Q&A: Jewish Law and Morality
Jewish Law and Morality
Question
I recently read the Rabbi’s article about the beautiful captive woman, which was written בעקבות the controversy at the time over Rabbi Karim’s remarks.
A. The Rabbi reaches the conclusion that Jewish law and morality are two different domains. A less novel explanation can be suggested: Jewish law and morality are two very closely connected domains; halakhic rulings strive toward morality, except that morality changes from period to period, and therefore adjustments are needed. I think this is very similar to the relationship between law and justice. These are two different domains, but the law does try to be just, and when an injustice arises the law should be corrected. Of course there are endless examples of this, from the daughters of Zelophehad until today.
Two advantages of this explanation: 1. It is less novel. 2. Jewish law is not something devoid of moral meaning
Answer
Your explanation has many advantages, but it suffers from one drawback: it isn’t correct. These matters were explained at length in my series of lectures on morality and at the beginning of the third book in the trilogy.
Discussion on Answer
How do you explain the huge gap between the improvement in perceptions and actual behavior? When you think about developments in behavior and then think again about the first half of the twentieth century, or the silence of the democratic countries in the face of Assad’s regime, or the genocide in Rwanda. (Just examples, there are many more.) It looks like people are playing at “let’s pretend I’m moral.”
If possible, can you explain in a nutshell why my explanation is wrong…
Yehoshua,
I don’t think the gap is huge. I only noted that despite the improvement in perceptions, behavior is not always aligned with those perceptions. But there is improvement in behavior too.
Questioner,
I explained in the message afterward. Beyond that, it’s clear that the Torah contains values that are non-moral, and it also contains quite a few instructions that are not moral. It isn’t reasonable to attribute everything to changes in morality. From the existence of non-moral instructions, you can see that the Torah has other goals besides morality. So why not attribute the anti-moral instructions to that as well? The question assumes that there needs to be a fit between the Torah and morality, but that assumption has no basis at all, and there is no reason to look for excuses for it.
A. Your answer is an answer, but how can you say there is no basis at all for the question? I find that astonishing. The assumption that there should be a fit between the Torah and morality has an empirical basis in the fact that all the basic moral commands appear in the Torah (murder, theft, adultery, damages, etc.), and there are almost no clearly anti-moral halakhot.
B. Or more than that: one could say that even the halakhot that seem anti-moral to us appeared to that generation as completely moral and natural. The Torah commands that a divorced woman who married and divorced again cannot return to her first husband: “Her first husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife after she has been defiled, for that is an abomination before the Lord.” At first glance this seems anti-moral—to forbid people things for no reason (every halakhic prohibition is anti-moral, like the wife of a priest who was raped; not only a halakhic permission to violate moral prohibitions), and the whole understanding of this is as a halakhic value. But the prophet Jeremiah expected the entire people, worshippers of idolatry, to understand this prohibition on their own even without any connection to Jewish law (and therefore he applies it also to the relationship between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the Jewish people): “If a man sends away his wife, and she goes from him and becomes another man’s, will he return to her again? Would not that land be greatly defiled?” That is to say, even as idol worshippers who were not obligated at all by the halakhot of the Torah, this appeared to them as a self-evident value-based natural principle, and no conflict arose for them between Jewish law and any other system.
Therefore it is very reasonable to assume that at the time it was given, the Torah was aimed precisely at the basic moral outlook that was prevalent among the people of Israel. And if so, one can also assume that there is a revelation here from the Torah about what the correct moral outlook is (for morality obligates objectively, and Elijah can reveal to us that we were mistaken in what we expected).
There is a question here, but not a difficulty. The facts only show that moral norms also have religious parallels; that is, an act that has moral value also has religious value. But the assumption that there must be overlap between them has no basis. On the contrary, there are quite a few indications that there is no overlap (such as indirect murder and constricting someone so that they die, and the like). Therefore I see no reason to look for explanations when there is no real difficulty.
As for the expression “abomination,” I have already addressed it several times in the past (mainly in relation to homosexuals). It does not necessarily express a moral deficiency.
By the way, I also don’t agree that morality changes from generation to generation. People’s perceptions change, and there is moral improvement over the generations (in perceptions, not always in actual behavior). But the Torah is supposed to teach us the true morality, not what people happen to think.