Q&A: A Difficulty with Your Critique of the View of Jewish Law as Morality
A Difficulty with Your Critique of the View of Jewish Law as Morality
Question
In the third book of the trilogy, you criticize the approach that resolves apparent contradictions between morality and Jewish law by claiming that Jewish law is the true morality. You argue that: (a) this involves conceptual confusion, like Rabbi Dessler’s concept of truth; and (b) morality is universal by definition and therefore cannot derive from Jewish law.
I do not claim to represent that position, but at least as I understood it, I took it in a way to which, in my opinion, these criticisms do not apply. There is a distinction between how we understand the moral principle and our ability to apply it in practice, because our information may be partial.
If we take, for example, Kant’s categorical imperative, I agree with the principle that I should act as I would want everyone to act. But if I think, for instance, that smoking is very beneficial to health, it could be that I would do my best to smoke in public places in order to improve the public’s health. If someone comes and gives me new information that smoking is unhealthy, I would change my view of what is moral and stop smoking in public.
As I understand it, in the same way, according to this view, the Holy One, blessed be He, reveals new information to us in places where we could not possibly have enough information. We have no idea how refraining from eating pork affects the world, but it could be that if the Holy One, blessed be He, were revealed to us in prophecy and showed us the whole world in a state where people, or at least Jews, do not eat pork, as opposed to a state where they do eat pork, we would understand that it is a much better world. Likewise, a world in which a priest divorces his wife who was raped, etc.
That is, Jewish law does not change our conceptual understanding of morality; it only gives us new information where, by human means, we could not have obtained it. Therefore there is no conceptual confusion here and no contradiction to the universality of morality.
Answer
Anything is possible, but this is completely unlikely. There is no reason at all to think that eating pork improves anything on the moral plane. And the same goes for many other commandments. On the contrary, it seems that the commandments are indifferent to morality and certainly do not overlap with it. You can always come up with wild hypotheses that standing on one leg changes the positions of the stars even if I do not see it, or that eating pork makes you immoral. I see no reason to assume that.
Discussion on Answer
God expects us to be moral (and does not command it, in the sense of a formal law. That is only Jewish law). But it is not true that everything He expects/commands is moral. In command there is also Jewish law, and even in expectation there are norms that are not connected to morality. See my article on the fixed measures for terumah and challah and the will of God.
Now I thought about it again: I understand that what I suggested is indeed far-fetched. But is saying that our waving the lulav in our world affects some kind of good in another world that we have no access to not equally far-fetched? (It somewhat reminds me of your critique of Kant and the claim that it could be that the noumenal world is completely different from what we experience.)
Not at all. If you have some argument, please present it.
How does the Rabbi define morality? Isn’t it most correct to define something moral as that which God commands?