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~4Aty“? N . , \ 1 Tan s \ ’ TODAY'S . MORALS AND THE ETHICS OF JUDAISM 3 (r13\\ ' John D. Rayner Let me begin by saying how much I appreciate the privilege of having been invited to participate in your conference — and how much I wa§ enjoying it until a minute or two ago! My present discomfort derives from the fear that the title of the talk I have been asked to give may have raised expectations that are doomed to disappointment. Therefore, before I go any further, I feel I must cut any such expectations down to size. It has been said that a speaker, when faced with the choice of exhausting his subject or exhausting his audience, should spare the latter. :Well,.l am in no dangéfi~of exa hausting the subject, but in order not to exhaust the audience, I have had to make two further choices. First, between the general and the particular. I could have taken just one aspect of our topic and explored it in some depth, but thought you would prefer me to cover a larger area even though that will make it impossible to go into detail. Secondly, be— tween the two halves of the title. I have not come equipped with a whole lot of facts and figures about today's morals, and though I shall make some allusions to the present state of private and public morality, based on general impressions, I should like, with your permission, to concentrate on the ethics of Judaism and leave it to you to work out in your om minds, and in m diécussion gmups; hm it 'relata'ag to pr'esent fealities. THE PRIMACY OF ETHICS Pefhaps we should begin, though, by asking ourselves: just how important is ethics in Judaism? About that there are two views. First, fine Prophetic view, which has been re-asserted in modern times by Progressive Judaism. According to this, the God of Is— rael, who is also the God of humanity, is essentially a moral God. As Abraham says in today's Sidra, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly?" (Gen. 18:25). There- 'fore right conduct is what He demands above all else from those who would be His serv- ants. In the words of the Psalmist, "The Lord is righteous, and He loves righteous deeds" (11:17), gnd in the words 6f Jeremiah:l"Let not the wise man glory in his wis- dom, let not the mighty man glory in his mighfi, let not the rich man glory in his riches; but let him who glories glory in this, that hé understands and knows Me, that I am the Lord who exercise lovingkindness, justice andjrighteousness in the earth; for in these things I delight, says the Lord" (9:22-23).T On this View, everything else is secondary. Ritual, for example, may be important, but it is not of the same 95223 of importance; it is not an integral part, as ethics is, of the answer to the questgon, what God requires of us. \§?qbbét:after prophefi castigated the people for their preoccupation with sacrifices and other rituals, and thén proclaimed what God really cares about: "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever—flowing stream" (Amos 5:24); "I desire love and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings" (Hosea 6:6); "Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow" (Isaiah 1:16—17). "He has spown you, 0 man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8). ~4aTY“? n ._, \ 1 tan . _ 2 _ So much for the Prophetic view, which might be summed up by saying that, though other things such as ritual may be important as a means to an end, fhe only ultimate values are ethical values. The other view is of that Pharisaic—Rabbinic and therefore, in modern times, of Ortho- dox Judaism. Here the position is not quite so simple. For on this view we have a div- inely revealed Torah which comprises 613 commandments. Many of these, of course, are of an ethical nature, but by no means all; yet they are all equally obligatory, and though the Rabbis speak of MITZVOT CHAMUROT and MITZVOT KALLOT, 'weightier' and 'lighter' com- mandments, there is no clear—cut principle by which they can be differentiated. To the question, "What does the Lord your God require of you?", the Proghets answered, "Be just and merciful"; the figgglg answered, "Obey the 613 commandments." Nevertheless, the Rabbis did in many ways show themselves aware of the primary import- ance of ethics. It is noteworthy, for instance, that whenever they tried to sum up in a nutshell what the Torah is all about, they invariably did so in ethical terms. They said that it is all about loving your neighbour as yourself, or all about making peace in the world, and generalisations of that kind. It is also noteworthy that the sins enumerated in the various confessions of the Yom Kippur liturgy are almost exclusively offences against the moral rather than the ritual law. Enerefore one must not overdraw the contrast. I merely wish to poifit out that the pre—eminence given to ethics over ritual is more marked in Progressive than in Orthodox Judaism. ETHICS AND LAW But there is another difference between the two approaches which is of great import— ance for our subject. From an Orthodox point of View, all questions of right and wrong find their an§wer in Halachah, in legislation, and conversely, whatever the Halachah has to say on such matters is 32§9_£gg£g the highest expression of Jewish ethics. Since the Torah is divine, and the Halachah its authoritative interpretation, how can it be other- wise? In Orthodox Judaism, therefore, law and ethics go together. It does not recognise an ethig independent of the Halachah which may variance with the occaiigqia} hgsfiif Halacfiéh. The Halachah is itself the ultimate arbiter; there is’novauthority-beyond— it; and if your conscience disagrees with it, then yodr conscience is mistaken. It is not for our moral judgments to determine what the Halachah should be: it is the Halachah that determines what our moral judgments should be. Therefore when prthodox rabbis deai with ethical matters they nearly always do so in halachip terms. éflen, unfortunately, they pay mnch—moné attention_toAritual than to ethical matters. In Israel, for instance, it 15 said that the Orthodox rabbinate is almost wholly preoccupied with two matters, SHECHITAH and GITTIN, with the result that if you happen to be a vegetarian who loves his wife you can get along quite well without"A the rabbinate. There are indeed some praiseworthy exceptions to that rule, not least the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations, Sir Immanual Jakobovits. He and a number of other Orthodox scholars in America and Israel (especially Rabbi J. David Bleich, heaq of Yeshivah University, New York) have been producing quite a spate of excellent books on contemporary moral problems, especially medical ethics. But they _ 3 _ ‘ l m . w . I . all turn out to be halachic treatises;.applying_talmudic law to the problems with which they deal. They do indeed have the virtue of highlighting the general ethical principles with whicfi‘the Halachah operates; but the possibility that these very principles, and therefore the legislation based upon them, may occasionally be mistaken, is, as you would expect, never entertained. And that is where we, as Progressive Jews, must beg to differ. From our point of View the Torah is a product of divine revelation and human interpretation in dynamic inter— action. Therefore it, and the tradition based on it, is a growing, developing bedynof teachings which has made many significant advances in the course of its history,but is never final. Therefore when we seek the answer to an ethical problem, we do indeed look first of all into our Jewish tradition, for it contains a great abundance of wisdom, and it is, and always will be, our chief source of guidance. But we do not approach it with the presupposition that what is has to say is in each and every case guaranteed to be right. We approach it.ih a particular waygireverently but not uncritically. rLet me spell out more fully what that apé}6ach entails:' We are interested in the Héiachah, which is a magnificent attempt to translate the values of Judaism into pne- cepts capable of minutely regulating everygay conduct. But we are even more interested in what lies behind the Halachah. "whaé Cz'e'iné ’the modes of reasoning, the ethiqal motives and the historical circumstances which prompted the Rabbis to legislate as they did? ‘gometimes their reasoning involves ascribing continuing validity to é biblicéi command- %ent, for instance about the Mamzer, which we consider obsolete. Sometimes the-Rabbis may have been motivated by attitudes, for instance to the status of women, which we regard as inequitable. And sometimes, their decisions were influenced by historical circumstances, for instance of a time when 'Gentile' was synonymous with 'idolater', which have passed away. All these things we must investigate before we can be sure whether whgt the tradition has to say oh a given subject is valid for usZ‘and even then we still have to take into account contemporary knowledge, for instance of medicine or psychology, in so far as it may be relevant, as well as to consult our owh consciences.
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