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A Year of Jewish Ethics #5: The Binding of Yitzchak

 

It’s impossible to talk about Jewish ethics and the book of Bereshit without addressing the story of the binding of Isaac, Akedat Yitzchak or simply the Akedah (found in Genesis 22:1-19). Avraham hears a call from the Divine to take his son to the top of a mountain and offer him as an offering. Avraham packs them up early in the morning and they travel for two days, and on the third day proceeds almost in slow motion toward this terrible act. Ultimately a messenger from the Divine speaks to Avraham and stops him.

There are so many ways to interpret the message of this story, but for Jewish ethics I want to follow a tradition in the midrash where God never wants Avraham to make this sacrifice, and Avraham knows this even though he is not sure how exactly it will play out.

So the ethical principle is that God never wants us to set aside our responsibilities for human life, ever, even when how to live up to that is complicated. No one’s death is good for a cause, no matter how good the cause. No one’s death and no group’s death can be the purpose of a cause, obviously, and just being willing to kill can never be the way you ask someone to show how devoted they are to a good cause. If you think that God’s will or some cause is so high that it overrides the value of a human life without a thought, you are always wrong.

So why doesn’t Avraham just say to God right off – “Good test – I get it, this is a command I should not obey even from you”?

I follow a way of seeing this story taught by a Chasidic rebbe known as the Izhbitzer. He sees the Akedah as a question Avraham asks himself after he has achieved some serenity and prosperity in his life. The Izhbitzer imagines Avraham saying to himself: How do I know what my own motivations are? How do I am not serving God only because things are easy?

So I imagine Avraham saying to himself: I say I have learned the principle of Tzelem Elohim, of the image of God manifest in every person. But am I really committed to it? Do I always stand up for it?

What if the only way to protect someone I care about puts someone else at risk? What if now that I am old, the only way to protect our legacy is for my child to fight for it, to risk his life for my ideals, to kill those who threaten it or threaten us if he has no other choice? What if he doesn’t know yet how to weep at the loss of life that might come from his justifiable acts, the way I hope I do? What if my pursuit of justice has blinded me to someone else’s life?

In this line of thinking, the Akedah isn’t something that happened, a demand from God, but an exploration within Avraham’s own soul. He makes himself live with the hardest dilemmas that test his commitment to Tzelem Elohim and human life. Because he does not delude himself that these dilemmas are easy.

So we have to commit and recommit to the absolute value of human life. Sometimes how to do that is clear. Sometimes it’s not, and in those cases, such as a just war fought justly, we still have to recognize that the deaths are not for God, or for the cause, and make sure at the very least that we don’t turn away.

The big idea is that God despises human sacrifice. We think we know this, and we have to continue to ask what it really means.

A Year of Jewish Ethics #4: Are You Responsible for Your Group?

What responsibility does an individual have for the faults of a whole group? In the first part of Bereshit, the book of Genesis, there are at least two stories that touch on this question directly. One is the story of the Flood, the Mabul in Hebrew, and the other is the situation in Sodom and Gomorrah, S’dom v’Amora. Both of these stories are about a places with a pervasive culture of evil.

The Torah describes and portrays S’dom and Amora in a few places as beautiful, ungenerous, and violent. And also spiritually corrupt, which I take to mean that somehow their ideas and practices justify those other evils and perpetuate them. God presents Avraham with the idea that places like this have no hope and should be destroyed. (I will add here that theologically I don’t believe that this is actually how God operates – I treat this as a metaphor or a thought experiment.)

Avraham argues with God that there might be a group of people within the cities who are tzaddikim, which either means they are innocent of the corruption of their place, or that they are actually people of integrity.

Eventually Avraham and God seem to agree on two possibilities. If there are ten people who are tzaddikim, the cities should not be destroyed at all, and if there are fewer, the cities are doomed but those individuals should be able to leave or extricated.

It turns out that is not a group of ten tzaddikim. There is one family who seem to stand relatively apart, the household of Avraham’s nephew Lot, and maybe it’s only Lot himself. They aren’t admirable, particularly, but they are not the worst of the worst, not what we think of when we think of the pervasive evils of S’dom. They are rescued when the cities are destroyed.

Let me suggest a couple possible lessons from the story of S’dom and Amora, knowing that in later teachings in this series I will have other things to add from the Torah and the Talmudic tradition about this question of individual responsibility within a group guilty of terrible things.

One lesson is that an individual is obligated to leave a group that cannot be swayed away from its vileness, if it’s just one or two against everyone. If you stay past a certain point, then you are responsible even if you’re not one of the ringleaders or you don’t agree. Your presence starts to contribute in all kinds of ways anyway – each time you are silent it strengthens the others, for instance.

It's hard to leave -- Lot and his family hesitate, even when the divine messengers who want to pull them out explain that staying means they will not survive the coming fire and brimstone. But that’s the only way they have a chance to remain innocent and not complicit.

Another lesson comes from the counterfactual that Avraham and God articulate, the idea of ten tzaddikim. Jewish tradition links this with the minyan, a quorum of ten adults for communal prayer. Here in the Torah, it’s a group of ten who stand for the idea of a moral community, not just some individuals who are morally courageous.

Such a group creates an enclave where alternative ideas can be shared openly and fleshed out and lived on a small scale, which can show itself as an alternative to the culture of the larger group. Even a minority can stand up together and try to lead the majority in teshuvah, in reflection and a way back, as long as the small group shares a life together and strengthens each other. A single person or family like Noach or Lot can’t do this, nor can just a few people, and they can’t be expected to take responsibility for that.

Even though there was no such small group in S’dom and Amora, the tradition sees Avraham teaching that there could be and if there are ten people then if they don’t leave, they ought to be a deliberate counterculture. It is at least the first half of the Margaret Mead idea: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.

Changing the world, in the context of something as extreme as S’dom, does not mean changing things completely. But when you are part of such a minyan, you now have the possibility of staying productively, and working on one important thing where the larger group has veered off.

S'dom and Amora, and the Flood, represent the extreme versions of a thought experiment about an evil society and the role of one tzaddik. I’ll come back in other installments with more specifics from the Talmud, about for instance how long a group like this ought to keep at it when the possibilities are better than they were for Lot and for Noach.

A Year of Jewish Ethics #3: Is Anger a Moral Emotion?

 

Emotions are a part of ethics. We can’t completely disconnect the principles we want to be guided by from the feelings we experience when someone is living up to those principles or violating them.

But does emotion help us act more ethically? I am recording this not long after the 2024 election, when anger has been a dominant tone both of President-Elect Trump’s campaign and of many people’s reaction to his victory.

Some might say that anger in particular gets in the way of the self-control we need to deliberate on decisions or choose a path of action. Too much anger of course does that.

I am connecting this topic to the parasha called Lech L’cha, the Torah reading which introduces us to Avraham, whose initial name is Avram. I’m struck by two sets of midrashim that suggest a backstory to Avraham, and fill in imaginatively what the Torah doesn’t tell us about the first seventy-five years of his life.

One midrash imagines Avram as a child. In the version in Bereshit Rabbah, his father Terach has a store where people buy figurines of the gods, and one day leaves young Avram in charge. One of the things Avram does when no one is watching to is to smash all the idols but one, and then place a bowl with a dish of flour in front of the largest one and a stick in its hand. When his father return and asks what happened, Avram says that a fight broke out among the idols over who would get the offering, and the big one smashed all of the other ones in order to take the offering. Terach brings Avram before the king, who eventually puts Avram in a fiery furnace from which he miraculously emerges.

Compare that midrash to what Rabbi Moses Maimonides teaches about young Avram. He imagines Avram as a boy who would observe the night sky and wonder about its patterns, who gradually on his own formulates the thought for himself of a single Mover of everything. He comes to believe that everyone around him is in error. But Avram pours his strength into his arguments with them, and smashes idols as a calculated teaching technique and to save people from worshipping them.

These two versions of Avram’s backstory have very different emotional tones. In Bereshit Rabbah, there is at the very least a climate of anger, in the stories told about the many gods and in the approach of the king to a dissenter. Maybe Avram’s smashing reflected that or maybe he absorbed that in his early life and had to leave in order to put it behind him.

In Maimonides’ version, the tone is contemplative. Smashing idols isn’t anger, but a controlled display for a teaching purpose. The people might respond to it viscerally, but Avram himself never loses his self-control.

So can anger be a moral emotion? I think both versions of Avram’s backstory tell us that anger can be part of a moral life. But anger is only morally significant when it is activated by a righteous cause, and even then there is a danger of the anger taking over. In the best case, anger helps us activate our energy for what is right. But the anger itself has to be modulated and converted into something else, particularly to leave room for our own deliberation and for gathering community around what is good. No good ideas and no concerted action for good can be built on anger alone.

A Year of Jewish Ethics #2: Moral Psychology (and Good Enough?)

 

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This series of short teachings about Jewish ethics is mostly about the “what”, the principles of action. But that can’t be disentangled from moral psychology, which is the inner experience of trying to do the right thing. Torah discusses moral psychology as well as moral principles. As the year goes on we’ll see a lot how they are intertwined in specific situations where what Torah thinks is right depends on what Torah thinks is possible for a human to do.

The story of Noach is one of the places where the Talmudic rabbis talk about broad themes of moral psychology. The first verse of Parashat Noach, Genesis 6:9, says Noach ish tzaddik tamim haya b’dorotav, which could be translated: Noach was a human, a righteous man, he was pure in his generations. In the Babylonian Talmud Rabbi Yochanan and his protege Resh Lakish pick up on that last phrase, pure in his generations. Rabbi Yochanan says: Sure, pure in his generations, but not so much if he was in any other generation. Resh Lakish says: If this is how he was in his own generations, how much the more so would he have been righteous in any other generation.

Each of them has something valuable to say here. According to Rabbi Yochanan there is a lot to be said for being the best against a pretty bad backdrop. We shouldn’t get carried away and say that Noach was the greatest tzaddik ever, but without him there would have been no one to save any aspect of the world.

Resh Lakish teaches that it takes a lot more just to be Noach than you think in a time when the climate is violent and corrupt. Sure, Noach didn’t turn people around in the end, but just holding his own and rescuing the ones he did in the ark took incredible moral courage.

Resh Lakish would know: He was a bandit when Rabbi Yochanan saw something in him, recruited him to leave his gang and become one of the Sages. There is a whole set of stories in the Talmud about how Resh Lakish struggled to overcome his past moral failures and worked to prove himself as someone with a moral and intellectual center, someone more than his charisma in his own eyes and in the eyes even of his teacher Rabbi Yochanan. (Some more about this relationship here and here.)

For us right now, there are two sets of things to think about. One is about the standard we hold ourselves and other people too – when do we demand absolute moral excellence, and when is it sufficient to act good enough for the situation or time we’re in? And what do we need to understand better about our own moral psychology, so we can prod ourselves or anyone else to act righteously enough?

A Year of Jewish Ethics #1: Speech

 

Last Shabbat I spoke among other things about the imperative this year in particular that Jews immerse ourselves in our own teachings about ethics. To be connected and grounded as we deal with issues in the American and Jewish worlds, we need to make Jewish ethics a core of our Jewish selves. To help, I'm going to try to generate a weekly teaching.

Welcome to the first in a series of short weekly teachings about Jewish ethics, jumping off from the parasha, the Torah portion.

The first chapter of the Torah is about the power of speech and the ethics of speech. God creates everything through speech. On the first day, God simply says y’hi or, let there be light, and light comes into existence. On other days, God speaks an intention to create something and immediately creates it. There is no gap between the speech, the intention, and the reality that comes into being.

Words are that powerful – they make or change reality. Nothing is more powerful than spoken words. And the ethical ideal is how God speaks in the first chapter of Bereshit (Genesis). There is no gap between what we mean, what we say, and the reality we create. That is what true and faithful speech is.

In the morning prayers, we say Baruch she-amar v’haya ha’olam – Blessed is the One who spoke and the universe came into existence. Baruch omer v’oseh – Blessed is the One who speaks-and-acts. Speaking and doing are for the Divine one thing.

It’s important that we have that introduction, because once human beings arrive speech gets complicated. We have the snake who uses speech to manipulate, Adam and Chava (Eve) who use speech to speak part of the truth, Kayin (Cain) who uses speech to deflect. God speaks questions, to draw people out. God has to confront the possible difference between the generous speech that creates and provides, and the implications of declaring that if the people eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil they will die. Ultimately, God decides to delay carrying that out.

Speech is the foundation of Jewish ethics. The power of speech and how we ought to speak. It’s foundational within families, as the Torah says about the first human family. And it’s foundational in our widest world, as the Torah says by making speech the pillar of creation and the social order. How do we speak knowing how our spoken words create the world? How do we speak so that there is no gap between what we say and what we create?