The Pharisee Fallacy
"Here we have Jesus zeroing in on the Pharisee fallacy: the mechanisms of rules have become elevated over any original purpose those rules may have had, and even negate those purposes. He calls this hypocrisy.”
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I would argue for a more nuanced view of Jesus and the Pharisees, one of the primary reasons being that Jewish scholars who engage with the New Testament view Jesus as moving within the stream of Phariseeism. This in no way invalidates the application of your observations, but offers a different perspective on Jesus’s criticisms of the various streams of Judaism of his time and how they might relate to us.
As you pointed out, at the time of Jesus Judaism had multiple streams of which Phariseeism was only one. Unlike the Saducees, they accepted the oral Torah as binding, and traced its origin back to Moses on Mt. Sinai. One of the issues between Pharisee and Saducee was over the authoritative nature of both written and oral Torah. With the advent of the rabbinic movement, an extension of the the Pharisaic stream of Judaism (2nd-4th centuries CE), the oral law took written form, and was accompanied by a running commentary on how these commandments were to be applied in an ever changing social context. Within the Pharisaic stream at the time of Jesus the legal sections of the Torah, both written and oral, were interpreted by a decision process called “binding and loosing”. Jesus engaged in this process with the Pharisees, even extending the authority to do so to the apostles themselves and by extension to the governance of the early church (Matt 18:18). Here is the justification, should one choose to understand it so, for church discipline.
By and large the Jews did not view the commandments as burdensome. It was a way to express their devotion to God. But, as it was sometimes interpreted in the first century Jewish social context (i.e. “bound”), Jesus declared it burdensome, and what he offered was not a dissolution of the Law, but a “loosening” of its application to a particular social context (Matt. 11:30).
A problem arises when Christians read the Gospels and interpret Jesus’s criticism of the practices of the different streams of Judaism as a condemnation of the faith as a whole. Historically this has been problematic as it has, in its extreme forms, led to wholesale replacement theology and overt antisemitism. Hopefully we do not follow this extreme reaction within our narrow social circles. Rather, we need to be careful in our criticisms of one another so as not to negate the faith of our brethren and sisters by binding them to burdens they cannot bear.
KW, USA