Abstract

Jewish Virtue Ethics and Compassion for Animals: A Model from the Musar Movement Geoffrey Claussen The Musar movement was a nineteenth‐century Jewish pietistic movement focused on the cultivation of moral virtue. It emerged in Lithuania under the leadership of Rabbi Israel Lipkin Salanter (1810–1883), who built on a long‐standing Jewish tradition of focusing on “Musar,” the disciplined cultivation of moral virtue. Salanter sought to develop a mass movement focused on Musar, stressing the importance of practices that might help people to identify their moral weaknesses and improve their moral character. He gave particular attention to the ways in which irrational and generally selfish emotions and desires could be harnessed in service of reason. Drawing on a long‐standing tradition in Jewish thought, Salanter saw reason as what distinguished human beings from animals, but he saw reason as incredibly weak, in need of support from the more “animalistic” parts of the human soul. Salanter wrote that most people conducted themselves like animals, drawn after their desires without any rational, moral reflection,1 but he also held out the hope that the animal impulses within the human soul could be tamed and transformed. Just as animals can be tamed, he wrote, so that their natures are changed for the better, so too a person can change his nature from evil to good.2 This is the primary way in which animality is discussed in Salanter’s writings, and the theme of becoming less like an animal by harnessing one’s animal impulses continues in the writings of Salanter’s disciples. Discussions along these lines, as well as other reflections on animals and animality, are especially prominent in the writings of Salanter’s senior disciple, Rabbi Zissel Ziv (1824–1898). Zissel stresses that a human being must know “his own animal soul,” the often‐inhumane tendencies that pervade human nature; his proof text for this is a verse from the book of Proverbs (11:12) stating that a “righteous person knows the soul of his animal”—“his animal” here being his own animality.3 Along Aristotelian lines, and following the language of Maimonides, Zissel describes how that animality must be disciplined so that it is under the control of reason; if a human being does not properly employ his reason, he is merely “an animal in the form of a human being.”4 Above all, reason should direct people to display proper compassion in response to the suffering of others—to “share the burdens” of their fellows, as Zissel puts it—and human beings who lack such compassion are particularly animal‐like. For Zissel, people do not reflect the “image of God,” by which they should be distinguished from animals, if they do not reflect the divine qualities of compassionate love.5 Those who “do not feel the pain of their fellows” are, rather, “comparable to beasts.”6 Given this sort of language, Zissel would not seem to hold non‐human animals in high esteem. But it is worth noting that his judgments are leveled against human beings who act like animals, not against animals themselves. Indeed, in one of his discourses, he concludes that animals are on a higher level than people who act like animals. For the man who “has only an animal spirit in him,” Zissel writes, “the animal is better than him, for it fulfils its purpose,” whereas he does not.7 All of God’s creatures, in Zissel’s vision, are expected to serve God according to their capacities. Human beings are expected to serve God by acting with rationality and with love, but they generally resist their task. Zissel describes animals, on the other hand, as readily “surrendering themselves to be servants of God”8 and as possessing an intuitive understanding of God’s existence and power.9 Human nature leaves human beings as far less disposed to be dedicated to God. Zissel sees a particularly brutish sort of animality as characterizing human nature, as “man is born a wild ass” (Job 11:12).10 He would seem to share the judgment of Israel Salanter that most people act like untamed animals and are far from fulfilling their human purpose. Still, Zissel indicates that...

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