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.
