Jewish-Christian Dialogue: The Ethical Dimension
Three images from Jewish tradition help us define the importance of, and the expectations we bring to, dialogue between faiths.
The first is a sobering one, drawn from Jewish law. The Bible contains a series of provisions relating to manslaughter. Someone who kills another inadvertently – “he was not an enemy of his and did not seek his harm”1Numbers 35:23. – is given shelter in the Cities of Refuge. The rabbis sought a definition. How were we to tell whether the person was or was not an “enemy” of his victim? What is the relevant criterion? They answered: If, out of animosity, they had not spoken to one another for three days.2Sanhedrin 27b; M.T. Hilkhot Rotzeach 6:10. The mere fact of not speaking together is the clearest symptom of a breakdown of relationship. Conversely, the mere act of speaking together restores relationship.
The second is the great metaphor of human communication contained in the story of the Tower of Babel. Babel represents the overreaching pride, the hubris, of humanity. “If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach. Let us then go down and confound their speech there, so that they shall not understand one another’s speech.”3Genesis 11:6–7. One of the themes of the Mosaic and prophetic literature is that the lost harmonies set out at the beginning of Genesis – between man and nature in Eden, between humanity after the flood – will eventually be recovered. Zephaniah speaks of the time when God “will make the peoples pure of speech.”4Zephaniah 3:9. Learning one another’s language of faith is one of the ways we reach back to before Babel.
The third, and perhaps the most moving, are the first recorded words between two human beings, Adam’s words to Eve: “This is now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. She shall be called ishah (woman) for from ish (man) she was taken.”5Genesis 2:23. There is a hidden subtlety in the verse that is missed in translation. Until this point, the text has used the word adam (man as species) rather than ish (man as an individual personality). Thus Adam names his wife before he names himself. He must discover the identity of the other before he discovers his own. In true dialogue, in the I-Thou meeting, we learn as much about ourselves as about the other.6I owe this exegetical insight to my teacher, Rabbi Dr. Nachum Rabinovitch.
So in the talking-together between faiths, we can hope to lessen long-standing hostilities. We break down some of the Babel-barriers to communication. And we deepen our own sense of individuality.
But when we talk together, of what shall we speak?
THE ETHICAL DIALOGUE
Two influential Jewish thinkers, Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Eliezer Berkovits,7Their approaches to interfaith dialogue are analysed in my “Perspectives,” L’Eylah, No. 21, 41–47. have argued that the most fruitful ground of meeting is not at the level of theology but of ethics. Soloveitchik has spoken of the incommunicability of faith: “The word of faith reflects the intimate, the private, the paradoxically inexpressible cravings of the individual for and his linking up with his Maker. It reflects the numinous character and the strangeness of the act of faith of a particular community which is totally incomprehensible to the man of a different faith community.” Accordingly, “the confrontation should occur not at a theological level, but at a mundane human level. There, all of us speak the universal language of modern man.”8Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Confrontation,” Tradition 6:2 (Spring/Summer 1964), 23–24. Berkovits likewise argues that “It is not interreligious understanding that mankind needs but interhuman understanding – an understanding based on our common humanity and wholly independent of any need for common religious beliefs and theological principles.”9Eliezer Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust, New York: Ktav, 1973, 47.
Starting from the Jewish-Christian situation, how shall we begin this dialogue with “common humanity” in the “universal language of modern man”? The problems are threefold.
First: can it be taken for granted that even the Jewish and Christian traditions share a common approach to moral questions? A great deal of the literature in both Judaism and Christianity, almost since the beginning of Christianity, has been devoted to showing now Jewish ethics is superior to Christian ethics, or how Christian ethics is superior to Jewish ethics. Each tradition has often felt it necessary to define itself in opposition to the other – in terms of the contrast between love and justice, or Divine grace and human responsibility, or faith and works.10For three relatively recent examples on the Jewish side, see Leon Simon (ed.) Philosophica Judaica: Ahad Ha’am, London, 1946, 127–137; Abba Hillel Silver, Where Judaism Differed, Macmillan, 1972; and the essay “Romantic Religion” in Leo Baeck, Judaism and Christianity, New York: Atheneum, 1970.
In part, this is the way any tradition which makes absolute claims about the right and the good reacts to others which offer different answers.11See “On Grading Religions” in John Hick, Problems of Religious Pluralism, MacMillan, 1985, 67–87. But in this case it has much to do with the specific and often highly fraught relationship between Judaism and Christianity, to the argument between what A. Roy Eckardt calls “Elder and Younger Brothers.”12Roy Eckardt, Elder and Younger Brothers, New York: Scribners 1967.
In the nineteenth century, as part of the dynamic of emancipation, there arose the concept of a shared ethical heritage, the so-called Judaeo-Christian tradition. How valid a concept this is, I would not presume to ask. But we might note that it is only one way of viewing the relationship between the two faiths, one that goes against the grain of each faith’s self-identity as expressed in most of their history.13The question raised here is one of long standing. See Elie Benamozegh, Jewish and Christian Ethics, San Francisco, 1873; I.M. Blank, “Is There a Common Judaeo-Christian Ethical Tradition” in D.J. Silver (ed.), Judaism and Ethics, New York, 1970, 95–108; Joseph Klausner, “Jewish and Christian Ethics,” Judaism 2 (1953), 16–30; Kaufman Kohler, “Synagogue and Church in their Mutual Relations, Particularly in Reference to the Ethical Teachings,” in Judaism at the World Parliament of Religions, Cincinnati, 1894; H.F. Rall and Samuel S. Cohon, Christianity and Judaism Compare Notes, New York, 1927.
Do the two faiths, for example, currently share a common approach to human sexuality, or to the relative roles of individual and governmental responsibility in solving social problems?14In my original presentation I noted that the Anglo-Jewish community had been moving politically to the right in recent years, while the Church, at least in some of its more publicised statements, had been seen to be moving in the opposite direction. Needless to say, advocates of both individual and public responsibility can find ample precedent in the biblical literature. See my Wealth and Poverty: A Jewish Analysis, London: The Social Affairs Unit, 1985. One of the regular discoveries of dialogue is that each faith is itself more internally diverse than it seems to an outsider. Often it is easier to find agreement between religious liberals, or conservatives, across faiths, than it is for the two wings to agree within a single faith community.15See A. Roy Eckardt, Jews and Christians: The Contemporary Meeting, Indiana University Press, 1986, 96. A single embracing presentation of “Jewish ethics” or “Christian ethics” is sufficiently elusive16See my “Jewish Ethics in the Twentieth Century,” in the Blackwell Companion to Jewish Culture, Oxford: Blackwell (forthcoming). to make us cautious in assuming that a “Judaeo-Christian” ethic can be fleshed out in any detail.
This should not be taken as in any way lessening the importance of dialogue. The value of talking together is not predicated on the expectation that we will discover ourselves to have more in common than we thought. Nor does it rest on the hope that the encounter will set in motion a gradual convergence of initially opposed traditions. Dialogue has value even if we find ourselves radically and immovably different. The problem facing liberal democracies is not so much to evolve a moral consensus17See the very instructive comments in the Foreword to the Warnock Report (A Question of Life: The Warnock Report on Human Fertilisation and Embryology, Oxford: Blackwell, 1985, 1–3). Warnock’s view is that “in our pluralistic society it is not to be expected that any one set of principles can be enunciated to be completely accepted by everyone.” Given this, the question to be faced is: “In what sort of society can we live with our conscience clear?” as to find a way of allowing different, incompatible ethnic and religious traditions to live together without threatening one another. “Let all peoples walk, each in the name of its god,”18Micah 4:5. said the prophet Micah. That remains, for a central Jewish tradition, the ultimate aim of mutual acceptance.
A COMMON MORAL LANGUAGE?
The second problem lies in this question: To what extent do any of us share moral problems any more? One effect of modernisation on consciousness – as Alasdair MacIntyre19Alasdair MacIntyre, Secularizationand Moral Change, Oxford University Press, 1967; After Virtue, Duckworth, 1981. and others have pointed out – is that it has wrecked our moral vocabulary and left us in the most profound confusion as to what is and what is not a moral issue. To take the two most conspicuous recent examples. One: do the problems of the inner cities have a moral dimension, or are they merely questions to be confronted at the level of practical policy? Two: does the AIDS epidemic call for any other moral response than compassion for the victims? Does it call for a reinstatement of traditional sexual morality? Does it even represent a rejection – by God or at least by the human body – of homosexuality and promiscuity? Or is the only possible answer, given the society in which we live, to issue an eleventh commandment: Thou shalt play it safe?
Nowadays religious leaders, both Christian and Jewish, tend to be reluctant to issue clear moral pronouncements. And we can hardly deny the significance of the fact that the most ringing moral denunciation of homosexuality came from lay sources, James Anderton on the Christian side, Chaim Bermant on the Jewish.20Bermant’s article, “Depravity, not deprivation is the cause of our ills” appeared in the Jewish Chronicle, 26 December 1986. It ended with an affirmation of Goethe’s remark, “All guilt is punished on earth.” And here we must confront a very sensitive point.
In no century as much as the twentieth has clear moral leadership been so necessary and so impossible. On the Jewish side, at both the popular and intellectual level, we are still scarred by the thinness, almost the invisibility, of Christian protest during the Holocaust years;21This sense dominates much contemporary Jewish theological writing. See for example: Eliezer Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust; Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity and Modernity after the Holocaust” in Eva Fleischner (ed.), Auschwitz: Beginning of a new Era? New York: Ktav, 1977, 7–56; Emil Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History, New York: Schocken, 1978, To Mend the World, New York: Schocken, 1982. and again when Israel’s existence was on the line in the weeks preceding the Six Day War and in the early days of the Yom Kippur War.22See, for example, the essays by William G. Oxtoby, A. Roy Eckardt and Frank Ephraim Talmage in F.E. Talmage (ed.), Disputation and Dialogue, New York: Ktav, 1975, 220–253. On the Christian side, we recognise that there must be similar consternation at the apparently uncritical support on the part of the Jewish community of the actions of the State of Israel.23This is stressed, for example, in Janet Sternfeld, Homework for Jews: Preparing for Jewish-Christian Dialogue, National Conference of Christians and Jews, 1985, 33–39. We must recognise that there are grievances on both sides. But what those grievances have in common is the sense that, at critical moments, religious leadership is too partisan to be moral leadership.
In the absence of a shared moral language, religious leadership is faced with the alternative of speaking either to its own faithful – in which case it fails to do justice to powerful opposed ethical claims – or to a minimalist moral consensus – in which case its pronouncements appear vapid and without content.24See MacIntyre, Secularization and Moral Change, 66–76; Stanley Hauerwas, Against the Nations, Winston, 1985, 1–50. Hence the question: Is religious moral leadership possible in a society which is morally diverse and, for the most part, only marginally religious?
THE PLACE OF ETHICS IN CONTEMPORARY
RELIGIOUS LIFE
Which brings us to the third point: With whom, as ministers of religion, do we share moral problems? Do we share them with society as a whole, or just with other religious people, or just with people of our own religion, or just with people of our own specific denomination, or just with a minority even of our own congregations: with that small minority which is prepared to give religion the deciding vote in a moral dilemma?
On the one hand it has become increasingly clear in recent decades that the sociological prediction has proved false, that secularisation would slowly extinguish religious life from modern societies.25Two classic studies are Bryan Wilson, Religion in Secular Society, Pelican Books, 1969; Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy, Doubleday, 1967. In fact almost all forms of religion have proved remarkably tenacious, and some in particular – those which oppose modernity and which are generally called, in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, “fundamentalist” – have experienced the most remarkable revival.26See, for example, Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiyah, Religion and Politics in Israel, Indiana University Press, 1984.
The modern democratic state provides much for its citizens, but not all. There remain certain needs – for an identity, for community, for an overarching system of meanings – which the state does not answer and which religion does.27See Peter L. Berger, Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind, Penguin Books, 1973, 163–191. That is on the one hand. But on the other, it is by no means certain that the need for ethical guidance is one of them. As rabbis, we may have to acknowledge, for example, that though Judaism has the most detailed code of sexual morality, that code seems to have little influence on what the majority of young Jews actually do. Individualism, hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure and material success are more powerful drives than anything the synagogue can deliver from the pulpit. For obvious reasons. They are there, available and seductive, in the cultural air we breathe. And that cultural atmosphere is not of the synagogue’s or the church’s making.
The problem can be stated more precisely, taking recent Jewish experience as an example. The two most notable movements in patterns of religious behaviour in recent decades have been in opposite directions. One is the search for individual religious experience, evidenced in the ba’al teshuvah (religious return) phenomenon. Individuals have sought out the enveloping, premodern culture of the yeshivot (talmudic seminaries) in a renunciation of secular society. The cluster of sectarian, neo-traditional Jewish groups has developed immense spiritual power as Judaism’s option of “de-modernizing consciousness.”28The phrase is taken from The Homeless Mind, ch. 9. The other is the growth of a strong secular-ethnic Jewish identity which has appropriated the symbols and language of tradition in building a “civil religion.”29The term “civil religion” is generally attributed to Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus, Winter 1967, 1–21. For studies of Jewish civil religion, see Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiyah, Civil Religion in Israel: Traditional Judaism and Political Culture in the Jewish State, University of California Press, 1983, and Jonathan Woocher, Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews, Indiana University Press, 1986. This is the faith of “Jews who seek to be Jewish through identification with the Jewish people as a corporate entity, its history, culture and tradition, but without necessarily accepting the authoritative character of halacha (Jewish law) or the centrality of halacha in defining their Jewishness.”30Daniel J. Elazar “The New Sadducees,” Midstream, August/ September 1978, 22.
Neither of these opposed modes of Jewish identity takes the specific Judaic ethical endeavour as central. Sectarianism is a form of retreat from a world witnessed as corrupt. Civil religion represents a legitimation of secular norms and strives, within them, to maintain group cohesion. Neither undertakes the classic task of religion, to socialise its members into coherent, distinctive and comprehensive forms of life.31I borrow this formulation from George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984, 126. Hence the third question for religious ethical leadership: Even when we are sure of what moral guidance we wish to give, how do we communicate and to whom? What is our constituency? At what point do we begin if we wish to build a more moral society?
THE RELIGIOUS DOMAIN
There are two conventional ways of considering religious ethics, one by asking what particular way of life is enjoined by a faith for its believers, the other by looking at the authority that lies behind that way of life. Neither approach, I believe, will take us to the common foundation we seek. Even if we can talk coherently of the Jewish or Christian way of life, it is too sui generis, too faith-specific, to command immediate attention by those who lie outside. And if we turn to authority, it is equally evident that the revelations that lie at the heart of the two faiths are in a tense relation to one another and are not directly persuasive to those who define themselves independently of the biblical drama.
But there is a third alternative, posed by asking which particular domain religious ethics occupies. Here I argue from within the Jewish tradition, in the hope that it captures something of wider significance even if other traditions would express it differently.
To put it briefly, Judaism has had relatively little to say about the two poles of human existence, the individual and the state. The individual as individual, as the lonely man of faith,32The phrase is taken from the title of the famous article by Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “The Lonely Man of Faith,” Tradition 7:2 (Summer 1965), 5–67. Much of Soloveitchik’s work is devoted to the phenomenology of aspects of the life of faith. Precisely because the individual subject of consciousness is not the locus of traditional spirituality, this gives his work a peculiarly modern tone, and creates a constant sense of tension. has almost no independent existence in Jewish thought. We recall the classic definition given by Maimonides of ha-poresh midarkhei ha-tzibbur, one who separates himself from the community. Maimonides writes: “Even if he does not commit a transgression but merely holds aloof from the congregation of Israel, does not perform the commandments in common with his people, shows himself indifferent when they are in distress…but goes his own way as if he were one of the other nations and not of the Jewish people, such a person has no share in the world to come.”33M.T. Hilkhot Teshuvah 3:11.
At the other extreme, the state too has little independent significance. Abarbanel famously remarked that the command to appoint a king,34Deuteronomy 17:14–20. to establish a governmental system, is the Torah’s concession to the evil inclination.35Abarbanel, Commentary to Deuteronomy 17:15; see also Ibn Ezra ad loc. Nor was Abarbanel being merely idiosyncratic. Not only is it the only biblical command specifically couched in terms of a response to the people’s request to be like everyone else: “Let me set a king over me like all the nations around me.”36Deuteronomy 17:14. Not only did the prophet Samuel try to talk the people out of it.37I Samuel 8:4–18. Not only did the prophets rail against the corruptions of governmental power. Not only did monarchy prove, with few exceptions, to be a moral and religious disaster. But the entire thrust of Jewish tradition is towards seeing the governmental domain as a practical necessity, rather than as an institution with a distinctive religious contribution to make.38For an insightful study of Judaic political theory, see Gerald J. Blidstein, Political Concepts in Maimonidean Halakhah (Hebrew), Bar Ilan University Press, 1983. For a historical study of how the “kingship” model has functioned in Jewish political organisation, see Daniel J. Elazar and Stuart A. Cohen, The Jewish Polity: Jewish Political Organization from Biblical Times to the Present, Indiana University Press, 1985. Rabbi Hanina, deputy High-Priest at the time of the destruction of the second Temple, summed up perfectly the extent and limits of the Jewish respect for political structures: “Pray for the welfare of the government for were it not for the fear of it, men would eat one another alive.”39M. Avot 3:2.
Jewish spirituality, at least since rabbinic times, finds its most significant context at the level neither of the individual nor the state, but in a series of settings midway between them, namely, the family, the bet ha-midrash and bet ha-knesset – the fellowships of learning and praying – and the kehillah, the community. Which is why Judaism has found it difficult to provide an adequate response to two modern phenomena: the religious search for individual salvation, catered for by some Chassidic groups but looked on with suspicion by many others; and the challenges posed by a Jewish state the majority of whose population is not yet ready for theocracy or religious coercion.
THE ETHICAL DOMAIN
This locus of Jewish values, set at an intermediate point between the individual and the state, may provide a significant point of entry into the problems I have outlined.
First, it is just this middle ground which contemporary secular society fails to provide for. The state is more active in the affairs of its citizens than in previous centuries. At the same time individuals have more choices, more freedoms and more scope for self-expression. It is not at either extreme that we experience our moral poverty, but in the middle: in the loss of the sense of community and in the breakdown of the family. Precisely where secular society is weak, Judaism and religions generally are strong.
Secondly, there are signs that at least some Christian thought is moving in this direction. I take as an example the impressive work of the American Christian ethicist, Stanley Hauerwas. Central to his thinking, especially in his recent book The Peaceable Kingdom,40Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics, SCM Press, 1984. are the perceptions that ethics belongs firmly within traditions and communities, and that we make our ethical choices as individuals within a specific historical tradition, and within the context of a community in which that tradition is given living substance. Perhaps even more significantly, some leading secular moral philosophers, like Alasdair MacIntyre41Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue. and Stuart Hampshire,42Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Conflict, Oxford, Blackwell, 1983. are moving in the same direction. This is nothing short of an intellectual revolution, because it represents a break with the two ethical systems that have most dominated secular thought for over a hundred years, utilitarianism on the one hand and Kantianism on the other, both of which are attempts to eliminate the concept of ethical traditions.
Thirdly, I must add as a personal conviction that I see no alternative route for the future of ethics. Morality does not flourish when planted at the level either of the state or the individual. When predicated of the state it is too ruthless of dissenting minorities to be tolerated. This is the enduring contribution of liberalism, from Mill to H.L.A. Hart. When predicated of the individual it is too rootless to provide the basis of virtue or character. This is the case presented with overwhelming force by MacIntyre and others.43See also “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honour” in Berger, Berger and Kellner, The Homeless Mind, 78–89; and Michael Oakeshott, “The Tower of Babel,” Cambridge Journal, Volume 2, 65–83.
SOME APPLICATIONS
How might this make a substantive difference to the way we think about ethical issues? Again I argue from within a Jewish perspective, hoping that other traditions may recognise something universal within the particular case.
Consider first the breakdown of traditional sexual ethics, brought forcibly to our attention by AIDS. Ever since the 60s, when homosexuality was legalised, we have generally accepted the liberal premiss that legislating sexual morality is not the business of the state.44H.L.A. Hart, Law, Liberty and Morality, Oxford University Press, 1968. But if the only alternative to the state is the individual, then we move inexorably to the conclusion that sexuality is a form of self-expression, and from there to the further conclusion that there is no such thing as sexual deviance.45Roger Scruton’s attempt (Sexual Desire, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986) to ground a traditional sexual morality in considerations of interpersonal intentionality – homosexuality thus fails because it lacks complementarity, strangeness and a sense of risk – seems to me to be a significant failure: significant because it demonstrates how tenuous moral argument is in this area when severed from talk about the family.
The only effective counterargument, to my mind, is one that locates sexuality firmly within the framework of values of the family. The ideals of heterosexuality and above all fidelity, summed up in the concept of marriage, are not merely part of biblical ethics. They are written into the entire fabric of the biblical vision, into its view both of creation – Adam and Eve – and of the covenant between God and man, aptly described by Hosea and Jewish tradition as a marriage.46The imagery is central to the act of wearing tefillin (phylacteries). As Jews wind the straps round their finger, they recite the verses: “I will betroth you to me for ever…I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the Lord” (Hosea 2:19–20), symbolically re-enacting the marriage between God and His people.
The underlying logic is apparent in the first chapter of Genesis. All of nature shares with God the property of being creative, of bringing new life into being, but only humanity shares with God the moral choice of bringing new life into the world. Only for Adam and Eve is the phrase “Be fruitful and multiply” experienced not just as a blessing but as a command.47To the animals it is a blessing: Genesis 1:22. To humanity it is a command: Genesis 1:28, 9:1. Bringing children into the world thus presupposes moral responsibility, for one might have chosen otherwise. That responsibility for those one has brought into existence extends to caring for them in their dependency, and to ensuring that they will have a world to inherit. Hence it is in the family that three great ethical concerns arise: welfare, or the care of dependents; education, or the handing on of accumulated wisdom to a new generation; and ecology, or concern with the fate of the world after our own lifetime.
Once the family is seen as the place where the ethical enterprise begins – something the Bible conveys dramatically by making “Be fruitful and multiply” the first of all the commands – then traditional sexual ethics becomes not one alternative among many in a sexually pluralistic world, but the only persuasive way of life for those who want to engage in the ethical undertaking.
Another example: the inner cities. Here I must testify, along with other Jewish readers, to a perplexity about Faith in the City.48Faith in the City: The Report of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas, London: Church House Publishing, 1985. In an otherwise outstanding report, one omission was striking. Early on in the document49Ibid., 37–38. there is a statistical table which summarises the responses of the clergy to the relative seriousness of various social problems. The list includes law and order, race relations, welfare provisions and unemployment. But top of the list nationally were problems relating to the family. It was almost top of the list for clergymen working in the inner cities. What was perplexing was that throughout Faith in the City the family appears as a problem and not as a solution.50See, for example, 334–335: “Moreover there are strong social pressures working against the traditional patterns of family life.… Any appeal to parental authority, and any attempts to strengthen it, must take account of the social realities of family life today.…” What from one perspective might seem like realism, from another might appear to be defeatism. Religions have traditionally been powerful agencies in sustaining forms of family life. The passage might be read, perhaps unkindly, as a retreat from this role. I would argue strongly for a move in the opposite direction. None of its sixty-one recommendations directly relates to ways in which the institution of the family might be strengthened by either the church or other religious and social groups.
Against this, the Jewish community has to testify from its own long experience of inner cities, immigrant and minority status and grinding poverty, that above all it was the strength of the Jewish family that allowed it to break the circle of deprivation. This has a number of dimensions. Educational surveys, for example, regularly highlight the fact that the most potent factor affecting academic success in schools is the degree of parental support and involvement in their children’s schooling. A potent factor in motivating enterprise is the all-too-human desire to give one’s children more than they might otherwise have. Many forms of deviant adolescent behaviour only make sense in the context of family breakdown.
There has been a determined onslaught against the family this century,51For a recent survey, see Digby Anderson and Graham Dawson (eds.), Family Portraits, London: The Social Affairs Unit, 1986. and we have to admit that the Jewish world was responsible for two of its most powerful formulations, the Freudian attack on the family as an instrument of repression, and the Kibbutz-socialist attack on the family as an instrument of capitalism.52For a sensitive portrait of kibbutz methods of raising children, see Bruno Bettelheim, The Children of the Dream, Paladin, 1973. That said, the family remains the most durable institutional context of human flourishing yet devised. The impression conveyed by Faith in the City is that family failures are a social datum, not to be addressed as an object of religious policy. But this is a tacit moral judgement, not an empirical conclusion. If human flourishing is part of the object of morality53See, for example, G.J. Warnock, The Object of Morality, Methuen, 1971. and if the family does indeed contribute to flourishing, then strengthening the family is a legitimate part of the moral project.
ETHICAL PARTICULARISM
As soon as we locate morality within ways of life which are neither embodied in the state nor confined to individual choices, we encounter the phenomenon of pluralism. There are, at this level, moralities in the plural, not a single common morality for humanity as a whole. Stuart Hampshire compares moralities with languages: “There exists a multiplicity of coherent ways of life, held together by conventions and imitated habits, for much the same reasons that there is a multiplicity of natural languages, held together by conventions and imitated habits of speech.”54Morality and Conflict, 148. There is no single overarching morality, as there is no single all-embracing language.
Arising out of this conception is another, the moral community, namely those bound together as speakers, as it were, of the same language. The notion of morality as part of a way of life alerts us to the fact that communities, though they may share a sense of mutual obligation, are characteristically bound together by other things as well: religious faith or ethnic origin, for example. The question which now needs to be posed is: Is it legitimate for us to regard such communities as moral entities? Does it make sense to speak of special obligations to the members of one’s group?
The drift of secular ethics since the Enlightenment has been towards universalism, that is, towards stipulating that ethical responses are just those we are willing to extend to everyone.55See, for an influential example, R.M. Hare, The Language of Morals, Oxford, 1964, Freedom and Reason, Oxford, 1965, Moral Thinking, Oxford, 1981. If we are not willing to extend them to everyone, they are not ethical, but either a kind of self-interest or a kind of tribalism. Crucial to my argument is that there are features of morality which are unaccounted for by this conception. There is a case to be made for ethical particularism.
One of the most powerful moral critiques in the work of Charles Dickens, one of the supreme moralists of all time, is of Mrs. Pardiggle and Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, ladies of what he calls “rapacious benevolence,” who are so taken up with good works on behalf of the Tockahoopo Indians and the Borrioboola Africans that they completely neglect and ultimately destroy their families. “Never,” says the husband of one of them to his daughter, “Never have a Mission, my dear child.”56Mr. Jellyby, Bleak House, ch. 30.
We have no difficulty in understanding what Dickens means. There is something that offends against Kantian ethics but which nonetheless answers to our deepest moral intuitions, that says: what does it profit a person if he saves the whole world and neglects those closest to him? The rabbis said it unashamedly. The poor of your family take precedence over the poor of another family. The poor of your town take precedence over the poor of the next town.57Baba Metzia 71a.
We were moved by the activation of the world’s moral conscience on behalf of the famine victims of Ethiopia. Yet there were few more telling symptoms of the universalism implicit in Western culture than the failure of the world to be moved by Israel’s rescue of Ethiopian Jewry. “Jews rescue their own,” was the cynical reaction. To which the Jewish response is instinctively: If we are not the kind of people who will rescue our own, are we the kind of people who will ultimately rescue anyone?
Once again, the family proves to be a moral crux. Michael Wyschogrod asks us to consider the following example:
In the devastating 1976 earthquake in Communist China, there was a report of an incident in which a father insisted on rescuing a local Communist officer rather than his child, whose moans he heard but ignored to save the official, whose social value the father judged above that of his son. By the time he returned to the wreckage in which his son was buried, he found him dead. The Chinese Communist press pointed to this incident as an example of proper Chinese behaviour.58Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: Judaism as Corporeal Election, Seabury Press, 1983, 215–216. Wyschogrod has penetrating things to say about ethical universalism and particularism.
The example forces us to clarify our intuitive moral responses. It presents us with a picture of a coherent way of life, but one which we might intelligibly reject for ourselves. Once we admit parenthood as a moral, not simply as a biological, category then we allow that there may be special obligations which are not universalisable.
We must be very careful at this point. It has been one of the most painful accusations of antisemites that Jews use different ethical standards when dealing with themselves than when dealing with others. Books have been written to refute the charge;59A poignant example is Joseph S. Bloch, Israel and the Nations, Benjamin Harz Verlag, 1927. it should not be necessary to repeat the arguments here. Some moral obligations are surely universal, but they do not exhaust the entire scope of morality. To quote Hampshire again: “human nature, conceived in terms of common human needs and capacities, always underdetermines a way of life.”60Morality and Conflict, 155. It makes sense to speak of some moral obligations which are generated within a specific moral community and which are bounded by that community. This has been historically a deeply controversial proposition. My argument is that it is a corollary of ethical pluralism.
Thus, for example, in the context of ethnic minorities there are two opposed poles of approach. One is to encourage them to develop adequate networks of self-help, welfare, educational and economic. Another is for outside agencies to assume direct responsibility. The former strategy is often assumed to be obviously less moral than the latter. Yet the latter is fraught with its own problems, predicated as it is on a paternalistic model which may be resented as threatening ethnic integrity and self-respect. I have tried to show that there is a moral case to be made for the first approach. I have argued the rationale of encouraging the vitality of middle-range institutions, from the family to the faith or ethnic community. It is here that moral action is at its least problematic. For it is here that morality begins.
LIMITS
Begins but not ends. Jewish ethics is an instructive instance of the two ways in which ethical particularism must be supplemented to be an adequate conception of morality. One is the growth of empathy. The other is the notion of moral limits. Both are necessary. For there is the signal danger in the kind of ethical thinking here advocated, that morality may indeed become in-group or purely tribal, where the only people we care about are those who share our commitments.
Against this possibility the Jewish ethical tradition provides dynamic models of the ways moral obligation extends outwards from the family. By the book of Exodus the covenantal family of Abraham and his children has become a nation. But obligations to other members of one’s people are still often couched in terms of the word “brother.”61There are many examples in Leviticus ch. 25. Duties are extended beyond the nation by the word “stranger” together with the rider, “You know the heart of the stranger, for you yourselves were strangers in the land of Egypt.”62Exodus 23:9. The development of moral character, on this conception, is along the axis of the widening range of imaginative identifications. I owe special duties to those with whom I most strongly identify; but the ethical imagination continually finds unexpected identifications.63One of the more remarkable imaginative leaps in the Bible is: “Do not abhor an Egyptian, because you lived as an alien in his country” (Deuteronomy 23:8). The moral family, in other words, has an inbuilt tendency to become an extended family.
There is a second rider, different in kind and all the more crucial. Any morality whose context is a less-than-universal community must contain a limiting-case set of obligations for those who lie outside the community. There must be a morality for the outsider; in the case of religions, a morality for the unredeemed. If there is nothing I may not do to one whose soul is not saved, if there is nothing I may not do in order to save a soul, then my morality is so fatally flawed as no longer to be worthy of the name. This surely is the enduring truth of ethical universalism, that there are some elements of morality which apply to humanity as such without qualification. There are duties I owe to those with whom I identify, but there are others I owe precisely to those with whom I do not identify, for whom I have no sympathy, with whom I have nothing in common. If the long, tragic chronicles of religious persecution and attempted genocide are not instances of immorality, we may rightly ask: What is?
Rabbinic tradition records a dialogue64Sifra, Kedoshim, 4:12. between two teachers of the Mishnaic age. Each was asked to provide a statement of the “great principle” which underlay the Torah. Rabbi Akiva answered by citing the verse, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”65Leviticus 19:18. Ben Azzai replied that there is a more fundamental principle: “When God created man, He made him in the likeness of God.”66Genesis 5:1. In the terms we have been using, Akiva takes as his moral ultimate the complete extension of empathy involved in loving one’s neighbour as oneself. Ben Azzai rightly notes that though this may be the end of morality, it is nonetheless not its most basic proposition. Morality has boundaries, and they are set by the recognition that there are certain things one may not do to any human being, whether one loves him or hates him. In the Bible this is grounded in the ontological sanctity of humanity as the image of God. To which ancient rabbinic wisdom added the following comment: “When human beings create things in a single image, they are all alike. God makes humanity in a single image, yet each of them is unique.”67M. Sanhedrin 4:5.
On this point, the ethical dialogue between faiths imposes a limit on theological dialogue, and one that needs to be clearly articulated. Three theological positions are usually distinguished.68John Hick, Problems of Religious Pluralism, 91. The exclusivist maintains that only his faith is in possession of the truth. The inclusivist maintains that his faith alone is true, but that others unwittingly or partially share it. The pluralist maintains that each faith is its own reflection of the same underlying truth.
If these positions are confined to theology alone, to the vocabulary of salvation, redemption, fate in the afterlife and the like, we can reasonably proceed within the categories they set forth. But if they are taken to entail ethical consequences, then all three must be regarded as inadequate. For if I do not have some moral obligations to those I believe to be categorically in error – if I am not prepared to recognise the image of God in the human being as such, independently of his or my theological commitments – then there is at least a possible line from faith to Holocaust. The twentieth century has surely taught us this much.
I would urge, therefore, as part of any dialogue between faiths, races or cultures, that it seeks to establish, for each of the partners, a morally adequate theory of “the other,” the one who is in God’s image though he is not in our image.
CONCLUSIONS
To summarise what has been a somewhat extended argument:
Jewish thinkers have advocated a form of dialogue in the realm, not of theology, but of ethics, conducted in the “universal language” of “common humanity.” I have argued that it is a given feature of modern Western societies that there is no such universal language. We are in an ethical Babel which shows no signs of converging on a single moral vocabulary. But we need not draw from this situation the two most common inferences, that there is a Platonic universal morality underlying the apparent diversity, or that to the contrary there is nothing left to morality than the expression of individual choice.
There is an alternative conclusion to be drawn, sometimes called “post-liberal pluralism,”69George Lindbeck (The Nature of Doctrine, 40) characterises post-liberal theology in terms of the assertion that “Adherents of different religions do not diversely thematize the same experience; rather they have different experiences.” The seemingly similar virtues and emotions within different traditions “are not diverse modifications of a single fundamental human awareness, emotional attitude, or sentiment, but are radically (i.e., from the root) distinct ways of experiencing and being oriented toward self, neighbor and cosmos.” This was the position advocated by Soloveitchik in Confrontation. I have merely added the observation that this extends not only to theologies, but to moralities as well, beyond the minimalist threshold. that there is an open-ended multiplicity of moral ways of life, each set in its own tradition and embodied in its own form of community. It is in the context of such communities, of which the family is the most basic, that the moral enterprise gets under way and is at its most lucid. A central moral task of religions, though not only of religions, lies in building such communities. The sense of anomie which pervades modernity has much to do with the poverty of secular culture at this intermediate point between the individual and the state. This is the primary moral domain.
The religious ethical endeavour would thus lie in creating persuasive examples of moral communities, each living out its distinctive traditions. Religious leadership can no longer speak to society as a whole on the basis of authority, for that authority cannot be presumed to be accepted by all. But it can speak out of its own experience and example. That too confers a kind of authority, perhaps the only kind for which we can hope in the modern situation.
Dialogue is necessary. Each faith community can learn volumes from others by seeing how they, in quite different ways, build caring communities. As Jews, for example, we have learned much from the Christian tradition of pastoral ministry, and we have incorporated it into our religious life. Long ago, to give another example, the rabbis learned from ancient Roman examples what “honouring thy father and mother” might mean in practice.70Kiddushin 31a.
Dialogue has a second aim: to establish a clear sense of the limits of ethical particularism. The growth, throughout the world and in all the major faiths, of religious fundamentalism makes this particularly urgent. Ethics sets boundary conditions for theology. If the unredeemed are not, at some level, objects of moral concern, possessing independent integrity and rights, then faith itself becomes morally untenable.
Dialogue need not be grounded in the belief that, au fond, we all share the same faith or the same morality. There is something profoundly moving in such a belief. But there is something equally momentous in the opposite conviction: that our worlds of faith are irreducibly plural yet we have been cast into the same planet, faced with the same questions. Can we live together? Can we learn from one another? Within this vision much is possible. Much, too, is necessary.