Judaism and Human Rights

Carlos Ripoll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351309745
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

Areligion or a culture like Judaism, at least three thousand years old, cannot be expected to be all of one piece, homogeneous, self-contained, consistent, a neatly constructed system of ideas. If Judaism were that, it would have died centuries ago and would be a subject of interest only to the historian and archaeologist. Judaism has been a living force precisely because it is a teeming, thundering, and clamoring phenomenon, full of contrary tendencies and inconsistencies. Although there are no words or phrases in Hebrew Scriptures for "human rights, " "conscience, " or "due process of law, " the ideals and values which these concepts represent were inherent in the earliest Jewish texts.This volume begins with four essays on the concept of man's being born "free and equal, " in the image of God. The underpinning of this concept in Jewish law is explored in Section 2, entitled "The Rule of Law." Section 3, "The Democratic Ideal, " traces the foundations of democracy in the Jewish teachings in the Bible and the Talmud, which in turn influenced the whole body of Western political thought. Relations between man and man, man and woman, employer and employee, slave and master are all spelled out. Section 4 presents essays analyzing man's freedom of conscience, and his God-given rights to dissent and protest. Section 5 deals with aspects of personal liberty, including the right of privacy. Section 6, entitled "The Earth is the Lord's, " deals with the Jewish view of man's transient tenancy on God's earth, his obligations not to destroy anything that lives or grows, and to share the earth's bounty with the poor, the widowed, and the orphaned. Section 7 delivers an analysis of the "end of days" vision of Micah and man's continuing need to strive for peace and not for war. The volume concludes with three new essays, dealing with contemporary issues: "In God's Image: The Religious Imperative of Equality under Law"; "The Values of a Jewish and Democratic State: The Task of Reaching a Synthesis"; and "Religious Freedom and Religious Coercion in the State of Israel."This enlarged edition is accessibly written for a general and scholarly audience and will be of particular interest to political scientists, historians, and constitutional scholars.

PART I

Born Free and Equal

Editor’s Note

“I lack nothing,” wrote Franz Kafka, “except myself.” From time without measure man has been desperately trying to fill that lack. It was the search for himself that compelled Thoreau to build his cabin in the woods at Walden Pond, for he was afraid, he said, that when he came to die, he might discover that he had not lived. What Thoreau meant, of course, was that his real self needed to live—the self, for example, that Socrates identified with his soul: that which made him a self and a man.

Much of the Hebrew Scriptures and of post-Biblical Judaism, in one way or another, expresses or implies this search—the search for that which, according to the Bible, is made in the “image of God.” It is that real self that has dignity in the world that God has made. Since all such real selves were made by the same God—since all are the progeny of the same Adam and Eve—each self has the same dignity that all others have.

In this conception is rooted an ideal of equality: an ideal not granted by any constitution but found in the constitution of man himself. And all nations and races are of equal dignity. They may vary—as individual men do—in their gifts and talents; they may be “chosen” for different purposes, but this only means that they are “called” to perform different functions, to fulfill different obligations. Yet all remain members of the same—and the only—family of man.

“The foundation on which all [our constitutions] are built is the natural equality of man,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to George Washington in 1784, “the denial of every preeminence but that annexed to legal office, and particularly the denial of preeminence by birth.” This equality, Jefferson believed, was rooted in nature in the sense that nature’s God ordained it; for men—as Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence—“are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights”; and these rights are “inalienable” because they are part of the very composition of man himself, rights which all men have equally in order that they may enjoy equal dignity.

Man’s Dignity in God’s World

Konvitz Milton R.

“Son of man, stand upon your feet, and I will speak with you.” That is what the prophet Ezekiel heard from one who appeared to him in the likeness of the glory of the Lord. In this stirring passage in the Bible, God asks man to neither fall on his knees nor grovel in the dust nor cringe in fear in the presence of His glory. What the prophet heard was: “Son of man, stand upon your feet!”

It was like that with the very first man and woman. Adam and Eve hid themselves from the presence of the Lord among the trees of the Garden of Eden as they heard the voice of God calling: “Where are you?” God did not want Adam to hide; He wanted to see and speak with him.

It was in similar fashion that God addressed Cain, who had killed his brother in cold blood; and one of the most severe punishments inflicted on Cain was that thereafter the face of God was to be hid from him—no longer would he be able to see God face to face. And so it was with Abraham and the other patriarchs: they stood up to God almost as His equals; they argued with Him on the basis of moral principles common to both. Even Avimelekh, the unfortunate king of Gerar who brought Sarah into his harem because Abraham had misrepresented her as his sister, spoke up to God, not as a craven idiot, but as a man standing on his feet, and he questioned God as to whether it was just to slay innocent folk.

Man has dignity; he has a head on his shoulders and he walks upright; he has a moral sense, he has intelligence, he uncovers the secrets of the universe. He is a creature within the universe, yet he is of a nature that transcends the universe, and so he is at one and the same time the most noble thing in the universe and more noble than the universe. “Even if the universe were to crush him,” the French philosopher Pascal said, “man would still be nobler than what kills him because man knows that he dies; but of its advantage over him the universe itself is unaware.”

When I look at Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,

the moon and the stars which You have established;

What is man that You are mindful of him,

and the son of man that You do care for him?

Yet You have made him little less than God,

and do crown him with glory and honor.

You have given him dominion over the works of Your hands;

You have put all things under his feet …

In Psalm 8 one thus finds the essence of the Hebraic view of the status of man in the universe. There is no belittling of man in order to increase the glory or power of God. On the contrary, God the Creator treats man—every son of Adam—as a partner in the work of creation. Man is not merely a creature, he is also a creator, a “little less than God.” Man has no need to create the moon and the stars, the sheep and the oxen, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea; but the work of righteousness was not finished in the first six days of creation; it was only begun when God created Adam and Eve in His divine image.

In the creation of the kingdom of God on earth, man is indispensable. God will not coerce any son of man to walk in God’s ways, to keep His statutes and His ordinances and listen to His voice. Man has the freedom to choose life or death, the blessing or the curse; and throughout the Bible God pleads with man to follow in the path of righteousness. Like a father who desperately wants to see his wayward son straighten out, advising, remonstrating, crying, pleading, finally even threatening, yet knowing that this child of His, man, has the freedom to do as he pleases. “If what is commanded be not in the power of everyone,” said Erasmus, “[then] all the numberless exhortations in the Scriptures, and also all the promises, threatenings, expostulations, reproofs, asseverations, benedictions, and maledictions, together with all the forms of precepts, must of necessity stand useless.” Once having created man as a being possessing reason and free will, God will do little without man. The son of man stands upon his feet to listen as God speaks to him; but God speaks to man because He is dependent upon him. God does not speak to cattle and birds and fish, for they can do His bidding without hearing His voice; but man, and man alone, is free, in a realm beyond cause and effect, for he alone lives in the realm of good and evil. God could have made the world so that there would be no evil in it, but then there would be no good in it either. But the world, as Nicholas Berdyaev has said, “is full of wickedness and misery precisely because it is based on freedom—yet that freedom constitutes the whole dignity of man and of his world. Doubtless at the price of its repudiation evil and suffering could be abolished, and the world forced to be ‘good’ and ‘happy’; but man would have lost his likeness to God, which primarily resides in his freedom.”

So it is that one could ask of God: “Where would You be, Lord, what would You do if men gave judgments for bribes; if men abhorred justice and perverted equity; if rich men were full of violence, and everyman had wicked scales and a bag of deceitful weights? What, Lord, would You do if men refused to see beauty in Your handiwork, if parents refused to love their children and if neighbor refused to love neighbor? It is because of my eyes and my ears and my heart that there is beauty in the world, and compassion, and the love of a man for his wife and their child. You, Lord, are dependent upon me to make and sustain a world worthy of reverence. If I did not salute the river before crossing it, if I did not venerate any person or thing, if I did not reverence and love You, Lord, what, Lord, could You do about it and where would You be?”

Just as God can and does say, “Son of man, stand upon your feet, and I will speak with you,” man, in turn, can say to God: “Lord of the universe, listen to me, I am about to sing a lovely song; look at me, for I am about to create a beautiful painting; turn toward me, and You will see that in a moment there will be love in the world, as I take this woman to be my wife; watch, Lord, as I increase justice in the world by lessening a poor man’s misery; I am about to create mercy and loving-kindness as I operate on a patient, or go into a strange distant land to fight malaria or sleeping sickness; and once more, Lord, look at me as I land on the moon, and watch me as I discover stars that have not been in the heavens for thousands of years.”

In God’s dependence upon man we find the secret of the doctrine of election.¹ God was unknown in the world which He had made; men worshipped sticks and stones; they did nothing to enhance His glory; so God looked down upon the human scene and found some men with whom He made a bargain. He said to them that if they would spread His name and make known to the rest of mankind that there is one God and that He has one law of righteousness for all men everywhere, He would try to look after them in some special way. In its essence this election doctrine is an open admission by God that He is dependent upon man for His glory. But in disclosing to man that God depends on him for His glory, God in this act laid the basis for man’s glory as well. The glory of one is the glory of the other. There would be no glory in human life if man could not feel that whatever he does, if his heart is directed toward God, he does in a way that is worthy of a being made in the image of God. It was this thought that Gerard Manley Hopkins expressed:

It is not only prayer that gives God glory but work. Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, everything gives God some glory if being in His grace you do it as your duty. To go to communion worthily gives God great glory, but to take food in thankfulness and temperance gives Him glory too. To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hand, a woman with a sloppail, give Him glory too. He is so great that all things give Him glory if you mean they should.

In this passage Hopkins, a Roman Catholic priest-poet, echoed a famous saying of the Rabbis of the Talmud:

I am a creature of God and my neighbor is also His creature. My work is in the city and his is in the field. I rise early to my work and he rises early to his. He cannot excel in my work and I cannot excel in his. But perhaps you say, I do great things while he does small things. We have learned that it matters not whether a man does much or little, if only he directs his heart to heaven (Berakhot 17a).

In this connection one recalls an incident in the life of the late Chief Rabbi Kuk. Some persons complained to him that some of the Jewish pioneers in the Palestine farming cooperatives were not sufficiently religious, for they did not observe (at least not strictly) some of the rites and ceremonies of Judaism. Here is how the Chief Rabbi answered them: “Why should we say they are not religious? Is it not a religious act of great merit to convert a desert place into farmland and gardens? Is not such work a form of prayer?”

It is this polarity of God and man, as revealed in the Bible, with its consequent interdependence or partnership of God and man, which gives man his religious sense. Insofar as a man has this sense, he can feel that his life counts. Unless one’s thoughts and feelings are rooted in this polarity, the human condition becomes the subject of a tale told by an idiot. For it is this polarity of God and man, the polarity of man as creature and creator, that alone can shatter the shroud of conventionality that our habits and customs spread over the world, so that we fail to respond quickly and warmly to the beauty of our days and nights, to the alternation of good and evil, justice and injustice; and so it is, as Rabindranath Tagore once said, that “on the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying, and I knew it not. My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded.” Days and years pass, and we do not keep ourselves in readiness for the plenitude that God offers but does not deliver. He will not live for us—each man must live his own life; each man must embrace experience with his own sense and mind and with his own freedom. Insofar as man is a creature, his hours and days are numbered, and his freedom is limited; insofar as man is a creator, he can, as the poet Shelley has said, become conscious of an infinite number of ideas in a minute and make that minute into eternity.

The great Hasidic Rabbi Bunam of Pzhysha once said: Everyone must have two pockets, so that he can reach into the one or the other as the need might arise. In his right pocket are the words: “For my sake was the world created”; and in his left pocket, the words: “I am earth and ashes.”

Rabbi Bunam must have said this while recalling Abraham’s standing before God and arguing with Him regarding the fate of the sinful cities of the plain. “Behold,” said Abraham, “I have taken upon myself to speak to the Lord, I who am but earth and ashes. Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking? Will You destroy the whole city for lack of five?” Here in a brief flash is the Hebraic conception of the dignity of man: he who is but earth and ashes can speak to God, can even dare to argue with Him, because for his sake the earth was created.

---

¹ For a discussion of the “chosen people,” see pp. 75 ff.

Judaism and Equality

Emanuel Rackman

Biblical Hebrew has no word for “equality.” Nonetheless in the Book of Leviticus the Jews were told, “You shall have one law for the stranger and citizen alike; for I the Lord am your God” (Leviticus 24:22). Equality before the law, according to Judaism, was divinely ordained. By the same token Hebrew has many equivalents for “differentiate,” and God Himself presumably ordained many of the differences—not only natural but also legal. Can such antithetical mandates be reconciled so that God’s attribute of justice is not impugned and His role respected as “Judge of all the earth”? … Not easily, but the literature of Jewish law and theology reflects a continuing tension between the ideal of human equality and the many inequalities that result from differences for which the tradition holds the Creator Himself responsible. In the emerging dialectic, values other than equality play their part, as do the different functions assigned to human being in society as a whole.

… Judaism holds that God endows all humans with His image—the Tzelem Elohim, which Jewish philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition often equated with reason. The dogma was so basic in Judaism that the fundamental rationale for executing a murderer was that he destroyed a divine image. He killed, in a sense, God’s likeness. “Whoso sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made He man” (Genesis 9:6).

Judaism, however, also derives human likeness from the fact that God had created only one man from whom all humanity is descended. No one could ever argue that he was superior in birth because of his genealogy. “Man was created alone. And why so? … That families might not quarrel with each other. Now, if at present, though but one was originally created, they quarrel, how much more if two had been created!” (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 38a.) That all men have only one progenitor, whereas animals were created by God in the plural number, was held to mean that all human beings are born equal. They enjoy this equality by virtue of the very fact that they were born, even if they never attain to the faculty of reason. This was the only source on which Thomas Paine could rely in his Rights of Man to support the dogma of the American Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. And this dogma was basic in Judaism….

Nonetheless, even as all men are born equal because they all descend from the one Adam, men do differ. “The creation of the first man alone was to show forth the greatness of the Supreme King of Kings, the Holy One, blessed be He. For if a man mints many coins from one mould, they are all alike, but the Holy One, blessed be He, fashioned all men in the mould of the first man, and not one resembles the other” (ibid.). Men differ in voice, appearance, and mind; men differ in sex and color; men differ ethnically and nationally. What is more, God Himself willed that they shall differ in language and geographic distribution. Within their national groupings, there are freemen and slaves, kings and subjects, priests, Levites, and prophets—and of all these differences the Bible takes note. To some it gives de facto recognition; to others even de jure recognition. Some differences it prescribes itself and it accords to the differentiated special duties and privileges. How can this be reconciled with the command to have one law for the citizen and the stranger? And how consonant is this proliferation of mankind with the prophetic protest, “Have we not all one father?”

To this very day the annals of Jewish history, the folios of Jewish law, and the apologetics of Jewish theologians reflect continuing concern with this dichotomy…. Too often the legal norms were ignored and the prophets inveighed against the oppressors; sometimes rabbis were progressive and at other times conservative and reactionary; communal leaders were often on the side of the status quo and often against it. As among all national and ethnic groups there were forces other than the law that precipitated or retarded the movement toward maximum social, economic, and politic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• PART I. Born Free and Equal
• PART II. The Rule of Law
• PART III. The Democratic Ideal
• PART IV. Freedom of Conscience
• PART V. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness
• PART VI. The Earth Is the Lord’s
• PART VII. Pursuit of Peace
• PART VIII. Human Rights in an Israeli Context