The chapter of Judaism Reclaimed which relates to parashat Shelach explores complex questions of religion and morality from the perspective of Jewish tradition. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the episode of the spies is that, while the nation was apparently lacking faith in God, it had witnessed a spectacular array of miracles from the plagues in Egypt and splitting of the sea to the revelation at Sinai and military victory over Amalek. It is incomprehensible that members of a generation that had seen the results of God’s intervention with their own eyes could have doubted His ability to vanquish the Canaanites; rather, they must have doubted His willingness to do so.
In an era of international law and human rights, we too may struggle to reconcile the apparently genocidal military campaigns against the Canaanite nations and Amalek with our perception of Judaism as the religion which introduced monotheism and the notion of a moral code to much of the world. How are we to resolve this contradiction and, if we accept that it was right to put Canaan to the sword, are we truly able to claim that Judaism embraces an objective and universal morality that eschews murder?
Judaism Reclaimed approaches this question first from the point of view of Rambam, maintaining that the Maimonidean perspective rejects the very notion of God being subject to or working within human conceptions of morality. This principle of Maimonidean thought is predicated upon Rambam’s profound explanations of the interplay between objective divine-based truth (emet) and human conceptions of good and bad (tov vera) which sullied humanity’s mind as a consequence of Adam and Eve’s sin in Eden. (The constraints of a brief Facebook summary prevent me from doing justice to this idea here.)
We move on from there to the Akeidah, where Rambam describes how Avraham, whose hallmark was kindness, was prepared to sacrifice personal feelings, aspirations, and moral judgments which he had developed and preached over an entire lifetime in order to comply with the “true” will of God. Avraham’s absolute obedience to God, despite his moral qualms, earned him generous accolades and promises of Divine bounty. But we also note that there are occasions on which Rambam does appear to require one to use moral reasoning.
In chapter 6 of Shemonah Perakim, Rambam distinguishes between chukkim and mishpatim, invoking a Talmudic teaching that some mitzvot, “even had they not been written, it would have been proper to write them.” This clearly implies that prohibitions such as those against murder, theft, and unprovoked violence could legitimately be regarded as inherently wrong or “immoral” even without an explicit scriptural prescription. We attempt to reconcile these sources by using Rambam’s teaching that, while is proper for a person to contemplate the mitzvot in order to understand God’s purpose in commanding them, this must be accompanied by an acute awareness of the wisdom diļ¬erential between man and God.
Rambam’s apparent endorsement of a moral imperative in Shemonah Perakim stems not from human judgment, but rather from a broader assessment of God’s revealed teachings. By analysing God’s will as it appears throughout the Torah, we can develop an idea of what is generally consistent with His will and thereby conclude that such mitzvot would have been “proper to write” even if the Torah omitted them. When faced with an explicit command of God, however, we must recognize that we cannot plumb the depths of His wisdom and must therefore set aside our limited assessment of what God’s will should be in favour of the revealed truth of His word. We trace this through the events of Avraham’s life, noting how his protesting God’s planned annihilation of Sodom was based upon his own understanding of God’s justice and mercy. At the Akeidah, however, Avraham was faced with a clear command from God and recognized that his own preconceived notions of the correct course of action could not challenge God’s truth as expressed in His explicit words.
We highlight the fact that, throughout the biblical texts, any command for the Jews to act in a particularly violent manner was communicated explicitly and unambiguously through a unanimously accepted prophet. In the absence of such a clear and exceptional command, we are required to develop an understanding of God’s will and act on the basis of God’s mitzvot and their “moral” lessons. The chapter concludes by addressing the question of Judaism and universal morality from the very different perspective of Rabbi S. R. Hirsch.
First posted to Facebook 18 June 2020, here.
