A Short History of Jewish Ethics

Conduct and Character in the Context of Covenant

Alan L. Mittleman

• Editorial: Wiley-Blackwell
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444346596
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Ethics & Religion

A Short History of Jewish Ethics traces the development of Jewish moral concepts and ethical reflection from its Biblical roots to the present day.

• Offers an engaging and thoughtful account of Jewish ethics
• Brings together and discusses a broad range of historical sources covering two millennia of writings and conversations
• Combines current scholarship with original insights
• Written by a major internationally recognized scholar of Jewish philosophy and ethics

1

Ethics in the Axial Age

The Bible is not a philosophical text. It does, however, provide rich content for philosophizing. Although it does not, therefore, provide formal or rigorous arguments on behalf of its ethics, it does provide broad patterns of reasoning about proper conduct and character. It does not simply assert and command; it invites the engagement of our reason. Despite its modern reputation as a blunt record of divine commands, it often appeals to our intellect and conscience. In Deuteronomy, for example, the Israelites are told that other nations will admire their wisdom and wish to emulate them: “Surely, that great nation [Israel] is a wise and discerning people” (Deut. 4:6; cf. Isa. 2:1–3). The Israelites will be thought to model a way of life that non-Israelites will find appealing. The eighth-century prophet Isaiah has God imploring the Israelites to “come, let us reach an understanding” (Isa. 1:18). The literary mode of this prophetic discourse, the lawsuit (riv), suggests a dialogue between parties who can rise above their passions and prejudices and seek a reasonable solution. The ethics of the Hebrew Bible is typically not presented as a purely human affair but it is nonetheless answerable to shared, rational criteria of evaluation. Abraham famously challenged God, when he learned of God’s impending judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?” (Gen. 18:25). The text assumes a natural apprehension of justice, which Abraham and God both share.¹ The significance and range of ethical naturalism in the Bible will be considered below.

The biblical literature has much to say about the ensemble of human excellences that constitute the best life for human beings. It ensconces its teaching in narratives, poetry, law, and wise sayings, examples of which we will presently explore. It is concerned as well with the best ordering of society, of economic life, and of political matters. In none of these domains is its vision systematic or deductive. It is often suggestive and casuistic, asserted rather than explicitly argued. The Bible’s style, although differing by genre, is typically laconic. It does not dwell, as Homer did, on the elaboration of pictorial detail, nor does it develop in its narratives reports of the psychological states of its characters.² One would love to know what Abraham and Isaac, for example, thought during their three-day trek to the mountain where Abraham would attempt to sacrifice his son. But we are told nothing; the lacunae are filled by later imaginative Jewish (and Christian) literatures.

The collection of, according to the traditional Jewish enumeration, 24 books that constitute the canonical scriptures came into being over a span of almost a millennium.³ (Nor is the process by which some books were included in the canon and others excluded clear or easily datable.) The Bible’s earliest constituent texts reflect, although probably do not derive from, a late Bronze Age Near-Eastern civilization. Its latest text, usually assumed to be the Book of Daniel, comes from a second-century BCE Hellenistic world for which the Bronze Age was a remote antiquity. The Bible expresses not only a stream of Israelite and Judean-Jewish creativity stretching over centuries, it also expresses a continual reworking of inherited textual materials, symbols, literary motifs, beliefs, and values; a history of intra-biblical development and commentary. It is as if the English-speaking world continued to rewrite and develop Shakespeare for twice the amount of time that has elapsed since the Elizabethan Age. Beyond this, the biblical literatures themselves represent a radical reworking and revolutionary challenge to earlier, non-literary forms of Israelite and Judean religion.⁴ The Bible is a polemic against what came before, against an Israelite and Judean culture that was hardly distinguishable from the “pagan” cultures in whose orbit it lived. The remnants of that banished form of life are half-veiled in the biblical text and partially revealed by archaeology. An historical account of ethics has to take this development into account.

The world of biblical religion, as opposed to its Israelite–Judean precursor, comes into being in the so-called Axial Age, a term of art that comes not from the vocabulary of the archaeologist but from that of the philosopher and social theorist. The Axial Age refers to a set of developments in the major civilizations of the world – Greece, China, India, Persia, and Israel inter alia – with roughly overlapping features. It represents a major shift in beliefs, values, religious consciousness, social and political thought, as well as in the social structures and centers of authority that fomented and sustained these shifts. The term was coined by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers. Jaspers contrasted the Axial Age with its predecessor “mythical age.” The Axial Age represents the triumph of “logos against mythos.” “Rationality and rationally clarified experience launched a struggle against the myth; a further struggle developed for the transcendence of the One God against non-existent demons, and finally an ethical rebellion took place against the unreal figures of the gods. Religion was rendered ethical, and the majesty of the deity thereby increased.”⁵

In pre-Axial Age, “mythic” civilizations, there was a sense of a distinction between the mundane and trans-mundane spheres. Animistic forces or, where present, gods penetrated mundane experience. The forces and gods were distinguishable but not radically different from human beings. Shamans crisscrossed the realms; magicians influenced the trans-mundane to assist human beings in their quest for purely mundane goods such as health, fertility, victory, and survival. Society was typically organized in clan and tribal structures. Authority was traditional or charismatic. With the rise of the Axial Age, a new relationship between the mundane and what Jaspers called the trans-mundane occurs. The trans-mundane ceases to be a rather more charged version of the ordinary world of experience and becomes fully transcendent. There is now a “sharp disjunction” between worlds.⁶ In Israel, for example, the God who earlier “moved about in the garden during the breezy time of day” (Gen. 3:8) became an inconceivably austere sovereign who speaks and the world comes into being (Gen. 1:3). The creation account that features this sovereign as its main character, Genesis chapter 1, although the most famous in the Bible, is only one of many. Other accounts, preserved as fragments rather than fully fleshed-out literary narratives, speak of that older conception of the deity. In texts such as Psalms 74:12–17 and 104:6–9, Isaiah 51:9–11, or Job 38:8–11 are preserved cultural memories of a more mythological God fighting primordial monsters and suppressing the forces of chaos.⁷ This God is much closer to his Babylonian analogues than the God of Genesis, chapter 1. With the rise of an intellectual class, the literary prophets of the eighth century, God became fully transcendent rather than trans-mundane. The sixth-century anonymous prophet known as Deutero-Isaiah gives pointed expression to this sense of radical transcendence when he proclaims: “For My plans are not your plans, Nor are My ways your ways, declares the LORD. But as the heavens are high above the earth, So are My ways high above your ways” (Isa. 55:8–9).

The fully transcendent God is increasingly revealed through word, law, and the cognition of value rather than through adventitious experiential, especially visual, encounters.⁸ No longer are archaic experiences of God, conveyed by such texts as Genesis 18:1–14 and 32:24–30, Exodus 4:24–26 and 33:23, Joshua 5:13–15, or Judges 6:11–23 and 13:2–24, possible. God comes increasingly to be conceived as pure spirit; without a body, there is nothing to see. Where there is something to see, it is not God but a mediated presence (Isaiah, chapter 6; Ezekiel, chapter 1). The experience of God, to the extent that it is possible, requires levels of mediation. In the popular religious imagination, angels come into being as designated intermediaries. In earlier Israelite religion, as in some of the texts just cited, angels, divine messengers, are not stable entities. They have no fixed identity – God and His messengers are one and the same. In mature biblical religion God is distinct and radically unique. As God’s transcendence grows, the “space” between the mundane and the transcendent is increasingly populated by a heavenly host. The religious imagination abhors a vacuum.

The challenge of the Axial Age, in all of the world civilizations, was to align the mundane order with the newly envisaged transcendent order.⁹ Social and political life, once timelessly organized along traditional tribal and clan lines, became an intellectual and a practical problem. How can the social and political realm reflect the eternal order of transcendence? For Israel, this problem had two interrelated solutions. The first was found in the concept of covenant, the conceptualization of the relationship between the nation of Israel and its transcendent sovereign along juridical and moral lines.¹⁰ The second was found in the reorganization of the social sphere under a divinely legitimated monarchy. In pre-Axial civilizations, deities were more powerful versions of humans but similar in nature. The totems or gods of the clan brought fertility, successful hunts or growing seasons, victory in battle, etc. The relationship between the group and its trans-mundane counterparts was natural, organic, and mutually beneficial. With the development of the Axial civilization, the social group – now orders of magnitude more complex than a clan-based or tribal society – becomes accountable to the god or, more precisely, to the eternal, transcendent values that the god represents. The higher order, in the Israelite case represented by terms such as justice (mishpat) and righteousness (tzedek), must be appropriately actualized in the mundane realm. God is now known as one who wills tzedek and mishpat for his people; who is approached through acts of tzedek and mishpat. The relationship between people and deity is no longer natural and organic but juridical and moral: they are linked to God through a deliberate acceptance of a mode of life in which tzedek and mishpat, which are willed by the divine, become operational.

The prophets, themselves ethicized and intellectualized descendants of earlier shamanic figures from Israelite–Judean religion, are the carriers of this consciousness of accountability. The prophets speak in the name of a universal God, uniquely revealed to (albeit frequently ignored by) Israel, and at the same time lord of all the world. As a mature, Axial Age phenomenon, prophecy arraigns the Israelite and Judean elites for their failures to instantiate tzedek and mishpat in the life of society and state.

Prophecy develops in tandem both with monarchy and with increasing disparities of wealth in society. Its terms of reference are grounded in covenant, both the presumptive nation-founding covenant of Sinai and the political-founding covenant of Zion, which established the legitimacy of David and his descendants. As in the case of national existence per se, political rule is legitimate only if it accords with transcendent norms of justice and righteousness. The prophetic enterprise is oriented toward reminding the king that his authority is conditional on his fidelity to norms underwritten by a higher authority. The political is subsidiary to the moral and the juridical. There are evidences of a “political ethics” along the lines of realpolitik in the Bible but the dominate voice subordinates realist decision making to transcendent religious-ethical norms.¹¹ When kings follow raison d’état, they usually do what is evil in the eyes of the Lord.

Covenant establishes a set of moral referents in some ways reminiscent of the culture of constitutionalism in the modern West. (This should not be surprising in light of the fact that biblical covenantalism lies at the roots of Western constitutionalism.¹²) Constitutions, especially written ones such as the Constitution of the United States, appeal to some prior normativity such as natural right while also standing on their own voluntaristic, contractual character.¹³ The covenant of God with Israel at Sinai reflects this dual foundation. In part, the covenant rests on the normative claims of the divine per se. God is that goodness that ought to be chosen.¹⁴ There is something ineluctable about the claims God makes on us, in the Bible’s view. Yet unlike the pure contemplation of the good in Plato, the Bible presents the human encounter with divinity as requiring choice, response, consent. There is a recognizable, practical picture of moral agency in the Sinai story. Israel is offered a choice. Perhaps not a fully free choice – a powerful God has just liberated her from bondage and brought her to a barren wilderness. Neither ingratitude nor abandonment is a desirable option. Nonetheless, the choice is real, if constrained – like most morally significant choices in life. Under these circumstances, Israel chose to bind herself to the One who showed her favor, who liberated her from slavery. Israel met God’s offer of relationship with a rational response of gratitude and a pledge of fidelity (Exod. 19:7–8). The imperatives of biblical law are contextualized within a narrative that emphasizes consent, rather like the social contract tradition that it anticipates. The law is also tied to, in the sense of requiring and promoting, the virtues of gratitude, fidelity, and love. Law must not be seen in purely deontological terms, nor should it be framed solely by reference to heteronomous commands. The covenant entrains its own distinctive virtues.

Once articulated, both constitutions and covenants function as models for the subsequent guidance of practical reasoning. Constitutions generate their own traditions of moral wisdom and culture. Once on the scene, a constitution is neither a sheer piece of positive law nor a transparent symbol of natural law. It is its own inflected, particular order, both generative of positive law and dependent on deep, thematic sources of normativity.¹⁵ So it is with the covenantal framework of the Hebrew Bible, expressed most paradigmatically in the Book of Deuteronomy, the leading covenantal text in the Bible. Although Deuteronomy per se may only have come to light in the seventh century BCE, much of what becomes canonical scripture was recast to accord with it.¹⁶ It shapes the subsequent “deuteronomic history” (the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings), and the prophets, particularly Jeremiah, but it also influenced the outlook of the other books of the Pentateuch. The Torah’s modes of understanding human relations as well as the relation between the divine and the human were reframed along covenantal lines.¹⁷

Just as constitutions should not be read as codes of law but as frameworks for the development of a normative form of life, so too should biblical covenants. The concept of covenant is not comprised by a set of rules but by the aspiration to achieve a just ordering of communal life and an ideal of individual character. This dimension of the phenomenon of covenant mitigates somewhat the rule-oriented appearance of biblical legal texts. One must keep in mind the larger normative and aspirational context in which those texts inhere. The philosophical paradigm of an ethics of divine command does not quite suit the great number of “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not” statements of the Bible. Within a covenantal context such statements are less flat rules than they are occasions for enacting a form of life, which has been entered into for rational and defensible reasons. As H. L. A. Hart pointed out, legal systems not only command, they enable. Laws not only constrain liberty, they create opportunities for its exercise.¹⁸ So too, the covenantal framework, although it contains rules, also opens possibilities for the growth of the soul, as it were. Laws – in later Judaism – become opportunities for the enactment of virtues su...

Índice

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Ethics in the Axial Age
• 2 Some Aspects of Rabbinic Ethics
• 3 Medieval Philosophical Ethics
• 4 Medieval Rabbinic and Kabbalistic Ethics
• 5 Modern Jewish Ethics
• Conclusion
• Index