by Rav Yehuda Amital in
his Jewish Values volume, that our feelings towards certain issues
emanate, not from the influence of alien cultures, but from a natural
morality implanted in us by the same God who gave us the Torah. When we
struggle with sections that seem to fly in the face of this bedrock
morality, we follow in the tradition of Avraham at the Akedah, according
to the Midrashim that portray him weeping, but fulfilling the will of God.
The struggle doesn't deny the binding nature of the command, but neither
does it invalidate the natural doubts and hesitations engendered by it.
