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Our Stable/Shifting Task:
From “Choosing a Sex Ethic” to Today
Eugene B. Borowitz, Judaism, Vol. 52. Nos. 1-2, 2003 (appeared 2004)

Romanticism aside, the latter years of the sixties were, in fact, a time of extraordinary ethical ferment, one in which people not only were concerned about a broad range of issues but sought to act upon their decisions concerning them. Sexual freedom was a major stimulant in the heady intellectual brew of the times and finding a new sex ethics was a lively concern among thoughtful young people, though generally explored more in doing than reflecting on what ought or ought not be done. In this exciting atmosphere of challenged old assumptions and daring new assertions Jewish leaders kept talking about the relevance of Judaism to our problems. But, as so often has been the case, after all the rhetoric no one, as far as I could tell, dared to give us a thoughtful, learned example of how our ideology could be realized in this specific, challenging instance. When I complained about my elders and betters in this field to Alfred Jospe, then Hillel’s national director of program, he challenged me to do it myself. So without adequate training in any of the fields that one might deem necessary for undertaking such a task but determined to see if our ideology of Jewish tradition’s continuing relevance would work in a realistic case, I boldly said I would.

I recall rather clearly the suffering that then ensued. Twice I thought I knew how to go about the task and sat down to write a draft of the little book but even before I had gotten very far, I knew my approach would fail to accomplish my goals. I did not retain copies of those drafts but I can guess what caused my anguish. If, as I had been taught, Jewish ethics was essentially universal, then Judaism had nothing special to say to contemporary college students. But if I sought to speak to them out of Jewish faith and its traditions, the youthful rebels simply wouldn’t listen. They wanted things to make sense to them in their terms. How then should I proceed? Then, in the summer of 1968, I hit on the arrangement I finally used: I would respect what I loosely called their “autonomy” by presenting the four major ethical options I thought they faced and analyze them in terms of values I thought they shared and Judaism cared about. To this I added a chapter on the Jewish experience with sexual ethics, justifying this by its general human interest as well as its special resonance to Jews. The apologetic caution evident in that statement also caused my editors to insist that I relegate to the endnotes much of the pertinent Jewish source material and some discussions of technical philosophic issues. After I vigorously argued that Hillel and Schocken had a responsibility to feature, not bury, the Jewish source material, they relented enough to devote a page following the Contents to a list of “Notes of Special Interest” that I hoped would win some readers for the detailed Jewish data. Despite that small victory for Jewish sources, I came to the end of the manuscript feeling quite unhappy that I had spent so much time talking to them in their language that I had not been able to speak my own. So, hoping that by now they trusted me enough to let me speak out of my Jewish religious belief, I took the last four pages to address them directly in my Jewish religious terms as I had not felt able to do earlier in the book, Choosing a Sex Ethic, a Jewish inquiry, Schocken, 1969.

I had come to my practical Jewish ethical task convinced that this was one place where Judaism could speak clearly and convincingly to our times. I may have left it reasonably satisfied that I had done the best that I could, but I now knew that Jewish ethics was an area strewn with intellectual land mines. Today, a third of a century since the publication of that book, I believe the difficulties have only exacerbated and I should like to devote the remainder of my presentation to analyzing our community’s odd situation with regard to Jewish ethics and then suggesting what I think our society of academics devoted to the study of Jewish ethics, might do about that.

Our community’s peculiar problems in this area is, I believe, best understood in the context of what has happened to our understanding of ethics during the past century. Painting with a very wide brush indeed, we may say that as science and technology increasingly demonstrated their power to explain and control nature, religion lost its long-time place as people’s primary means of comprehending the world and their place and responsibility in it. But as the scientific method prided itself on being value-free, the Kantian notion that reason itself demanded ethics of us became a powerful humanistic supplement to the emerging modern worldview. If the human mind, properly utilized, could distinguish good from evil and could mandate what people ought to do, it seemed to many secularizers almost unethical not to spurn religion, its stories so redolent of mythology, its rites with their overtones of magic, and its social divisiveness. Those moderns who remained convinced of the essential truth of religion responded by creating a new understanding of the relationship of God and duty, one built on themes in Kantian philosophy. As he had suggested, instead of faith in God serving as the foundation for human obligation, the certainty of rational ethics would now set the parameters for what a rational mind might assert about the reality and nature of God. This model of religious thinking, one that moved from the certainty of rational ethics to what might be said about God became the intellectual paradigm undergirding the intellectual appeal of the many modernized religions we lump together under the label “liberal.”

This general development in western culture had extraordinary appeal to that large number in the Jewish community who, wherever they were given the opportunity, avidly modernized. They recognized that as nations accepted the modern point of view that religion was a peripheral consideration in citizenship, Jews could attain real social equality. In working toward that goal, they found two aspects of Kant’s thinking about rationality particularly useful in explaining to themselves and their neighbors their determination to remain loyal Jews. The first was that truly rational ideas had universal scope. For Jews, who had long prided themselves on their monotheism, the notion of universality as a standard of truth seemed intuitively correct. Moreover, since rational ethics now also had to apply universally, Jews could not be discriminated against but, like all other rational beings, needed to be treated as ends in themselves and not merely as means to an end. It was an insight Jews saw confirmed in the experience of the general human good modernity had mobilized in emancipating them from the “ghetto.” This aspect of Kantian-style ethics thus powerfully combined truth and practical benefit – a highly biblical notion – and is, in my opinion, the intellectual reason Jews remain involved in universal ethical causes in striking statistical disproportion to the rest of the American population or others in their socio-economic class. And within our community, this commitment to the universal reach of ethics continues to provide feminists and other excluded groups with a commanding justification for their complete inclusion.

The second Jewish attraction to Kantian thinking was that it associated rational ideas with that special urgency we term “law.” Newton’s rational universe operated according to natural law. Similarly, Kantian ethics identified moral obligation not as a matter of sentiment or goal-seeking but as “a categorical imperative.” That had all the earmarks of a rational restatement of the classic Jewish commitment to mitzvah, commandment, and instantly turned the Protestant denigration of Judaism as a religion of law rather than of love back on the accusers; Judaism was, by Kantian standards, the more rational religion. Of course, Kantianism validates only ethical mandates. Yet in the thrill of attaining social equality, many Jews once were (and now continue to be) happy to replace the Oral Law with the Kantian Moral Law. It was this disposition that gave rise to the transdenominational Jewish ideology that ethics is the essence of Judaism. Surely many of the tensions in our discussions of halakhic issues these days echo something of this sentiment.

Hermann Cohen, the great founder of Marburg neo-Kantianism gave this point of view a solid philosophical foundation and thus, without himself ever teaching it, began the academic enterprise we call Jewish ethics. It would be sinful, I feel, and not merely indecent for us to begin this organization without mentioning his name for blessing.

At the very least, two consequences of his work, one theoretical, the other practical, demand acknowledgment, brief though it must be. Theoretically, later modern Jewish ethical thinkers, though regularly disagreeing with Cohen substantively, followed him methodologically: that is, they utilized one or more humanistic university disciplines to explicate the nature of contemporary Jewish ethics (and – but only in recent years – occasionally also challenged aspects of the university perspective based on their vision of Judaism’s own truth). Practically, the neo-Kantian, ethicized versions of Judaism were long the only substantial way cultured modern Jews could validate their Jewishness to their neighbors and themselves. So many sophisticated American Jewish leaders in the first half of the twentieth century were, loosely speaking, Cohenians, communicating to their students and the community the notion that a high rationality and ethical humaneness lay at the heart of Judaism. Many, of course, also proclaimed the unique virtues of Judaism’s non-ethical teachings but they then had to face the tensions the commanding power of general ethics raised with the halakhah’s strictures on matters like mamzerut [the Jewish equivalent of bastardy], agunah [the woman legally “chained” to her husband], and (later) women’s rights. Today, the continuing power of general ethics manifests itself most grievously in relation to American Jewish support for the State of Israel some of whose actions, despite arising in the exceptional context of unremitting brutal conflict, have often troubled American Jews even as they have pained many Israelis.

We may say, then, that during the first half of the twentieth century ethics established itself as the chief pride of modernized Jewry and the core of its intellectual self-understanding. But that paradigm for structuring a modern Jewishness largely collapsed in the three decades following World War II. Hindsight suggests that my difficulties in conceptualizing my sex ethics book arose from my sense, like that of a number of other young Jewish thinkers, that the paradigm which so imbued our teachers, was now untenable. Let me, so as not to leave more loose ends, remind you of the corollary developments, theoretical and practical, which robbed us of our former certainty and brought our community to what I see as its present paradoxical ethical situation.

Academically, a radical shift took hold after mid-century in the philosophic understanding of human reason and its effective scope. The neo-Kantian model of rationality effectively died as mathematically descriptive science increasingly set the standard for attaining rational certainty. In this perspective, rationality meant proceeding logically from premises to conclusions by way of statements that could be empirically verified or falsified. In such logical analysis ethics could be dismissed as a species of emotivism. When, in rebellion, philosophic existentialism emerged, it redirected thought to selfhood, freedom and the search for authenticity but, if as Sartre said, “Hell is other people,” this version of rationality could not, in turn, provide a sure ground for a robust ethics. More recently, as deconstructionism has undercut the very referentiality of language and the possibility of any sure foundation on which to proceed to certainties, philosophic ethics has largely abandoned the search for a rationalistic meta-ethics and limited itself, often quite impressively, to ethical issues pursued within given systems.

We may thus say that in the past century, the adequacy of philosophical reason to serve as the sure, commanding, standard for ethical action has changed from a certainty to a major intellectual problem. This reversal lies behind Bob Gibbs’ impressive recent book, “Why Ethics?,” in which he abandoned his previously announced orientation to praxis-ethics to work on ethical theory and did so by demonstrating that every response to the mother-question generated other questions, each then creating sub questions, all of which he courageously sought to answer. Am I exaggerating when I suggest that in my lifetime rational ethics has gone from clarifying categorical imperatives to refining our ethical uncertainties?

As academic philosophy was largely de-ethicizing itself from within, a series of critical attacks from without further weakened the identification of reason with impersonal certainty. Marx, Freud and the anthropologists showed how our ideas are substantially determined by our class, our psyche and our culture. In recent years, people of color and feminists have tellingly indicated how race and gender deeply affect our readings of reality. Our once vaunted rationalistic universalism has now been shown to be fundamentally particular. Moreover, we have no realistic hope of restoring our prior messianic confidence in the goodness of human nature and the efficacy of education, culture, therapy or other nostrums to empower ethical existence. The lessons of the Holocaust reinforced since by daily revelations of the venality and malevolence of the “best and the brightest” of us, have forced a new realism about human nature upon us, one highly reminiscent of the talmudic view of human beings as characterologically conflicted.

The practical concomitant of these intellectual developments is glaringly exposed by what society made of a central idea of rationalistic ethics, namely “autonomy.” Its glory lay in validating the overthrow of social practices that reason showed were unethical, thereby empowering such human triumphs as the Emancipation of the Jews in Europe, the confirmation of full civil rights for African Americans in the United States, and the continuing worldwide struggle to achieve women’s equality. But as rationality was divested of its tie to ethics, naked self-interest usurped the place of rational choice operating under the sovereignty of moral law. The resulting increase in drug-taking, sexual license and social violence, or, among the more genteel, the devotion to what-is-good-for-me at the expense of a counter-balancing common-good, has made the old adulation of self-determination seem naive. It has confronted us with a newly oppressive ethical issue: what now sets the limits of personal freedom? That is, what authoritative ethics now rightfully overrides individual preference? Or, to restate the issue in classic Jewish tones, how today can ethics again command us?

The breakdown of the old ethical paradigm has led many Moslems, Christians and Jews to a freshly intense commitment to their inherited traditions and institutions, the many religious phenomena lumped under the label “fundamentalism.” These believers proudly turn their backs on the moral license they see abetted by modernity’s obsession with the self. Instead they glory in setting limits for the proper use of human freedom, and, equally appealing to many, provide communities which socially reinforce their standards. We see the broad appeal of this religious sentiment most plainly in the fundamentalist presence in American politics.

But we learn something special about the staying power of the universal ethical intuition among us in observing how the overwhelming majority of Jews have not accepted some Jewish equivalent of the general fundamentalism. That is all the more remarkable because – with due apologies to the various theorists among us – we have not yet produced a broadly convincing theory of ethics to replace the Kantian-style paradigm which once made ethics so precious to us. Many Jews today do believe that their tradition has much to teach them, but their realism also indicates that Judaism’s teachers and institutions, being human, are flawed and should not be accorded the reasonably unquestioned authority they have commonly demanded. And, our majority will not accept baldly discriminatory rules such as those of mamzerut, agunot and women’s place in Judaism, merely to maintain the functional integrity of their inherited legal tradition. This generation, with all its putative affection for kabbalah, classic Jewish mysticism, is also one that regularly epitomizes the purpose of Judaism as tikkun olam, repairing the universe, by which they do not mean the internalized, mystical practices of Lurianic kabbalah but, primarily, ethical concern.

Three somewhat overlapping theological positions seem to me be the ones most widely held contemporary understandings of Judaism among non-Orthodox Jews (and, I would argue, among many of the modern or centrist Orthodox as well): First, that Judaism is unthinkable without halakhah but that needs to be seen not as a substantially fixed canon but as a historic process in whose development moral considerations must now be a major factor; or, second, that individual Jews seriously covenanted to God as part of the Jewish people’s ongoing covenant with God, deserve a substantial measure of authority in determining Jewish duty; and, third, the independent cogency of various interpretations of feminist Jewish thought. All these views testify to our community’s continuing commitment to the close connection between general ethics and Judaism despite the erosion of the modernist intellectual foundation for that belief, a paradox which should significantly humble those of us devoted to ethical and theological system-building.

Have we then come together to found this Society for Jewish Ethics in order to resolve our community’s present ethical perplexity? In any proximate sense, I hope not, for not only do we share the condition of our civilization and community but, the academic self-consciousness we bring to this field only intensifies the difficulties our community faces. I want to defend that position a bit and then make a suggestion or two for ways our Society might usefully and realistically respond to our dilemma.

I begin by sharing with you the results of an informal thought experiment I conducted to see if I could clarify what we ought to be talking about and how we might best do that. Very quickly I discovered that on each of the six topics I raised I found myself in a Gibbsian situation, facing a number of highly contentious issues, twenty-some of which I’d like briefly to set before you.

Terminology. Just what do we mean by “ethics,” and what do we include or exclude when we use that term? And will anyone be bold enough to suggest that they can definitively define the meaning of the term “Jewish?” Unless some halakhic and intellectual wizard can ingeniously reinterpret the laws of kilayim and indicate how we may hybridize two already suspect species and come up with a kosher yield, how shall we identify that doubly suspect thing called “Jewish ethics?” Besides, if it is particularized how can it be universal ethics? And can we respect the encompassing horizon of Jewish duty by yoking it to a domain that rejects any sharing of its authority to command?

Meta-ethics. Can anyone convincingly establish what rationally grounds an ethic today or what gives it commanding power? Or need an ethic at all command us? But can it then be called “Jewish” if it does not make some deeds urgent enough to override temptation or repair a bit of this broken world? Need there be a notion of God or the equivalent involved in a Jewish ethics? If so, can the resulting teaching properly be considered ethics? Or should we, can we, as many thoughtful ethicists do, by-pass these issues as insoluble and, proceeding without a foundation, limit our discussion to mid-level issues?

Authority. To what extent can the mind’s conclusions command us? As philosophic views shift, do our ethics change with them? What is the relation of general legal thinking and statement to ethical teaching? To what extent do reasonably well established Jewish traditions command us? How do our changing views of the context and connotations of classic Jewish texts change our views of Jewish ethics? By what method can one legitimately make an ethical inference from a halakhic directive? More sweepingly but also more critically, what today is the best balance of mind and text as the grounds for a commanding Jewish ethical behest?

Hermeneutics. Feminist Jewish scholars often read texts in ways that open up new meanings in them; must we all be feminists or their disciples in order to qualify as a Jewish ethicist today? More abstractly, to what extent should our shifting hermeneutic practices influence our ethics? How shall we deal with the conundrum that practitioners of diverse hermeneutic practices cannot realistically evaluate the virtues of readings from a perspective different from theirs except by touting what they see as the advantages of their hermeneutic?

Theory and Praxis. If much philosophical ethics these days seeks or evades the question of the theory validating this discipline, while Jewish tradition, emphasizing halakhah, law, over aggadah, non-legal lore, is fundamentally praxis-oriented, should contemporary Jewish ethics be weighted toward one or the other interests? And if we need both in a robust Jewish ethics, what should the proper balance between them be?

In Sum. Why does my list leave out the question you find most troubling? Why is there so much overlap between my questions? And, the question of all questions, so why in the face of all these nettlesome issues do we nonetheless find ourselves ethically compelled to bring this Society for Jewish Ethics into being? It is to that mother of all our questions that I want now to present some non-answer answers.

I begin by calling our attention to two intellectual forebears who, in their own ways, have provided valuable, if divergent, guidance for our perplexity. The first of these is Steven S. Schwarzschild, z”l, who was for many years Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at Washington University and a lonely academic voice proclaiming the continued relevance of Cohen’s Marburg neo-Kantianism. Long before Levinas, he argued passionately for the primacy of ethics to all other philosophic thought and insisted that Judaism had first conceived that notion, thereby making any philosopher whom he judged to have endorsed that position, a “Jewish philosopher.”

It seemed not to bother Steve at all that most philosophers thought it quixotic of him to champion so outmoded a set of ideas as Marburg neo-Kantianism but, if anything, such philosophical opposition only made him feel called to the intellectual challenge he was shouldering. I recall how, in one of the years following World War II, he reported with glee that some Argentine Yiddishists had responded to the charge that Yiddish was now a dying language by founding a magazine called Davke, which barely translates as “Just For That Unlikely Reason.” He not only felt that what they had done was admirable but exactly what being a Jew was all about.

This memory brought to mind a maxim related to neo-Kantianism that I don’t believe I ever heard Steve use but it certainly confirms his attitude. One criticism of that philosophy was that it illogically insisted that creatures it knew were deterministically ordered were, as rational beings, required to operate in freedom in ethical decision-making. The neo-Kantian defense was, “Because you must, you can,” any other course suggesting the universe was irrational. Perhaps that should be our motto. We know we must continue the tradition of Jewish ethics even though it seems to me we have no coherent group conception of how properly to do so. Steve would have enjoyed adding, “Indeed, Davke, just because it seems impossible, it is our Jewish intellectual duty to do so.” Zekher tzaddik livrakhah, the memory of the righteous is for blessing.

Our second forebear, likewise unfazed by very long odds, is Rabbenu Tarfon who deserves, I must insist, having both his statements in Mishnah Pirke Avot (2.15 and 16) considered and not merely the inevitably quoted one.

Rabbi Tarfon says: The day is short, the work-load immense, the workers lazy, the pay great and the Householder pressing. He used to say: You are not required to complete the work but you are not a free-man who can free himself from it. If you have studied Torah very much, they will give you very great reward and the Master of the work is trustworthy. He will pay you the wages of your work – but know that the payment of the wage of the righteous is in the world-to-come. (Pirke Avot 2:15-16) [My rendering]

In both texts Rabbenu Tarfon speaks of the magnitude of the work confronting us, the study of Torah, and gives two reasons why, despite our sloth and the shortness of our lives, we must work at it. In both statements he promises us great reward for unremitting effort, though he realistically reserves it for the life of the world to come. For those of us who do not believe that ethical acts must be done out of disinterest, we look forward to the Society rewarding us with the joys of personal and intellectual comraderie. In the latter statement he also famously reminds us that we are not in the status of a ben chorin, a free man, who, unlike a slave, is able simply to walk away from burdensome employment. In some sense, the Taskmaster has a claim on us. Neither reward nor compulsion seem like apt motives for founding a society devoted to ethics but particularly for those of us who are, in our own way, religious, Rabbenu Tarfon knows us; our situation, apparently in some still compelling manner, is very much like his.

To me, these forebears validate what we are doing even though they do not intellectually resolve the paradox which confronts us. But each of them may also be read as, horror-of-horrors, demi-pragmatists, idealists fearful that the impossible ideal will not long remain compelling unless there is a vigorous intellectual effort under way to rebuild its eroded foundations. Our work may be that necessary. To give it some initial focus I propose that our Society undertake a practical project that should help clarify what we are doing and how we can best do it. It mimics one carried out by the Society for Jewish Law, though not done by them for the purpose I have in mind. Among the many other things we do over the next three or four years, let us ask a diverse group of our members to plan for and, with other contributors, write a one-volume introduction to Jewish ethics. I envision not a professorial Einleitung, “Introduction,” but the sort of multi-faceted statement that could serve as a serious undergraduate textbook for courses in our field. Coming with the blessing of our society, edited by a diverse group of its members, testifying to the variety of present approaches to our topic, and drawing on the diverse experience and learning of our members, it should be a splendid pedagogic tool. For all its practical value, I am primarily suggesting the project to us for what constructing an integrated overview of the sprawling reaches of our discipline might teach us about how best to spend our early years. It would, of course, be a substantial undertaking and perhaps others may think of less demanding ways of working toward this goal. For myself, a sefer, a book, has special Jewish appeal despite the difficulties it always involves.

I conclude now as our tradition instructs us to do when there are moments of great personal benefit amplified by the knowledge that the good involved reaches out to embrace many others as well. The language of the classic blessing prescribed for such celebrative moments seems to me particularly appropriate at the founding of a Society for Jewish Ethics: Barukh atah Adonai, Elohenu, melekh haolam, hatov vehametiv, We bless you Adonai, our God, sovereign of the universe, the Good and the Causer of good.

Eugene B. Borowitz is the Sigmund L. Falk Distinguished Professor of Education and Jewish Religious Thought at the New York School of Hebrew Union College-Jewistitute of Religion. The Jewish Publication Society has recently honored his work with a volume in its Scholar of Distinction Series, Studies in the Meaning of Judaism, a selection of his papers tracing the evolution of his thought from 1950-2002. He is a Contributing Editor of JUDAISM.

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