GEN970 [Setting forth four problems with the conventional reading of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac]. Abraham was chosen to be a role model as a father. God says of him: [This verse]. How could he serve as a model father if he was willing to sacrifice his child? To the contrary, he should have said to God: “If you want me to prove to You how much I love You, then take me as a sacrifice, not my child.”  SACKS 23

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GEN973 Judaism is supremely a religion of love: three loves. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might” Deuteronomy 6:5;” You shall love your neighbor as yourself” Leviticus 19:18; and “You shall love the stranger, for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt” Deuteronomy 10:19; see also, Leviticus 19:33-34. Not only is Judaism a religion of love - it was the first civilization to place love at the center of the moral life. C. S. Lewis and others pointed out that all great civilizations contain something like the golden rule – act toward others as you would wish them act towards you, C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: McMillan, 1947), or, in Hillel’s negative formulation, do not do to others what you would hate them to do to you Shabbat 31a. This is what game theorists call reciprocal altruism or tit-for-tat. Some form of this (especially the variant devised by Martin Nowak of Harvard called “generous”) has been proven by computer simulation to be the best strategy for the survival of any group. See for example Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield, Super Cooperators: Altruism, Evolution and Mathematics (or, Why We Need Each Other to Succeed) Edinburgh: Cannongate, 2011. Judaism is also about justice. Albert Einstein spoke about the “almost fanatical love of justice” that made him thank his lucky stars that he was born a Jew. Albert Einstein, The World As I See It, trans. Alan Harris (San Diego: The Book Tree, 2007), 90. The only place in the Torah to explain why Abraham was chosen to be the founder of a new faith states [this verse]. So why the combination of justice and love? Why is love alone not enough? … You cannot build a family, let alone a society, on love alone. For that you need justice also. Love is partial, justice is impartial. Love is particular, justice is universal. Love is for this person, not that; justice is for all. Much of the moral life is generated by this tension between love and justice. It is no accident that this is the theme of many of the narratives of Genesis. Genesis is about people and their relationships while the rest of Torah is predominately about society. Justice without love is harsh. Love without justice is unfair, or so it will seem to the less-loved. Yet to experience both at the same time is virtually impossible. As Niels Bohr, the Nobel prize-winning physicist, put it when he discovered that his son had stolen an object from a local shop: he could look at him from the perspective of a judge (justice) and as his father (love), but not both simultaneously. Jerome Brunner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 51. At the heart of the moral life is a conflict with no simple resolution. There is no general rule to tell us when love is the right reaction and when justice is. In the 1960s the Beatles sang “All you need is love.” Would that it were so, but is not. Let us love, the let us never forget those who feel unloved. They too are people. They too have feelings. They too are in the image of God. SACKS 41-45

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GEN975 Sacrifice (as with meat-eating) entered Judaism as a substitute for violence. It also helps us understand the profound insight of the prophets that sacrifices are not ends in themselves, but part of the Torah’s programme to create a world redeemed from the otherwise interminable cycle of revenge.   The other part of that programme, and God’s greatest desire, is a world governed by justice.   That, we recall, was His first charge to Abraham, to “instruct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just”   SACKS 162-3

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GEN977 The principle of individual responsibility is as basic to Judaism as it was to other cultures in the ancient Near East. See Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel (New York: Schocken, 1972), 392-33. … what is at stake is the deep understanding of the scope of responsibility we bear if we take seriously our roles as parents, neighbors, townspeople, citizens, and children of the covenant. Judicially, only the criminal is responsible for his crime.  But, implies the Torah, we are also our brother’s keeper. We share collective responsibility for the moral and spiritual health of society.   “All Israelites,” said the sages, “Are responsible for one another” Shevuot 39a. Legal responsibility is one thing, and relatively easy to define. But moral responsibility is something altogether larger, if necessarily more vague. “Let a person not say, “I have not sinned, and if someone else commits a sin, that is a matter between him and God.” This is contrary to the Torah,” writes Rambam in Sefer HaMitzvot, positive command 205. This is particularly so when it comes to the relationship between parents and children. Abraham was chosen, says the Torah, solely so that “He will instruct his children and his household after him that they may keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just” [this verse].   The duty of parents to teach their children is fundamental to Judaism. It appears in both the first two paragraphs of the Shema, as well as the various paragraphs cited in the “Four Sons” section of the Haggadah. Rambam counts as one of the gravest of all sins—so serious that God does not give us an opportunity to repent— “one who sees his son falling into bad ways and does not stop him.” The reason, he says, is that “since his son is under his authority, had he stopped him the son would have a desisted.” Therefore it is accounted to the father as if he had actively caused his son to sin.  Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuva 4:1. The reference is of course to a son under the age of thirteen.  SACKS 308-9

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GEN976 The love of one’s children should be such as to cause him to give thought to leading his children in the ways of justice, to teach them Divine service, and to command the continuance of Divine service after him, as it is written Isaiah 38:19 “A father will educate his sons to Your truth,” and Deuteronomy 4:9 “And you shall make them known to your children and to your children’s children,” and as stated in respect to Avraham [this verse]. TZADIK 107

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GEN979 The whole question of a will is fascinating.  In our modern culture, men leave wills which allocate their properties, money, and worldly goods among their heirs.  But are those the most valuable things one has to leave to his children? Is not our modern will another expression of the idolatry of wealth which runs counter to the whole thrust of religion and especially of Judaism? Isn’t such a will [it?-AJL]self an ultimate surrender to materialism?  Our forefathers left a much different kind of will.  It was known as an ethical will. It contained no list of assets and properties.  It contained, instead, a distillation of the truth which a man had accumulated in his lifetime.  It contained his most important assets — the values and wisdom which, as the end appears in sight, he wished to pass on as his proudest legacy to his survivors.  From the twelfth century to the seventeenth of the Common Era it was the custom of Jewish fathers to leave explicit directions for the guidance of their children in the form of a last testament.  However, the tradition of the verbal testament goes right back to Abraham, of whom God said [this verse].  … The Bible abounds with these admonitions — uttered sometimes directly from father to son and sometimes from a leader to his people. Witness the blessing of Jacob, David’s counsel to Solomon, and the final instructions given to the people of Israel by Moses and Joshua.  The Apocrypha presents several sublime examples of these testaments.  Both the mother and the father of the Maccabees left words of inspirational wisdom to guide their five sons. However, that section of the Apocrypha known as The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is perhaps the most remarkable of all.  Each of the sons of Jacob sketches his own role in the drama of Joseph’s exile, and drawing upon these experiences, counsels his son.  … These texts inspired Jewish parents for two thousand years to leave similar legacies of spirit. The inspiration was not left to chance, however. It became an actual rubric in the Jewish code, enjoining fathers to leave behind instructions for their children to follow. … One of the most remarkable ethical testaments, The Gate of Instruction is attributed to Maimonides.  VORSPN: Jewish Values & Social Crisis: A Casebook for Social Action 349-50

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GEN981 … the Torah is the first attempt of our ancestors to define what it means to walk in the ways of God, a God whose paths are, as Abraham already discerns, “what is just and right” [this verse]. This produces a robust wrestling with God and with the law whenever a law appears to be immoral, motivated by the conviction that a moral God could not plausibly be understood to desire what is patently immoral. Historically, this has led to narrowing a number of laws (such as the death penalty, the stubborn and rebellious son of Deuteronomy 21: 18-21, the illegitimate child of Deuteronomy 23:3 [The Rabbis make the evidentiary procedures necessary to convict someone of a capital offence so rigorous that they themselves admit that a court that decrees such a sentence once in seven years is “a blood court” (M. Makkot 1:10). They narrow the eligibility for qualifying as a “stubborn and rebellious son” so much that they ultimately maintain that there never was or will be such a person (B. Sanhedrin 71a).  The Rabbis narrow the definition of an illegitimate child (a mamzer) as much as possible, such that the product of a married man having sexual relations with an unmarried woman is not one, and neither is a child born out of wedlock to two unmarried people. Further, in practice, the rabbis do everything in their power to free a person from this category, including retroactively invalidating conversions and first marriages, so that they rarely if ever apply; imposing restrictions on other laws so that they become so onerous that nobody would want to take advantage of them (for example, slavery); “Because he is happy with you’ (Deuteronomy 15:16); he must be with   [that is, equal to] you in food and drink, such that you should not eat white bread and he black bread, you [should not] drink old wine and he new wine, you [should not] sleep on a feather bed and he on straw.   Therefore, it was said, “He who buys a Hebrew slave is like one who buys a master for himself’” Sifra, Behar 7:3; B. Kiddushin 20a, 22a; B. Arakhin 30b. The quoted version follows the reading in B. Kiddushin 20a expanding other laws (for example, applying the ban against putting a stumbling block in front of a blind person in Leviticus 19:14 to prohibit deceiving those who are intellectually or morally bind as well; Sifra on Leviticus 19:14 (that one may not mislead people in giving advice); B. Pesahim 22b (that one may not offer wine to a Nazarite, who has foresworn wine); B. Bava Mezia 75b (that one may not lend money in the absence of witnesses lest that encourage the borrower to claim that the loan was never made) reinterpreting others (such as an “eye for an eye” to mean not retribution but compensation); M. Bava Kamma 8:1, and the Talmud on that Mishnah. Even if the Torah is interpreted literally, it represents a moral advance from Hammurabi’s code, according to which a person of a lower class who punches out the eye of a person of a higher class is put to death.   In contrast, the Torah was saying only an eye for an eye, not death for an eye, and it removes all class considerations. The Rabbis, writing some 1,200 years after the Exodus law code was probably formulated, take this one step further by reinterpreting this to mean – through 10 separate proofs! – not retribution at all but rather monetary compensation and adding others (like the entire institution of the ketubbah, the marriage contract, to increase the protection of women in marriage).   M. Ketubbot 4:7-12   All of these rabbinic modulations of the law stem from their strong conviction that God would not want the law to allow, much less require, immoral things. DORFFLGP 138-9

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GEN988 Why did Jews of the past and why do I think that the Torah and subsequent Jewish law to our own day are not simply human creations but also the record of Jews’ response to God? In part because the Torah portrays it as such, leading our ancestors to believe that God is the source and authority of the law. In addition, as Simon Greenberg has pointed out Greenberg, ‘A Revealed Law,” (reprinted in Siegel, ed., Conservative Judaism and Jewish Law), several phenomena of the ongoing practice of Jewish law can only be adequately understood if we presume God’s involvement in some way. Specifically, the Jews’ “sense of overwhelming awe when they contemplated the grandeur and majesty of the Law” Greenberg, “A Revealed Law,” p. 41 (Siegel, p. 182) is certainly part of the religious feeling motivating those who observe it. Another element in the Jews’ commitment to Jewish law is their conviction that through it they perform a cosmic role in helping God complete creation. The strength of these perceptions of God’s role in creating Jewish law is especially evident in the numerous sacrifices that Jews have made to uphold it; only their belief that Jewish law expresses the will of God can explain their persistence in following it and their willingness even to die for it. Finally, Jews of the past and I myself attach divinity to Jewish law because, as God told Abraham, it helps define “the way of the Lord by doing what is just and right.” [this verse] – that is, it defines a path for life that is spiritually and morally rich, so rich that it is hard to believe that human beings in the ancient past would have been able to formulate it on their own. DORFFLGP 100-1

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GEN982 … there are times when it is a mitzvah to hate. One might ask, “How is this congruent with the Torah personality of love and kindness?”   Every human being is endowed with a Divine spark that inspires him to love kindness, truth and justice.   At the same time, there is an inner drive pushing him to be selfish and to single-mindedly fulfill all his desires and goals with a total disregard both for other people and for these positive values of human interaction. Most people waver between these two drives, sometimes following one, sometimes the other, and usually applying a combination of both. Simultaneously, every person has natural tendencies toward love and hatred – love for those people or ideas for which he has an affinity, and hatred as a reaction to his feelings of aversion for others. The legacy of our forefather Avraham, and the prime teaching of the Torah, is that a person develop his Divine spark, which will lead him to follow the way of kindness and justice [this verse]. He must also strive to overcome, as much as possible, the trait of selfishness, which leads to all the vices of the world. As a person develops this Divine spark within himself, he will feel an affinity to those qualities and an aversion to vice. Shaarei Teshuvah 3:190  The prime method of developing this Divine spark and an ultimate appreciation of Torah, kindness and justice is to recognize the manifold infinite kindnesses of Hashem. Every person must contemplate that his very creation is due to the sheer kindness of Hashem, Who constantly showers him with life, sustenance and an infinite number of seemingly natural miracles. The enormity of the precise workings of the human organism, as well as animals, plants, etc. multiplied by billions, will overwhelm any thinking individual as to the majesty and kindness of the Creator. EHRMAN 35-6

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GEN986 The Jewish conception of piety places special emphasis upon ethical conduct.   The Torah defines “the way of God” as the “doing of righteousness and justice.” [this verse].   ETHRESP 3

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