Renewing Jewish Ethics

Abstract

Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, in his seminal paper, “Does Judaism Recognize an Ethic Independent of Halakhah? ”¹ identifies two domains of decisionmaking in Judaism. On the one hand, there is din, the sphere of strict law, and on the other hand, there is lifnim mishurat hadin (usually translated as beyond the letter of the law), the sphere of Jewish ethics. From Lichtenstein’s point of view, Jewish ethics plays a relatively minor role in Jewish life. This is because Judaism is essentially a religion of law. This view is expressed most clearly in a statement by Maimonides in his Commentary on the Mishnah: “What you must know is that [as regards] anything from which we abstain or which we do today, we do it solely because of God’s commandment conveyed through Moses…” (2004, p. 36, emphasis added), This means, according to Lichtenstein, that while a kind of natural morality predates Sinai, as a sanction in Judaism, natural morality has been effectively superseded by the Halakhah (Jewish law).

They impose the Word meant for yesterday and thus miss hearing the Word that the eternal validity of the Torah was planning for today, for this generation, for this new hour in the history of the Jewish people.

Rabbi Eliezer Berkovitz, 1983, p.118