Q&A: Morality and Torah
Morality and Torah
Question
A number of questions about your approach to morality and Jewish law:
A) Do you accept the classification of the types of commandments as “civil laws,” “testimonies,” and “statutes”? After all, according to your view everything is a religious value. So even “You shall not murder,” which is commonly treated as a civil law because of its rational basis, is really a religious statutory value.
B) Why did the Torah command, “And you shall do what is right and good”? Morality itself demands that we act accordingly, like any gentile would. Why does the Torah need to require this?
C) If the commandments in the Torah are religious values (and not rational or moral ones), how can their reasons be interpreted through logical analysis? For example, Meiri, regarding gentiles, grounds this in social norms. But isn’t the foundation religious rather than moral?
Answer
A. I do not fully accept it. There are commandments whose moral logic is clear, but their religious dimension requires a verse. See my responsum from just now here:
https://mikyab.net/%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%AA/%d7%a1%d7%91%d7%a8%d7%90-%d7%94%d7%95%D7%90-%d7%9C%D7%9E%D7%94-%d7%9C%D7%99-%d7%A7%D7%A8%D7%90
B. The Torah did not command it. No enumerator of the commandments included this in his count. On the contrary, the Torah here is saying exactly that: that there is an expectation of us to behave morally even though this is not part of Jewish law.
C. In the book I explained in two ways the relationship between Jewish law and morality. The halakhic command gives religious force to the moral principle. The prohibition against murder stems from the value of life, except that the value of life has a moral aspect and a religious aspect. Therefore a moral interpretation can בהחלט shed light on the halakhic definition as well, even though there is no complete overlap.
As a general point, I would just add—I have plans to write a column about this—that sometimes we also have understanding in areas that are not morality or simple logic, such as ritual impurity and purity or consecrated offerings. The fact is that there too we offer logical arguments and sort through interpretive possibilities.
Discussion on Answer
Regarding C: why does the Torah add a religious command to a moral value? Why does it matter to it that it remain only a moral value?
B. It is not a forecast but an expectation. The Torah instructs us that it wants us to be moral. That is not entirely self-evident, but even if it were, I do not see any special difficulty in this. It is important to the Torah to sharpen the point that there is a religious duty (not a halakhic one) to be moral.
C. It is not a question of why it cares. This is the truth: that every moral command has a religious dimension. Not murdering or helping another person has moral value and also religious value. It improves society and also the glory within the foundation.
Understood. Thank you very much!
Thank you.
A. Agreed
B. Still, why does the Torah write out its expectation? It is self-evident. In other words, what would have happened if the Torah had not written this—wouldn’t it still have been obvious that one must behave morally?
(And according to the approach that everything is Torah and there is no additional normative system, this is of course an excellent question. And perhaps from here one can infer it for them.)
C. Agreed. Waiting for the expanded column