To Be a Holy People: Jewish Tradition and Ethical Values

Abstract

The proverbial man from Mars landing on Earth would see very few differences between Eugene Korn and me. We are both rabbis; we both earned our Ph.D. at Columbia in philosophy with dissertations in moral theory under the same mentor, Professor David Sidorsky, within three years of each other; and we both have devoted considerable thought, time, and energy to interfaith relations. So two things should not be surprising: (1) I love this book for reasons that I will describe below; (2) the differences between us are largely, I think, a function of the fact that he is an Orthodox rabbi and I am a Conservative one, not just by upbringing or by accident but, in both our cases, as a result of a lot of thought.Part of why I really like this book and hope that it gets wide readership within the Orthodox community and beyond is because of Rabbi Korn’s sheer courage in addressing controversial issues within the Orthodox community. Despite my demurs mentioned below, I agree with him on every one of the issues he addresses, and I hope that this book will convince many of his Orthodox confreres about those issues—specifically, the needs to include women and homosexual Jews in Jewish life, to be open to engage in dialogue and cooperate with people of other faiths on mutually beneficial projects, and the moral inadmissibility of accepting donated hearts but not contributing to the number of hearts available for transplant. Even more fundamentally, I also like this book for the methodology and theology it espouses, which I will discuss below, but so that I can end on the positive note that I want people reading this review to take away from it, let me first state some of my demurs.First, this is very much an Orthodox book written for an Orthodox audience. The publisher publishes primarily for that audience, and the only people cited are secular philosophers, Christians, classical Jewish thinkers, or—and mostly—other Orthodox rabbis. Apart from one citation of Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rabbi Korn mentions not a single Jew who is not Orthodox. I understand the political reasons why Rabbi Korn has done this: he is already asking Orthodox Jews to stretch beyond the four cubits of Jewish law to respond to contemporary moral issues from the underlying theological and moral foundations of Judaism—namely, a good God who is moral and demands morality of us, and human beings created in the image of that God. So to include thinkers from other streams of Judaism who have written about the issues he addresses might undermine the acceptance of his message within the Orthodox world. That, though, is a shame, for it means that he could not learn from non-Orthodox Jews who take similar positions but with different reasoning or nuances or argue against conflicting positions from those quarters’ objections.This Orthodox bent is at the heart of some of my other concerns about this book. Specifically, first, Rabbi Korn rightfully argues for compassion for LGBTQ Jews but “all without violating the biblical prescription against male homosexual relations” (p. 67). Frankly, that is not enough. I am one of the three Conservative rabbis who wrote the responsum for the Conservative movement that narrows that prohibition to male anal sex and permits other forms of adult, consensual, safe, and private male (and female) homosexual sex, authorizes Conservative rabbis to officiate at same-sex weddings for Jews, and permits Conservative seminaries to ordain otherwise qualified gay or lesbian Jews.1 Our reasoning was based on the same principle that Rabbi Korn invokes throughout his book—kevot ha-beriyyot, honor due human beings—and based on the overwhelming evidence that keeping homosexuals in the closet has led to much higher rates of smoking, drug abuse, and suicide among LGBTQ youth and young adults.2 Under those conditions, I would suggest, the acceptance and compassion that Rabbi Korn advocates are just not enough.Second, Rabbi Korn argues forcefully that Jews should respect people of other faiths. What about Jews of other streams? I am writing this after yet another incident at the Wall when Haredi Jews made an egalitarian service at the Robinson’s Arch part of the Wall, designated by local authorities for this purpose, impossible to hold. Worse, for decades, the Israeli government, pressured by the Orthodox parties within a variety of coalitions, has spent significant amounts of money supporting Orthodox synagogues, schools, youth programs, and rabbis and very, very little, if anything, for the those of the other streams of Judaism. How is that respect for one’s fellow Jew, let alone fellow human being?Third, as a Conservative rabbi, I agree with Rabbi Korn fully that “viewing the Jewish tradition with only the eye of uncritical obedience to formal law or with only the eye of ethical values distorts our vision” (101). The former of those assumes that Jewish law should be obeyed without question as to its authority or even its substance: just do it! That, though, is more rigid on both counts than either the Torah or Rabbinic literature. The Bible articulates no less than eight reasons to adhere to Jewish law, and the Rabbis add four more,3 so “just do it!” badly misrepresents the philosophical sophistication of the classical Jewish tradition. Furthermore, every page of the Talmud and the vast rabbinic literature since then manifests hearty debates about exactly what obedience to Jewish law entails, so to pretend that there is only one way to adhere to Jewish law or that any particular way should be immune to continuing evaluation and maybe even change disregards the mode and tenor of Jewish law over the centuries and is therefore a mistaken and historically inauthentic form of Judaism. On the other hand, to pretend that Judaism is only ethics devoid of law also misrepresents the character of the Jewish tradition; the most recent, 1999 Platform Statement of the Central Conference of American [Reform] Rabbis recognizes this in speaking the language of mitzvot, which it translates as “sacred obligations.”4 So what Rabbi Korn and I both advocate is more nuanced than either end of that spectrum—namely, a combination of commitment to Jewish law for any or many of a variety of reasons and a simultaneous willingness to evaluate how any particular law should be observed in our time or applied to a particular circumstance, and one must do that legal reasoning with fundamental Jewish theological and moral convictions in mind, just as they have shaped much of Jewish law in the past. What is missing in Rabbi Korn’s presentation, though—and what makes it clear that his intended audience is only Orthodox—is any argument as to why a Jew should obey Jewish law in the first place. Orthodox Jews may take that commitment for granted, but non-Orthodox Jews certainly do not.Fourth, Rabbi Korn discusses the apparent immorality of God’s commandments in the Bible to eliminate the seven nations of Canaan and also Amalek without offering terms of peace, contrary to the plain meaning of Deuteronomy 20:10-11 and the way Maimonides later codifies the law. On the moral level, Rabbi Korn argues cogently to interpret these commandments, as the tradition has, very narrowly to apply only to those in the distant past, for “any literal implementation of the imperative to destroy without limit individuals considered to be evil incarnate strikes fear in the hearts of morally sober persons” (120), for it is all too easy to identify people with whom you disagree as being such people. Historically, as he points out, Christians have classified Jews and Muslims as such, and more recently Jewish nationalists have categorized as Amalek all Palestinians, Jewish leftists, and Jewish politicians seeking peace with the Palestinians, including Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, z”l. All of this is morally and legally indefensible and downright dangerous. Theologically, though, the biblical commandments to annihilate the seven Canaanite nations and Amalek poses a major theological problem, since God would seem to have commanded something He knew to be immoral even in the biblical era. If the thesis means that God too has an evolving moral consciousness, then God’s knowledge and being undergo change, which opens up a host of theological problems for Maimonides’ conception of God, to which time and change do not apply (pp. 119-120).This theological problem disappears, of course, if you either, contrary to Maimonides, understand God—or, at least, our conceptions of God—to be dynamic and evolving, or if you understand the Torah as documents written by human beings and reflective of what they understood God to want of us at various times. The latter option, though, is probably closed to Orthodox writers, and it is one of the ways in which Conservative, Reform, and secular biblical scholars differ from Orthodox ones.Finally—and this is really a quibble—Rabbi Korn writes, “Responsa on strictly ritual questions lack moral dimension and have no need for these values” (71). By and large, that is correct, but not always. My father told me the first story I ever heard about Jewish law. My grandparents lived across the street from a large Orthodox synagogue. Because of the proximity, my grandparents often hosted people who showed up on Friday and needed a place to stay for the Sabbath. One Friday afternoon my grandmother sent my father, then a lad of fifteen, to ask Rabbi Solomon Scheinfeld whether there would be such guests that week. Rabbi Scheinfeld served that congregation from 1902 to 1943, and, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica (14:952), was the “acknowledged rabbinic head of Milwaukee’s Orthodox community during his tenure.” When my father entered the rabbi’s office, Rabbi Scheinfeld was in the process of deciding whether a chicken was kosher. As he turned the slaughtered chicken over in his hands, he asked the woman who had brought it many questions about her and the physical and economic health of her husband and family. After he pronounced the chicken kosher and the woman left the room, my father asked him why he had asked so many questions about her and her family. The rabbi turned to my father and said, “If you think that the kosher status of chickens depends only on their physical state, you understand nothing about Jewish law!” So sometimes decisions about ritual matters do depend on the welfare of the people asking them.Aside from Rabbi Korn’s treatment of the specific topics he addresses, what I really like about this book is its methodology and its theological and moral grounding of all halakhic reasoning. Methodologically, as he says, Though these [Western] religions venerate their sacred scriptures, none of these contradictory sacred scriptures define a static “essence” of its religion. Rather, it is how the living religious community interprets, prioritizes, and lives the meanings of its sacred texts that defines its religion (199–200, his italics).This means that it is a dangerous error to presume that any of the three Western religions (and it is undoubtedly true for Asian religions as well) is defined by any single or group of texts in its sacred liturgy. In fact, as Rabbi Korn illustrates, there are texts arguing for peace with people of other faiths and texts arguing for punishing or annihilating them in all three Western religions, including Jewish ones. Choosing to act on the bellicose texts has led historically to the destruction of the ancient Canaanites and Amalek by our people and considerable persecution of Jews by Christians and Muslims at various times and places. If people of any of these religions are going to be able to separate themselves from these toxic texts, they must fully use the texts within their traditions that advocate respect for others and pluralism and narrow or altogether sideline those that urge annihilation of other nations or faiths—but that is a choice that they both can and should make; people of each religion have the ability to make these choices and therefore also the responsibility for them. If they and their leaders instead choose to be chauvinistic and bellicose, they do so with catastrophic practical and moral danger to everyone involved, including themselves. Furthermore, methodologically, they do so asserting knowledge of what God wants of us that they have no right to claim: we all must adopt a position of epistemological humility vis-à-vis what we think God wants of us, for while God may be omniscient, no human being is.Theologically, for any Jewish (or Christian or Muslim) moral or legal treatment of an issue, Rabbi Korn correctly, in my opinion, places front and center the need to put God and human beings created in the image of God. Doing that gives Rabbi Korn—and hopefully all of his readers—the courage to say that adherents of these faiths who use their sacred texts to discriminate against women, gay or lesbian people, or people of other faiths—or people of the same faith—are acting both unwisely and cruelly in the process of interpreting and applying their tradition that way, and they are also ignoring the fundamental convictions of all three Western faiths that God is moral and demands morality of us and that each human being is created in the image of God and therefore worthy of safekeeping and respect. A fundamental respect for a moral God and for all people created in God’s image requires us to limit morally problematic texts to ancient times, as the Jewish tradition has done with regard to the conquest of the nations of Canaan and Amalek, or to justify in some other way that those texts are no longer authoritative to guide our actions, as the classical Rabbis did with capital punishment (M. Makkot 1:10). On the other hand, again like the classical Rabbis, we should seek to expand those texts whose broader interpretation can expand our respect and compassion for others, as Rav did, for example, in ruling that an employer whose employees had broken a barrel of his wine must return their cloaks to them rather than keep them as payment for the lost wine and pay their wages besides, based on Proverbs 2:20, “That you may walk in the way of good men and keep the paths of the righteous” (B. Bava Metzi’a 83a) and as the Rabbis did in developing the Torah’s demands that we not oppress other people (Leviticus 25:14, 17) to include oppression in business and also in how we talk to and about each other (M. Bava Metzi’a 4:10). It is only with that kind of fundamental mutual respect for other human beings that we can fulfill the command to “do what is right and good in God’s eyes” (Deuteronomy 6:18).Finally, to buttress Rabbi Korn’s argument yet further about the moral core at the heart of Judaism, I would point to the Talmud’s own discussion of how to think of the 613 commandments. When discussing various ways in which they were summarized in biblical texts, they mention not a single ritual commandment; they are all ethical: Rabbi Simlai continued: King David came and established the 613 mitzvot upon eleven mitzvot, as it is written: “A Psalm of David. Lord, who shall sojourn in Your Tabernacle? Who shall dwell upon Your sacred mountain? [1] He who walks wholeheartedly, and [2] works righteousness, and [3] speaks truth in his heart. [4] Who has no slander upon his tongue, [5] nor does evil to his neighbor, [6] nor takes up reproach against his relative. [7] In whose eyes a vile person is despised, and [8] he honors those who fear the Lord; [9] he takes an oath to his own detriment, and [9] changes not. [10] He neither gives his money with interest, [11] nor takes a bribe against the innocent. He who performs these shall never be moved” (Psalms, chapter 15) . . . Isaiah came and established the 613 mitzvot upon six, as it is written: “He who walks righteously, and speaks uprightly; he who despises the gain of oppressions, who shakes his hands from holding of bribes, who stops his ears from hearing blood, and shuts his eyes from looking upon evil” (Isaiah 33:15). Micah came and established the 613 mitzvot upon three, as it is written: “It has been told to you, O man, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you; only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). . . . Isaiah then established the 613 mitzvot upon two, as it is stated: “So says the Lord: Observe justice and perform righteousness” (Isaiah 56:1). Amos came and established the 613 mitzvot upon one, as it is stated: “So says the Lord to the house of Israel: Seek Me and live” (Amos 5:4) . . . Habakkuk came and established the 613 mitzvot upon one, as it is stated: “But the righteous person shall live by his faith” (Habakkuk 2:4).(B. Makkot 24a)The Rabbis certainly valued Jewish rituals—they devote full tractates to them—and so do I. In the end, though, this aptly summarizes Rabbi Korn’s thesis that even ritual and social matters must be understood from the core ethical concerns of Judaism to model oneself after a moral God and to respect human beings created in God’s image.