gefilte,
I often hear people say you shouldn’t try to understand the reasons for mitzvos, rather you should just do them because Hashem says so.
Sometimes the Torah gives us the reason for a mitzva. Sometimes, especially for many bein adam l’chaveiro mitzvos, the reasons seem evident. But for most mitzvos, no reason is given at all, and we cannot fully understand why it was given. The risk of inventing reasons for mitzvos that sound good to us, is that we can unintentionally cheapen the mitzvos by replacing Hashem’s infinite wisdom with our limited wisdom in a desire to ascribe meaning to things. And if our finite wisdom subsequently changes, we might CV”S see the mitzva “based” on that wisdom as obsolete.
But isn’t the entire Torah sheBaal Peh dedicated to understanding the mitzvos and the reasons we do them?
No. The oral Torah and our traditions based on it are dedicated to understanding how to do the mitzvos.
After all, understanding the reasons for mitzvos often helps us determine who/when/what circumstances the mitzvah applies.
And that’s precisely the danger. We can’t invent a reason for a mitzva and then use that invented reason to say the mitzva does or does not apply here or there. And even if a reason for a mitzva was given to us, we cannot throw it out because we now think that reason no longer applies. You will not see fish and meat together on my plate, even though non-Jews eat gumbos and “surf and turf” all the time with no visible sakana.