Speaking October 28, 2010 at Temple Israel Ner Tamid in Cleveland, Dennis said: “Why didn’t I accept full Orthodoxy with the oral law? When I was in yeshiva, I asked my rabbis in sixth grade, if God gave a written and an oral Torah, why didn’t He write it all? Why was some written? It can’t be because of significance because there are parts of the written Torah that are incredibly over-detailed and there are things in the Oral law of tremendous significance. It seems capricious and God doesn’t seem capricious. Second, it doesn’t say anywhere in the written Torah that God gave an oral law. It’s an oral tradition that I should believe that an oral tradition was given at Sinai.
“Maybe God wanted there to be an oral tradition so that it could change and the written Torah was the constitution that doesn’t change.
“I believe the oral law developed the most humane way of killing an animal devised in history… This is all wonderful, but now that we have stunning where an animal doesn’t know what is bout to be done to it, why don’t we stun animals in kashrut and then kill them ritually? Because the answer is that the oral law says that the animal has to be fully conscious. In my opinion, in this case, the oral law undermines its own brilliance. If there was stunning 3,000 years ago, the Talmud would have said there could be stunning.”
