Q&A: Morality and Jewish Law
Morality and Jewish Law
Question
. The Rabbi wrote that morality is something that the Holy One, blessed be He, implanted in us, and nevertheless sometimes Jewish law contradicts morality, let's say because there are additional considerations in specific cases. And yet the Rabbi wrote that if there is a clash between Jewish law and morality, sometimes morality will win. How can that be? After all, the whole reason the Torah departed here from morality is because it recognized that there is some additional consideration here that apparently changes God's will!? So is it because people understand that Jewish law is mistaken here?
Answer
There are two kinds of conflict between Jewish law and morality.
A. Essential: killing an Amalekite baby, separating the wife of a priest from her husband after she was raped, branding children born from adultery as mamzerim, and the like. Here there is a conflict every time one comes to carry out the Torah's instruction.
B. Incidental: like danger to life and the Sabbath, and the like. Here the conflict is in a particular case and may not appear at all. It is possible to observe the Sabbath without harming the preservation of life, and also to preserve life without violating the Sabbath. The conflict exists because a certain situation happened to arise.
In the first case, in principle Jewish law does indeed prevail, for the reason you mentioned. After all, the Torah took the moral consideration into account and nevertheless instructed us to do something against it. Of course, this should be qualified when we are dealing with the Sages' interpretation of the Torah, because there a mistake could occur. And although they have authority, in a place where this clashes strongly with morality there is room for an additional consideration.
But in the second case, the Torah said nothing at all about the override. It is possible that it spoke only about cases in which fulfilling the command does not contradict the moral value. There, there may be cases in which one can prefer the moral imperative. This is certainly true in extreme cases such as a transgression for the sake of Heaven. There, the Talmud itself determines that the external value overrides Jewish law. See my article on this topic: