Q&A: Is the Sabbath connected to morality?
Is the Sabbath connected to morality?
Question
You wrote in one of your columns that the Sabbath has nothing whatsoever to do with morality, but from looking at the verses it seems that, on the collective level and maybe even on the individual level, the Sabbath also has a moral dimension (even if it is not a moral obligation):
“(14) But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son, your daughter, your male servant, your female servant, your ox, your donkey, all your animals, and the stranger within your gates, so that your male servant and your female servant may rest as you do.” Is the Rabbi willing to accept that a commandment can have several reasons?
For example: morality, holiness, a symbol of the covenant with the Holy One, blessed be He, and recognition of His kingship, and so on…
Answer
Where exactly do you see morality here? Just as you rest, they too should rest. There may indeed be several reasons, so what?
Discussion on Answer
Or alternatively, the following verses:
“Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall cease, so that your ox and your donkey may rest, and the son of your maidservant and the stranger may be refreshed,”
and regarding the Sabbatical year:
(4) But in the seventh year there shall be a complete rest for the land, a Sabbath to the Lord; you shall not sow your field nor prune your vineyard.
(5) You shall not reap the aftergrowth of your harvest or gather the grapes of your untended vine; it shall be a year of complete rest for the land.
(6) And the Sabbath produce of the land shall be for you to eat—for you, your male servant, your female servant, your hired worker, and your resident stranger who live with you.
It seems pretty clear that the purpose here is moral: that the weaker members of society should also receive the privilege of rest and produce, which they would not receive if employers did not have compassion on them.
You have a serious problem in logic. Murder is also a moral prohibition. And so is theft. Does that mean that “you shall not murder” and “you shall not steal” are moral commands? If so, then why did you go to the rationales for the Sabbath and not to those prohibitions?
I thought that was too obvious. I wanted to say this specifically about commandments where it isn’t obvious to us that they are connected to morality,
that many of those also have a moral dimension. And I didn’t understand why you reject that.
You saw a few examples of commandments that do not deal with morality, or commandments that conflict with morality, and concluded that Jewish law does not deal with morality?
I couldn’t understand the claim…
I was trying to show that even commandments that do not necessarily look moral have a moral dimension (of course, not all commandments).
I’ll explain the structure of the discussion again, because in my opinion you’ve lost it. The explanation of my position appears in column 541. You challenged me, and I explained why that is not a challenge. I did not reject anything, and if in your view Jewish law does include morality, then fine. In my opinion it does not.
The additional reason is that in the place where I read your words, you attributed “you shall not murder” and “you shall not steal” to the moral plane, whereas regarding the Sabbath you said it has nothing to do with morality:
“Moral laws are laws that accord with the principles of morality, such as ‘you shall not murder,’ ‘honor your father and your mother,’ charity, and the like. Non-moral laws are laws that have nothing to do with morality, such as most dietary prohibitions (pig, orlah, leavened food, and the like), impurity and purity, Sabbath, all matters relating to sacred offerings, commandments dependent on the Land of Israel (perhaps except for gifts to the poor), and the like.” — and here I didn’t understand why you exclude the Sabbath from that. The further discussion about whether Jewish law deals with morality is also an important discussion, but my question came בעקבות your statement here, which seems to claim that there are indeed laws that deal with morality.
So you were commenting on my initial assumption? In my opinion you aren’t right even about that, but never mind.
That too, but I also still can’t understand your jump from the fact that there are anti-moral or non-moral laws to the conclusion that all of Jewish law does not deal with morality. After all, even if our intuition supplies us with basic moral truths, it still remains at a fairly basic level, and that is assuming we live today. In the pagan world there was no binding morality, and no proper moral conceptions, and therefore it was necessary to provide the Jewish people also with the more basic moral truths. But there are many commandments that have a moral dimension, even though they are not necessarily a moral obligation, which we would not have observed had the Torah not been given: returning lost property, the Sabbatical year, Sabbath, gleanings, forgotten sheaves, and the corner of the field, charity, almost the entire portion of Mishpatim, and also a significant part of the portion of Kedoshim, and more…
The statement that a person was created in the image of God, and that this grants him superior rights and innate rather than acquired dignity—those are innovations from the Torah, and therefore judging the Torah’s values and their meaning and original intent by the moral conception (the more refined one) seems like a serious mistake. Many verses about the way of the Lord being charity and justice, the words of the prophets, “righteous statutes and ordinances,” and the like, also show us the poet’s intent…
So why does the Rabbi insist that there is no connection between Jewish law and morality?
I explained it there, and I’ll repeat it briefly.
If Jewish law aspires to other values, and they can of course conflict with moral values, there is no reason to assume that it is itself also concerned with moral values. There are quite a few indications of this. For example, the need for “you shall not murder,” even though that is a simple matter of reason and we were required not to murder even beforehand (as with Cain). And likewise we see that the parameters of the legal prohibitions are not identical to the parameters of the moral prohibitions (murder in the Talmud and one who contracts another to kill, and so on). All the indications show that Jewish law is not interested in morality. There is much more evidence for this as well (for example, “and you shall do what is right and good” was not counted among the commandments by any of the medieval authorities (Rishonim); for example, Rashi at the very beginning asks why the Torah did not begin with “This month shall be for you,” while the entire book of Genesis deals with basic human and moral uprightness, and so on and so on).
That does not mean the content of the commands is not similar to moral commands. For example, “you shall not murder” obviously has similar content, but the command is meant to say that murder has a religious problem, not only a moral one. Jewish law deals only with that layer and not with the moral layer. And so too with the rest of the moral commandments.
Does the Torah have a moral influence on the world? Certainly. But that is not specifically through Jewish law, rather through the Torah’s other parts. In any case, in my opinion Jewish law is not engaged in that. And in my opinion, at least today, there is also nothing to learn morally from the Torah.
There is definitely reason to say that it is also concerned with moral values, because sometimes there is a clash of values, and sometimes the religious value overrides the moral value, or the national value overrides the moral value (assimilation, for example).
What you said about murder being a simple matter of reason may be true today, but even if once there was a natural feeling that it is forbidden to murder, it was not an absolute prohibition the way it became in the Ten Commandments.
The value of the human being was not so high, and the Torah turned that into a binding principle.
Besides, perhaps regarding murder that is true, but that is because it is the most basic moral value.
In the ancient Near East there were many moral distortions, which required a clear statement even in areas that today (in the Western culture in which we live) seem trivial to us.
True, Cain is punished, but it is not the death penalty as we later see the Torah command for murder, and it may very well be because the prohibition was not yet absolute.
True, the parameters of Jewish law are not always identical to morality, but that too often stems from anachronistically reading the Torah. We need to see what the laws were then, and consider the Torah’s value-oriented and moral direction (in the Written Torah) relative to the cultures of that time. There is certainly an attempt here at moral correction on a very high level, especially since, as I said, there are many commandments that do not express a moral obligation but nonetheless embody moral values, and a higher moral level than the basic demands of “you shall not murder” and the like.
“And you shall do what is right and good” does not need to be included among the commandments, because it is in the category of a general statement like:
“(5) You shall keep My statutes and My ordinances, which a person shall do and live by them; I am the Lord.
(8) You shall keep My statutes and perform them; I am the Lord who sanctifies you.
(31) You shall keep My commandments and perform them; I am the Lord.” — and the like. Besides, I am not at all sure that the command “and you shall do what is right and good” is a command specifically about morality, for it says, “(18) And you shall do what is right and good in the eyes of the Lord”—which implies that it is apparently speaking of the commandments that are good in the eyes of the Lord, and not according to human intuition.
True, the book of Genesis deals with morality and basic humanity, but it remains there and does not progress. The Torah confirms existing intuitions, turns them into obligations, and develops them to a much higher moral level. I am not saying that this is the only thing the Torah does, but it is quite clear that this is one of its central directions.
I am not speaking specifically about the details of Jewish law, but about the Torah’s intention and the intention of its author. From a simple and straightforward reading of the Torah, it is quite clear that there are very serious intentions there regarding general moral and social improvement. There are many commandments, statements, and verses that emphasize this, and I do not see a good reason to deny it just because on the level of details we do not always know the reason for the commandment.
The Torah’s moral revolution is enormous, and I think that to say this is merely accidental is making a mockery of the Torah.
True, you are right that there is a basic moral intuition, but with enough religious education—even that intuition disappears. In a pagan world that operates according to the urges of various gods, when we see both from the Torah and from scholarship that the conception of the human being in those cultures was so low, with endless cruelty and a distorted moral outlook, one must indeed command even those moral rules that seem trivial to us. All the more so after 400 years in which the Jewish people were immersed in that culture.
A few examples:
(30) Take care lest you be ensnared after them, after they have been destroyed before you, and lest you inquire after their gods, saying, “How did these nations serve their gods, that I too may do likewise?”
(31) You shall not do so to the Lord your God, for every abomination of the Lord, which He hates, they have done for their gods; for even their sons and daughters they burn in the fire to their gods.
(9) When you come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to do according to the abominations of those nations.
(10) There shall not be found among you anyone who passes his son or daughter through the fire, one who practices divination, a soothsayer, an augur, or a sorcerer,
(11) or one who casts spells, or one who consults a ghost or a familiar spirit, or one who inquires of the dead.
(12) For whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord, and because of these abominations the Lord your God is dispossessing them from before you.
(13) You shall be wholehearted with the Lord your God.
It is completely understandable that in such a situation, the people needed clear statements also in the realm of morality. After all, it is not likely that all this behavior stems only from impulse, but from a distorted worldview that requires a total change from one end to the other.
(6) You shall keep and do them, for that is your wisdom and your understanding in the eyes of the nations, who shall hear all these statutes and say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.”
(7) For what great nation is there that has gods so near to it as the Lord our God whenever we call upon Him?
(8) And what great nation is there that has righteous statutes and ordinances like all this Torah that I set before you today?
To have compassion on the weak and give them rights like your own—is that not morality?
Did they change the definition of morality?
After all, giving charity is also not a moral obligation, and yet it is considered a moral act, since it helps the weak. The same goes for “you shall honor the presence of the elderly,” and the like. To have compassion on the weak, and give them rights, even though it does not improve your profits—isn’t it obvious that this belongs to the realm of morality?