Q&A: Ethics and Jewish Law
Ethics and Jewish Law
Question
Good evening!
Rabbi’s view is that Jewish law does not come to establish ethics, but rather has aims beyond this world. If so, I would like to ask: when the Torah prohibits murder, damages, and commands kindness, etc., is its purpose then also not ethics, but rather Jewish law that just happens to look ethical?
Or to put it differently: can we derive from the Torah’s laws on ethical matters its ethical outlook? Or is it that even in these laws, the Torah does not establish ethics, but only religion?
Thank you very much!
Answer
I answered this in the column “Jewish Law and Morality” and in all the places where I addressed this topic. There is definitely no overlap—indirect murder, confining someone and the like prove the point—and that itself shows the independence of Jewish law from morality. There is a parallel, not a complete one but probably not a coincidental one either, in that what is immoral also harms the religious aims.
Discussion on Answer
No, it does not. That is, Jewish law does not relate to the ethical. The Torah does. The “moral” commandments are meant to achieve religious aims. At the same time, there are also ethical obligations in which we are the same as non-Jews. Therefore there is a difference between the definitions of murder, theft, damage, and the like in Jewish law and in morality.
So that means the Rabbi understands that the Torah does indeed sometimes relate to the ethical, though not necessarily.
Maimonides writes that everything the children of Israel were commanded includes the Noahide commandments, yet the source of obligation does not remain the same (as Rabbi Chaim says, that after the Torah was given, one does not learn modesty from a cat. And note well that this does not necessarily contradict Rabbi Shimon Shkop’s words about monetary law.) [By the way, this is not related to Maimonides in Laws of Kings, where he says that the children of Israel too must do it because of God, since here he writes that for us there is still an additional layer.]
That is, seemingly the intention is that even the ethical commandments were prohibited by the Torah for additional reasons. Does this mean that they have religious reasons beyond ethics, or does it mean that the Torah redefined ethics, at least with respect to Israel?