Q&A: Where Do the Boundaries of Morality Begin and End?
Where Do the Boundaries of Morality Begin and End?
Question
Hello Rabbi Michi,
I’ll start with an introduction, because it seems to me to reflect many people of my generation.
I remember that when I first entered the study hall of the hesder yeshiva in 1995-96, I was truly captivated by Rabbi Kook’s harmonious teaching, and by the charm of his personality as they took pains to describe it to us. After a certain period, when I became acquainted with “The Halakhic Man,” and with a certain sobering-up from all the harmonies and the search for holiness everywhere, I thought that it was indeed more correct to ground the Torah in Jewish law, and everything else was nice. Over time, my confidence in the correctness of Jewish law and its sages also began to shake, and I thought that first and foremost Judaism should be grounded in moral principles—and best of all if we could draw them from Jewish texts, in the style of Levinas’s work and so on. I sobered up from that too—from the moral foundation, and certainly from the search for it in the Sages.
Personally, I have very basic moral rules that I’ve never really thought much about; I simply don’t murder people who don’t think like me, and the derivative rules and subclauses that follow from that.
As for the Torah, I have accepted upon myself the tradition of the Oral Torah. I try to learn as much Talmud and halakhic decisors as possible, and the Kabbalah of the Rashash (I don’t know how to explain why; there’s something special about that learning).
Back to morality. As I said at the outset, many people of my generation went through a similar process and are now holding onto morality as a foundation. I can’t understand why. In the last 20-25 years (it seems to me that Rabin’s assassination symbolizes a change in direction), a great deal of ink has been spilled around this issue: “the other,” “the fellow person,” altruism, conscience, values, and so on. It always sounds very smart and very right.
My basic assumption is that if something is worthwhile and good, it should require effort, precision, and investment. For example, a literary creation like Tzitz Eliezer is not something just anyone can produce. Does being moral really require effort? I’m almost sure not. When I read (I hardly read them anymore) texts from this field, I ask myself: was my neighbor from my childhood in Sderot, Sultana Cohen, of blessed memory, who wasn’t particularly educated, less moral than the columnists in Makor Rishon and Haaretz? I don’t know. But she was kindhearted, pleasant, and courteous.
When I was in high school, the genocide in Rwanda took place. It’s not that anyone really cared; you can’t deny the facts—800,000 murdered. Where was the West in that story? Statesmen in Europe either abstained or blamed one another for not taking responsibility.
President Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize. Other than the fact that he’s handsome, I didn’t understand why he won it. I assume the 600,000 murdered in Syria don’t understand either. In fact, Trump the beast (in the sense that he doesn’t make an effort to hide the desires that people usually hide and that most of us, me included, consider problematic) helped to a considerable extent to stop the killing by Assad’s regime.
In recent years, your friend Rabbi Yuval Cherlow has publicly presented himself as an “ethicist” (is there rabbinic ordination for that?). Aside from the fact that it’s rather annoying that he does this in his role as a rabbi, as though there were a connection between the two things, I really don’t know what people are so enthusiastic about in setting up morality as some triumphant objective tool on which to base Judaism. As I said, I have little trust in all the talk around these issues, and in order to be a decent and pleasant person you certainly don’t need to read philosophy or humane psycho-philosophy.
More generally, what are the boundaries of this discourse, which for many people seems to be the most essential thing of all, with everything else just extra? When it comes to Jewish law, then more or less (mostly more) I know what the rules of the game are (likewise in Kabbalah) and how to work with them. Above all, I think I know how to appreciate a good, well-reasoned halakhic text that can be discussed and has practical ramifications.
When it comes to morality, I have no idea where it begins and where it ends. It always sounds to me as though, because people have nothing left to hold onto, they go for the moral shelter as a safe place, and dig into it with musings and “do this and don’t do that,” as if they’ve discovered America.
The paradox, as I wrote above, is that sometimes simple, uneducated people are far nicer and more upright than the “enlightened” white religious-secular liberal.
A bit of order would help.
Answer
Hello Yehoshua,
There are quite a few questions here. I’ll try to address them briefly.
First, morality does not depend on knowledge. There are quite a few moral people who never studied. But it is important for me to emphasize that niceness is not necessarily morality. Morality is tested when there is a dilemma and when a person does not want to act that way. A natural tendency to be nice is not morality (just to sharpen the point: I am not saying that your neighbor in Sderot was like that).
The purpose of literature that deals with morality is not to make you moral, but to clarify what the moral obligation is. In some cases this is not clear, and then there is value in an intellectual clarification of the matter. In such situations, it is possible that your neighbor would not have reached the correct conclusion.
I assume you know my position regarding the connection between morality and Judaism, so you were bursting through an open door. There is no such thing as Jewish morality, and morality is not Judaism. Morality is humanity, and by its very nature it is universal. It is required equally of every person, Jew or non-Jew, and what is required of everyone is the same thing.
As for moral discussion, it is founded on intuitive assumptions, but in that respect it is no different from many other fields. I wrote in several places (for example in the fourth section of the fourth talk in the first book) that moral intuition is the result of observing the idea of the good (moral realism). In that sense, there is a basis here that can be called “observational.” That is where it begins. It ends with the conclusions you draw from that “observation.”
Discussion on Answer
A person generally should not market himself at all. The decision about who is an ethicist should be left to others.
Simply behaving honestly can lead you to mistakes in edge cases. Usually we know what is right, but there are situations in which more abstract thought is needed. The elaborate clarifications of morality are mainly intended for those cases. As I wrote, being nice and just flowing along with honesty and friendliness is not morality—both because it may lead to mistakes in edge cases, and also because morality is behavior that comes from commitment and decision, as I wrote.
Is it moral for a person to market himself as an ethicist on the basis of being considered an important rabbi? Maybe tomorrow Asa Kasher will market himself as a lecturer because his grandfather was a Torah scholar?
You wrote that the purpose of the literature dealing with morality is only to clarify what the moral obligation is, and also that morality does not depend on knowledge—you can be a simple person and behave honestly toward others (except in complex cases, where people with analytical ability will reach more correct conclusions).
There’s a huge gap here. Why is there a need to write so much about ethics, to examine what is good and upright, what the duty of a human being in society is, while on the other hand every person with average IQ understands—or better, naturally lives—what is good and what is bad?