Q&A: Where Is Morality in God, in the Torah, and in Jewish Law?
Where Is Morality in God, in the Torah, and in Jewish Law?
Question
Hello Rabbi, I heard during your lectures that you maintain that morality is not relative, that although not all of us feel the same way, nevertheless there is a divine morality (or an absolute one, if you prefer) that is true morality, which the Torah tries to explain to us.
I am trying to understand how this fits together, if we see that the Sages explicitly disagree with divine morality in their halakhic rulings, whether regarding “an eye for an eye” or “the ox shall be stoned and its owner also shall be put to death”, and in other cases too we see that the Sages adopt a morality different from what is written in the Torah.
Moshe Halbertal as well, in his book Interpretive Revolutions in the Making, shows that the Sages were guided by their own personal moral outlook, and of course there are the words of the Vilna Gaon — Jewish law uproots Scripture.
In light of all this, does Jewish law have anything at all to do with divine morality?
If we do not derive morality from Scripture but rather interpret it as we wish, how can one say that there is a morality we took from somewhere other than our own personal inclinations?ֿ
And if morality is indeed our own personal inclination, how can one say that we are clarifying some kind of divine morality? Or even that such morality exists? (Of course, what I wrote does not *contradict* the existence of divine morality, it is simply a transcendent morality that is in no way accessible to us, and therefore any discussion of it is devoid of meaning, at least as I understand it)
An additional question comes up here, if the Sages are the authority, and they can undermine the Torah, does God have any place in this equation? Are we servants of God or servants of the Sages?
After all, even the rules that limit the Sages (supposedly) were themselves created by the Sages, and even about those there is dispute (although I am not expert in the subject, but that is how it seems)
Answer
I don’t know what you were listening to during my lectures, but you didn’t hear that from me. In my view, morality is indeed not relative, but there is no divine morality and non-divine morality, no Jewish morality and non-Jewish morality, and certainly one does not learn it from the Torah. See column 541 and much more here on the site.