Learning from the Past: Considering the Ethics of Appropriation

Abstract

Encountering the life, work, and thought of Rabbi Simḥah Zissel Ziv from my orientation as a normative Christian social ethicist, I found myself both fascinated and horrified (at times) by his ideas and his project of musar. Mostly, though, I found him enigmatic. Coming from a Calvinist tradition, I found that his obsessive concern for people's “evil inclinations” (139) was familiar territory and a theological understanding of human nature that I find deeply troubling in my own tradition. John Calvin famously referred to humans as no more than worms and supported the doctrine of “total depravity,” which holds that humans are slaves to sin due to our “fallen nature.” which is a result of the actions of Adam and Eve in disobeying God.As a Christian social ethicist, more specifically as a Protestant and a scholar-activist, my own scholarly work and intellectual interest is in thinking critically and faithfully about contemporary social problems and crises and how to mine the resources of my faith tradition (Christianity) to figure out how Christianity and Christian beliefs have been a part of shaping and forming particular problems (like racism, poverty, or sexual violence) as well as to think creatively, strategically, and faithfully about how the wisdom and moral traditions of Christianity can be brought to bear in helping Christians understand faithful ways to respond to these social problems. I became an ethicist, not a theologian, given my understanding of Christianity as calling its followers to live differently in the world based on particular beliefs about justice and love that ought to shape the lives of Christians in particular moral behavior. This interest in moral education and normative ethics, or how people “ought” to behave, offers a bridge between my work and the work of Simḥah Zissel.Despite some of the problems I had with his patriarchal biases and theology, I admired Simḥah Zissel's paradoxically rigorous expectation for human perfection and his prudential allowance for the human execution of these expectations. On the one hand, he demanded that people change themselves entirely, modeling themselves on an ideal of perfect virtue and battling against every untoward impulse within the soul. And yet, these same ideals were tempered by a certain realism about what human beings can withstand (139) and a certain pragmatism evident in his belief that people should be judged on their ability rather than an abstract standard of excellence (139). I was particularly inspired by his argument that in order to guard against socially destructive behavior, a person is required instead to engage in socially constructive behavior (145).Clearly, as a Christian ethicist, the idea that musar, or moral education, ought to form a central aspect of studying Judaism made imminent sense to me. While interested in the historical role that Simḥah Zissel has played in the development of Jewish understandings of moral education, I also approach his work with an eye toward what it can teach me and contemporary communities of faith about the task of moral education. I find the question of what and how we learn from the past increasingly challenging and intriguing.What I found most attractive about Simḥah Zissel's development of musar were the methodological aspects of his understanding of how moral development takes place. While I certainly think the content of his musar teachings is worth serious discussion and critical assessment as we think about the value of his teachings in contemporary settings—his methodological approach to musar is where I find his vision potentially useful for contemporary models of moral education, models that would aid in developing moral character in the twenty-first century in ways that challenge and combat the moral laxity and loss of social networks and community that were clearly important to Simḥah Zissel.There are three insightful aspects of his methodological approach to musar that I would like to highlight—the slow pace of change; understanding moral education as a pathway or journey rather than a destination; and his emphasis on right action and not simply contemplation. Let's look at each of these in turn.The first important insight about moral education associated with Simḥah Zissel's form of musar is the fact that moral education takes a lifetime. Highlighting both the necessity and deep challenge of moral education was the striking image of a tree that has spent many years growing in a particular but (presumably) unhealthy way. Pulling it quickly to try to make it stand straight would certainly snap the branches and cause it to break. Simḥah Zissel points out that redirecting the growth of the tree so that it might once again become healthy is possible, but it must be done slowly and carefully and the process of retraining the tree in how to grow in healthy ways will take a long time. Part of what makes this image so striking is that his example is that of a tree. While I am no horticulturalist, if I were confronted with a distorted and unhealthy tree it would never even occur to me to consider what needed to be done to retrain and redirect the growth the tree. I, and many people I would imagine, are far more likely to simply cut it down and plant a new tree. It's so much easier to raise a tree up right from the beginning.This, I think, is precisely the reason that the image of the tree is so effective. In a broken world shaped by poverty, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, intolerance, war and so much human fragility—not everyone has the opportunity to grow in healthy ways from infancy through childhood and into adulthood. In this way his image has a two-fold resonance. Not only is Simḥah Zissel highlighting the notion that musar is slow and methodical, requiring daily practice and attention; he was also highlighting the fact even the most seemingly broken and twisted among us can be reclaimed and reformed through careful training and attention. If we shouldn't give up on a tree, then surely we cannot give up on those juvenile delinquents or criminals or dropouts or homeless or any of the other folks who live on the margins of society. Of course, even in his own day, the idea that musar was not simply a body of knowledge to be mastered but more akin to a spiritual practice was not always a popular notion. In our Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram culture, the idea that attending to our own moral health requires time and energy and that progress is often slow will be a difficult sell. Nevertheless, there is deep truth in this insight as well as a deep potential for addressing some of the cultural problems we face that cannot be solved overnight.His second insight is related to the slow pace of musar but distinct as well. Simḥah Zissel holds that musar is not something to be achieved, not a destination or a status that one can possess. Rather, musar is a pathway, or even better, it ought to be understood as the journey that we make as flawed human creatures ever seeking to better ourselves and to better the world. This sense of musar as an ongoing struggle is more akin to thinking about musar simply as the task of being human, which helps us to think about musar as a spiritual practice rather than a spiritual gift or state of being that one can reach or achieve. Recognizing the task of morality as an ongoing duty that needs to be practiced, refined, and improved can also be a helpful corrective to our achievement-oriented culture, which glorifies mastery and dominance, sometimes without recognizing or appreciating the important role that discipline and practice play in shaping character. There is a certain humility required to recognize that everyone, every day, has more to learn about how to be a better person; that there is no point at which one arrives at a state of perfection. In a world that values independence, control, and achieving excellence, the idea that these goals are not only illusive but never really achievable threatens to render our view of morality as a Sisyphean task. However, because the daily spiritual practice of musar has the potential to yield fruit that can enrich our lives and our communities—it is far from futile or pointless. The humility required to recognize musar not only as a daily spiritual practice but to value and embrace such a task flies in the face of contemporary American life.Throughout the book, Claussen focuses on the way in which Simḥah Zissel places deep emphasis on the importance of understanding musar as an active principle rather than a contemplative exercise. Claussen says that he made it clear to his students that “they should not be like ‘the philosophers’ who valued contemplation of goodness over acts of goodness; nor should they be like typical yeshiva students who learned to privilege the study of Talmud over the performance of good deeds.” (144) It is this final methodological characteristic that I find the most intriguing and heartening aspect of Simḥah Zissel's approach, because it relates to my own hesitations about the danger of virtue ethics more generally to emphasize the shaping of individual character traits at the expense of paying attention to social injustice.While I have not seen evidence that Simḥah Zissel's understanding of musar attends to the problem of social injustice, what I do find intriguing is that his approach to musar moves beyond the virtuous behavior of the individual to take into consideration how moral relationships are built in the communities in which we live. This fundamental question of the moral fabric of communities is, ultimately, a social question, and Simḥah Zissel's answer to this question does establish a clear vision of communities that embody relationships of justice. His understanding of economic and social cooperation in the community as the work of love in action is very similar to Adam Smith's description of how moral sentiments function in society, despite the way in which economists have interpreted Smith's work as a paragon of individualism in the succeeding two hundred years.Prior to writing The Wealth of Nations, Smith, who was a moral philosopher, not an economist, wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In it, he describes the social relations that exist within groups of people and how those social relations function to shape human behavior. He begins with compassion, which he describes as enabling people to feel the joys and miseries of others. Ultimately, Smith argues that the fact that human behavior is shaped by compassion is what enables people to develop the relationships that create caring and connected communities. Smith and Simḥah Zissel, while separated by a nearly a century, shared a vision of communities tied together by relationships of solidarity that emerged from deep feelings of compassion and mutuality. Each of them recognized the importance of being able to see the other as self as the foundation for healthy and moral communities.Smith wrote the Theory of Moral Sentiments while living in Glasgow in the mid-eighteenth century. At that time, Glasgow was the second largest city in Scotland and probably comprised around 25,000 people. Simḥah Zissel's musar philosophy was developed in nineteenth-century Lithuania, where he studied in the city of Kaunus with a population of fewer than 60,000 and lived most of his life in the small town contexts of Kelm and Grobin, where the populations were likely three to four thousand. While Kaunus and Glasgow were very large cities by the standards in the 1700s and 1800s, the cities in which these men shaped their ethics pale in comparison to cities in the twenty-first century. In 2015 there were thirty-five mega-cities with populations that ranged from 11 to 38 million people. One of the many crises that we face as a human species is figuring out what it means to live in community when our population has topped 7 billion people and is set to reach 11 billion by the end of the century. While xenophobia has always plagued humankind, the massive increase in scale in our living environments and the growth of urbanization have contributed to an entirely different social landscape than the one that faced Smith and Simḥah Zissel.And yet, both of these scholars faced similarly shifting sets of global, political, and economic circumstances—even if they differed in scale. Each of these men recognized and valued not only the importance of virtue and virtuous behavior in shaping civil and just societies, but also recognized the important relationship between the two. Simḥah Zissel's attention not only to the behavior of individuals but also his recognition that community relationships rely on the integrity and moral uprightness of its citizens represents the best side of virtue ethics. These scholars' recognition of the essential importance of seeing ourselves in others is something that is sorely lacking in contemporary society.Economists who have misread Adam Smith have largely done so because they think that economics is a science that functions outside of the realm of morality. Economists who believe that there are economic “laws” that shape and guide human behavior in the marketplace have failed to recognize what both Smith and Simḥah Zissel knew so well, that moral behavior must not only be taught and learned but that it must be practiced on a daily basis. Simḥah Zissel's notion that the best antidote to immoral behavior is working daily to engage in intentionally moral behavior is a practice that could have an enormously transformative effect on our global economy if it were put into practice by those elites who set banking and trade policy. Likewise, if the owners of capital truly saw themselves in the bodies and lives of their line workers, exploitation would be far less likely.So, I will end where I began. As a Christian ethicist reading a nineteenth-century Jewish ethicist, there are two important points where I might learn from my encounter with Simḥah Zissel. First, what might his ethical vision contribute to my own thinking about moral theory and globalization and how humans are called to live ethically in the twenty-first century? Second, how do we effectively and respectfully use and appropriate the work of historical ethicists, theologians, and scholars in contemporary scholarship?In my own work on building justice-oriented models of global integration and community I have relied heavily on the idea of solidarity as a model of building the kind of relationships that Simḥah Zissel describes as coming to see oneself as a partner to others rather than a competitor.1 The relationships of partnership that allow one to see the other as a moral equal, on the same level as oneself and to love the other accordingly (146–47) are essential the kind of relationships that I have described as rooted in mutuality. In addition to these theoretical similarities in the foundations of our work, Simḥah Zissel's attention to honoring the slow pace of change; understanding moral education as a pathway or journey rather than a destination; and his emphasis on right action over against contemplation are useful tools in building a moral theory that empowers people to shape communities of justice and relationships of solidarity. But, ultimately, Simḥah Zissel's vision of musar is a virtue ethic, and while these steps help to build a moral theory, any moral theory that seeks toward social justice must also incorporate an element of social analysis and social change. While I remarked earlier that his metaphor of retraining the tree challenged us to think more intentionally about how we think about the support of those people in society who might not have had the benefit of growing up in a sound and healthy community from the time they were seedlings, this vision of focusing on the support and “retraining” of the tree through the practice of musar ultimately locates the individual virtue and actions of individuals as the proximate cause of social problems. In an unjust social world that marginalizes and dehumanizes people on a daily basis, attention to addressing the structures of injustice in our world demands at least as much of our concern as attending to the moral education and support of the individuals who have been harmed by those structures. Any moral theory for the twenty-first century would do well to attend to the tasks that Simḥah Zissel has laid out for us in recognizing the nature of moral action and behavior, but it must also demonstrate equally rigorous attention to the structures of society that diminish and undermine human integrity and community well-being.Finally, the question of how we engage and appropriate the work of our predecessors remains a challenging one. Adam Smith's moral philosophy has been deeply misread is ways that have allowed his observations about economic activity to be completely detached from his moral anthropology and his normative interest in human behavior. This has led to disastrous consequences as economists have extracted the portions of his writings that serve their purposes and ignored the broader moral framework within which Smith envisioned those economic transactions occurring. In the last few pages of the book, Claussen alludes to the ways in which the work of Simḥah Zissel has been recovered and used in Orthodox Jewish communities as well as rising interest in musar in non-Orthodox Jewish communities. It is clear that each of these communities are engaged in selective redaction of Simḥah Zissel's work, incorporating those aspects of his thought and teachings that correspond to their own interests and moral agenda. I would be very interested to hear Claussen reflect more deeply on the ethics of appropriation in relation to the work of Simḥah Zissel and the Orthodox and non-Orthodox communities that he discusses. What is lost and what is gained in this task of appropriation and are there ways of engaging his work that undermine the integrity of Simḥah Zissel's vision?Moral education, like many aspects of religion and culture, changes its shape over time. Discerning how to embody and express one's religious belief in a changing world is the perennial task of any living religious tradition. Clearly, Simḥah Zissel and his Lithuanian musar compatriots found themselves struggling with aspects of modernity that were entering into Jewish life and thought through the Haskalah movement in Central and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. As Claussen has noted, Simḥah Zissel's development of a yeshiva model that incorporated both study of Torah and musar plainly showed the positive influence of that movement on his understanding and practice of Judaism. It remains to be seen how thinkers like Rabbi Simḥah Zissel Ziv will influence contemporary ethicists as we develop new moral theories for the twenty-first century that can help our communities learn new ways of thriving and building communities of deep accountability and compassion.