Jewish Ethics in Theory & Practice
From the Editor
In Abraham Joshua Heschel’s essay, “What Manner of Man Is the Prophet?,” the theologian asks: what was it like to be a prophet? In answering, he describes how, for the prophet, “the invisible God becomes audible” as he is “taken up into the heart of the divine pathos.” Divine pathos, or seeing the world as God sees it and responding with “echoes of divine love and disappointment, mercy and indignation” is, for Heschel, the heart of the prophetic experience. Divine pathos is Heschel’s explanation of how and why the prophets became excoriating critics of ancient Israelite society, calling priests, kings, and citizens to task for their ethical failures.
Heschel is writing about the biblical prophets as figures of the past—individuals who lived centuries ago, with an access to the divine that ended with the destruction of the Second Temple—but his words pull us into reconsidering our own moment. His compelling description of the injustices that plagued the ancient world and the pain these caused to God and the prophets remind us of the injustices of our own time. In other writings, Heschel linked his own social justice work to his reading of the prophets, too.
Liberal Jews have long turned to the biblical prophets as evidence of the centrality of ethics to the Jewish tradition. In the early days of the Reform movement, German rabbis extolled the prophets’ emphasis on ethics, contrasting it with the ritual laws, which they saw as leading to empty gestures. (The fact that this critique echoed the prophets’ deprecation of sacrificial worship added to the larger argument.) Over time, we began using the term “ethical monotheism” to describe this sort of Judaism: belief in a God who demands ethical behavior. In the latter half of the 20th century, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas insisted that meaningful human existence begins when we recognize and respond to the needs of other people, an idea he identified as the most important Jewish teaching.
Who does not want the world to be less broken? But Heschel’s essay, as much as it fits with these patterns, does not make ethics easy. In his telling, each prophet lived, saw, and spoke in his own concrete situation. They did not speak in generalities or in timeless principles but in sharp words aimed directly at the individuals who needed to hear them. Heschel’s prophets leave us with the uncomfortable sense that without access to divine pathos, we lack the certainty and strength that gave the prophets the limited power they had to effect change.
I don’t think we are wrong to be inspired by the prophets or to feel their words calling us out of complacency. I worry, though, that emphasizing their stories leaves too many of us believing that an ethical approach is limited to broad generalizations drawn from precise critiques. In short, if we limit ourselves to the prophetic books, we will be woefully ill-equipped for articulating, let alone pursuing, a meaningful Jewish ethics.
This issue of Sources approaches Jewish ethics head-on. Each writer addresses an area of contemporary ethical concern and offers a vision of how we might or even should respond, as Jews, to that concern. But I also asked each writer to do something else, something that will make these articles valuable beyond their authors’ visions. My request was simple: show your work. The essays in this volume engage with different sorts of Jewish texts and other sources, and they do so with a variety of methodologies. As you read, you’ll find biblical and rabbinic texts; halakhah; musar; works of Jewish philosophy; and more. You’ll find historical arguments, text-critical arguments, and homiletical arguments. Most important, these essays demonstrate that the field of Jewish ethics is engaged and engaging. Determining and doing what is just and good is a dynamic conversation in which we all can participate—and living as we do in a time without prophecy and the confidence it affords, this conversation is essential.
The issue is divided into two sections. The first section features essays on the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. It opens with an essay by Donniel Hartman about the challenge of making moral choices under the influence of fear. He begins with an account of how terribly October 7 disrupted the sense of security that both Israeli and American Jews had been taking for granted before Hamas’s attack, acknowledging that it left many of us feeling morally adrift. Nevertheless, he writes, the Jews must be a moral people, and he articulates preconditions and principles for this moment.
Drawing on the work of political theorist Michael Walzer, Yitzhak Benbaji argues that for the State of Israel not to rescue the hostages would be a violation of their rights, and, at the same time, for the state to release convicted terrorists would be a violation of Israeli citizens’ right to security. The moral approach to such a choice between two violations of rights, Benbaji writes, requires that government figures acknowledge the violation inherent in whatever they choose. Without that, they do not deserve support.
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Elisheva Baumgarten writes about two midrashim that speak to her in this moment. In her reading, the first, about the cries of a grieving mother, becomes a call to hear the suffering of hostage families. The second, about a family negotiating an offer of good fortune made by the prophet Elijah, becomes a call to prioritize the present over the future. Her piece is accompanied by a new midrash on suffering by Liora Eilon, a survivor of Hamas’s attack on Kfar Aza.
In the final essay in this section, Geoffrey Claussen considers the meaning of justice and compassion during wartime, drawing on ideas of character and virtue found in the musar tradition and voicing an ethical critique of the Israel-Hamas war.
Essays in the second section of this issue, Jewish Ethics in the 21st Century, consider a variety of ethical concerns demanding our attention. Flora Cassen connects the history of Jewish Studies as an academic discipline to the reluctance of many Jewish Studies scholars to participate in campus debates about antisemitism. She ends by calling upon the field to reconsider its relationship to activism. In a Conversation piece, Aaron Dorfman, Mark Gottlieb, and Rivka Press Schwartz debate how and why American Jewish schools should teach students about the ideas and values that undergird the country’s democracy and the institutions that uphold it. They invite us to rethink our relationships with the American project, both individually and collectively.
Julia Watts Belser addresses the ethics of hope, particularly in the realm of how we respond to climate change. She draws on Jill Hammer’s poem, “Jonah,” a midrash on the biblical prophet, which appears in print for the first time right after her essay. Andrés Spokoiny then draws our attention to the ethical questions raised by the growth of individual philanthropy. While still calling for the creativity and flexibility that characterize the work of so many philanthropists, he outlines ethical errors they must be wary of falling into.
Sara Labaton reflects on caring for the sick, reading Talmudic and medieval sources through the lens of her father’s experience as a patient suffering with terminal cancer. In a piece on the term tikkun olam, Daniel Burg critiques the idea of “fixing the world,” arguing that the notion that the world can be fixed prevents us from true engagement with the real problems plaguing our society.
The team of Jill Abney, Janice W. Fernheimer, Lauren Hill, and Karen Petrone introduce an approach to Holocaust education they developed in Kentucky, a state with both a Holocaust education mandate and a relatively small Jewish population. Their model of community partnerships and teacher development has broad implications for the ethics of teaching about Jewish life and Jewish history.
The issue closes with an article by Marjorie Lehman and Mira Beth Wasserman, who use Talmudic texts about slavery to address a question that all too often goes unasked: what should we do with traditional Jewish texts expressing views we today find ethically abhorrent? By revealing some ambivalence in the texts themselves, their close reading becomes a call to speak out against the continuing legacy of slavery in the United States.
Each of these pieces individually and all of them together illustrate what we tried to capture by calling this issue, “Jewish Ethics in Theory and Practice.” Judaism’s approach to ethics has never been to declare a particular set of answers to ethical questions or even to develop a single formula by which one can find such answers. Rather, the Jewish concept of the good is found in the dynamic interplay between ideas and life, between the abstract thinking and the concrete doing. I hope that this issue will contribute to your own ethical reflection and action.
Claire E. Sufrin
