Q&A: Torah and Morality — Several Questions
Torah and Morality — Several Questions
Question
Hello Rabbi Michael Abraham.
I already asked you several questions on this topic. With your permission, a few more came up.
1. Here we see yet another system of obligations from God that are not considered commandments. If so, what is the definition of a commandment? What is the difference between God’s will that is considered a commandment and that which is not?
2. You argued that sometimes the halakhic system prevails and sometimes the moral one does. How can one determine which prevails when? After all, each system will say that it is the one that prevails.
3. Sometimes it is unclear whether something is part of Jewish law or not. For example: saving a life overrides the Sabbath. Is that a moral principle that overrides the halakhic one, or is it an internal part of Jewish law itself?
4. I have heard people argue, rightly, that this approach is dangerous. It basically says that there is an additional normative system that sometimes overrides morality. That means that immoral acts are considered the right acts. Isn’t this a danger to society? Haven’t we suffered enough from similar approaches that silenced morality?
Answer
Hello Haggai.
1. What is “here”? I don’t remember what we discussed. A commandment is God’s will as expressed in the Torah through a command.
2. This is a general question about conflicts between values. I wrote about this in several places in my books (mainly in a few articles in Be-Middah Tovah 5767). Bottom line: there is an intuition that lies outside the two systems under discussion (since, as you correctly wrote, you cannot decide between two systems on the basis of one of them). But it’s hard for me to elaborate here. See, for example, these two articles:
Excellent article.
Thank you very much, and more power to you.