|
Sources of Jewish
Morality –
Sources of the
Common Morality
Translated from Hebrew by S.
NAthan
l'ilui nishmat Esther bat mordechai
The forbidden/permitted
approach does not belong to morality but rather to the morally marginal /
force-based / instrumental structure of the law; it is the connecting link
between law and morality.
“Is such indeed the
law?” asks a sage in the Talmud, when the court orders him not only to
refrain from penalizing workers who have damaged his property, but even to
pay them for their day’s work. Indeed it is, the court answers, based on
the principle “that you shall walk the path of good people.” “We rule
against the trait of Sodom. [‘What is mine is mine, and what is yours is
yours.’]” (Baba Batra 59)
The law gives morality
its teeth. Torah law is intermingled with Torah principles of morality
because both morality and law are not the work of human hands, but rather,
their source derives from heaven, from the realm of the absolute.
Non-Jewish morality is
but one of the branches of non-Jewish law. In itself is instrumental, in
that its purpose is to regulate relations between man and his fellow – or
perhaps it is as Nietzsche claims, that morality is the invention of the
weak, in order to neutralize the power of the strong. Alternatively, the
law may be an outgrowth of general consensus.
Different attitudes
to the law according to different ages:
An absolute perception
of the law is appropriate to six-year-olds. This is a pre-democratic
perception: The instrument of the law. The height of this perception is
represented by Positivism, a theory of law developed by Wittgenstein.
According to this
theory, the law is not meant to represent values in any form. The law does
not contain justice. Its goal, rather, is order. According to this
approach, the law is an instrument. The field that it encompasses is narrow
in the extreme – it is no more than a fence around that field.
Positivist law does not
presume to apply to any sort of meaningful content whatsoever, be it
national, moral, or value-oriented. It is only expected to represent order.
Thus the approach taken
by of legal dictators of all sorts contains an inherent contradiction: If
the law represents only its own authority, there is no justifying its taking
any attitude toward religion or toward moral values, or toward nationhood,
etc.. This is because the law does not contain any of these things, but
rather contains only itself. It is no more than a retarded perception,
appropriate to a child’s initial discovery of the law, at the early stage of
socialization – age six.
Only a Torah perception
– in which law is that which defines morality, and in which both derive from
a higher source – can justify the law’s addressing itself to morality, as
mentioned above.
A similar attitude
applies when the law addresses situations that do not seem necessarily
moral, such as the laws of damages and torts: Aside from addressing the fact
that there has been a transgression of morality on the part of the
perpetrator of the damage, the Torah attaches legal teeth to this morality.
To teach you that one
may not separate law from morality. For this reason, morality attaches the
law of paying damages to the moral transgression. The obligation to pay is
imposed not only as a fine, but also as a monetary issue, because monetary
payment does not only belong to the law. Money belongs to morality as well.
|