Question

Hello Rabbi Michi,
In your book “Walking Among Those Who Stand,” you divided the commandments in the Torah into 3 categories: moral commandments, non-moral commandments, and anti-moral commandments. After that, you offered possible point-by-point explanations for some of the anti-moral commandments (raping a captive woman is understandable given that the entire outcome of the war depends on it; killing an Amalekite infant is understandable given that Amalek is a people that constitutes a constant existential threat to us; etc.), and you mentioned that of course according to your view, which holds that there is normative duality, these explanations are not actually needed. Afterward you noted 3 approaches to the relationship between Jewish law and morality.

1. Identifying Jewish law with morality
2. Identifying morality with Jewish law
3. Normative duality

 
You rejected the first approach because it assumes some kind of divine morality different from ours, such that according to that morality it really is moral to divorce the wife of a priest who was raped; and you rejected it because, aside from confusing the normative with the conceptual, morality by definition is universal. You rejected the second approach by citing sources that show there is extra-Torah morality.
 
And now to the question. In my opinion, one can propose an additional approach. I am not claiming that this additional approach is superior to the approach of normative duality. In my opinion it is less plausible than normative duality and even becomes somewhat suspect because it comes close to the realm of unfalsifiability. But since, in my opinion, the refutations of the first two approaches mentioned above do not apply to it, and since from the in-depth surveys I conducted (two people) many seem to assume it implicitly, I would be glad to hear your opinion of it.
This additional approach begins like the softened version of the first approach, meaning that it claims that morality really does underlie the moral commandments (a possibility you supported even within the duality approach). It accepts that there are religious commandments that have no connection to morality (eating pork). But it does not accept that there are anti-moral commandments. So what is the explanation for anti-moral commandments such as divorcing the wife of a priest who was raped? Here this approach claims that we human beings simply do not have the full picture. That is, if we had the full picture of reality, we would understand that this is the moral thing to do according to our own moral values. In other words, this approach assumes that there are certain parameters hidden from our view, such that if we were aware of them, we would agree that the right thing to do is, sadly, to divorce the priest’s wife. I want to emphasize that the point is not that there is some higher morality different from ours, as the first approach claimed, but rather that there is one universal morality shared by all; only sometimes the correct resolution of a moral conflict changes depending on the facts, and if we had all the facts we ourselves would decide to divorce that unfortunate priest’s wife. In other words, this approach makes use of the style of possible justifications that you raised for anti-moral commandments (the fate of the war depends on it, etc.), except that in this approach the style of possible justifications does not assume historical ignorance, as those earlier justifications did, but rather a present lack of data.
For the sake of example, I’ll throw out a few wild “data points” that, if true, could explain divorcing the priest’s wife. Suppose the priests’ genome is such that a priest whose wife was raped is unable to bear that fact. All his life he would feel a deep revulsion toward her, he would hate her, and all things considered their married life would become miserable and full of alienation. Could it not be that given that “fact,” the right thing would be to divorce her? Or suppose the priests’ genome is such that if a priest has relations with a woman who was raped, the child born will be defective. It is important to me to emphasize that my goal is not to offer a plausible example, and it is clear to me that these examples are completely speculative. I am only trying to say that perhaps there are facts not available to us, and if we were exposed to them we would understand that, as a sweeping rule, the right thing to do when weighing all the facts is to divorce the woman. I also think that research in such a sensitive area, trying to quantify the amount of happiness for all the relevant people (the husband, the wife, and the children) between two different decisions (divorcing the wife or not), is probably impossible.
I am aware that arguments like these are unfalsifiable, which creates suspicion. I also agree that the range of possible justifications becomes narrower in light of your view that there is probably no intervention in the world (though with a little imagination one can think of facts hidden from us that do not involve intervention, and in my opinion even the ones I listed do not assume present-day intervention).
To sum up, this approach is somewhat reminiscent of the moral approach to the question of why bad things happen to the righteous, except that in my opinion it is even harder to refute. (It is harder to point out that the suffering of the priest’s wife is greater if we divorce her than if we choose the alternative, than it is to point out that a righteous person who burned in the Holocaust probably was not doing all that well.)
Of course one could argue that we have not solved the problem, because such an explanation raises the further question: then why did God create the priest’s genetics in a way that would cause so much suffering? But such a question is also relevant to your own explanations for anti-moral commandments (why did God create man as so beastly that the fate of war depends on rape, or why did He create a cruel nation like Amalek), and regarding normative duality too one may ask why God gave religious commandments that contradict morality, so I allow myself to assume that this is not what the discussion is about.
Sorry for the length.