Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

As this issue of the Journal of Jewish Ethics goes to press, the editors (and a good portion of the editorial board) have just arrived home from the Society of Jewish Ethics annual meeting in Chicago. For the first time since January of 2020, SJE members met in person, alongside scholars and activists from the Society of Christian Ethics and the Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics. We heard presentations and panel discussions on religious freedom, reproductive ethics, natural law, the politics of repentance, and Jewish ethics in comparative historical perspective, among many others. And although the SJE is a relatively small scholarly society, the lively sounds of spirited conversation and debate at the end of each session suggested a much larger gathering.Like the SJE annual meeting, this journal features some of the most compelling, creative, or, indeed, controversial research in contemporary Jewish ethics—a field that includes serious attention to classical Jewish sources, history, and contemporary ethical and political thought, as well as an ongoing critical evaluation of the relationship between these.The first two articles in this issue consider ethical questions around Covid-19 vaccination, reflecting the amount of scholarship emerging on this most immediate of topics—recognizing too that the tragedies and controversies of Covid-19 may well be relevant to other, as-yet-unseen, future health crises. Ranana Leigh Dine’s essay, “Publicizing the Miracle of Vaccination,” focuses not on the ethics of vaccination itself, but the ethics of sharing one’s own vaccination status through the thoroughly contemporary phenomenon of the “vaccine selfie.” Dine creatively draws on the Hanukkah theme of pirsumei nisa, “publicizing the miracle,” alongside the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Mara Benjamin to argue that the vaccine selfie might contribute to a Jewish “visual ethics” of thanksgiving and embodied obligation. The essay by Zohar Lederman, Shmuel Lederman, and Ghada Majadli, meanwhile, offers a public health analysis of vaccination amid geopolitical conflict, arguing that the state of Israel has a specific ethical obligation to provide Covid-19 vaccines to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.The second pair of articles in this issue return to major thinkers in modern Jewish philosophy. Simeon Theojaya’s essay considers the source of ethics in Levinas and Kant, noting that both emphasize the pressing nature of ethics even as their philosophical foundations differ, and analyzing Levinas’s notion of “proximity” to the Other as a powerful foundation for ethical response. Vincent Calabrese performs a critical analysis of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s writings on halakhah, or Jewish law, and considers the relationship between such law and contemporary constructive work in Jewish ethics and thought.This issue also features three book reviews on a pleasingly diverse array of topics, from a sweeping overview of Jewish ethical and moral queries to a biography of an influential and violent rabbi. These works, and their thoughtful reviews, testify to the broad spectrum of scholarship that might fall under the category of Jewish ethics. Such ongoing scholarship allows our conversations to continue long after the academic conferences have finished.