GEN325 Men and women confront each other in sameness and difference. Each is an image of the other, yet each is separate and distinct.  The only relationship able to bind them together without the use of force is marriage as covenant—a bond of mutual loyalty and love in which each makes a pledge to the other to serve one another. Not only is this a radical way of reconceptualizing the relationship between man and woman. It is also, implies Hosea 2:16-22, the way we should think of the relationship between human beings and God. God reaches out to humanity not as power -- the storm, the thunder, the rain -- but as love, and not an abstract, philosophical love, but a deep and abiding passion that survives all the disappointments and betrayals.  Israel may not always behave lovingly towards God, says Hosea, but God loves Israel and will never cease to do so. How we relate to God affects how we relate to other people. That is Hosea’s message-and vice versa: how we relate to other people affects the way we think of God.  SACKS 174

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GEN351 All societies need a shared a moral code. They all therefore need a process of socialization. But not all do this in the same way. The anthropologist Ruth Benedict made a fundamental distinction between shame cultures and guilt cultures.  In shame cultures the highest value is honour. In guilt cultures it is righteousness, “doing what is right because it is right.”  In shame cultures, morality functions through a sense of what others expect from you. Shame itself is the sense of the disgrace we would suffer if others found out what we have done. Guilt has nothing to do with opinions of others and everything to do with the voice of conscience. Shame cultures are other-directed. Guilt cultures are inner-directed. The Chrysanthemum and The Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946).  This has significant consequences. One who is been shamed has been marked, tainted, stigmatized. The only way of escaping shame is to leave and live elsewhere, or, in extremis, to commit suicide. Guilt cultures are different because they draw a sharp distinction between the agent and the act, the center and the sin. The act maybe wrong, but the agent remains untainted, intact. As we say in our morning prayers, “The soul You gave me is pure,” even if I have done things that are impure. Thus, in guilt cultures, there is always the possibility of remorse, repentance, atonement, and forgiveness. We can mend broken relationships. We can atone for sins. We can apologize and be forgiven. What we did does not hold us eternally captive. What we do in the future can atone for all we did in the past. A guilt culture is a morality of freedom. A shame culture is the morality of conformity and social control. Much has been written about Genesis 2–3, the story of the first humans in the Garden of Eden and the first sin, eating from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Few, however, have understood that it is actually a story about the difference between guilt and shame. Bernard Williams, in Shame and Necessity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, points out that shame is essentially a visual phenomenon. When you feel shame, you are experiencing or imagining what it is like to be seen doing what you did by others. The first instinct on feeling shame is to wish to be invisible or elsewhere. Guilt, by contrast, is more a phenomenon of hearing than one of seeing. It represents the inner voice of conscience. Becoming invisible or transported to somewhere else may assuage should shame, but it has no effect on guilt. The voice goes with you, wherever you are. Read this story of Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit carefully and you will see that it is about visual phenomena and shame.  At first the couple were naked and “not ashamed” [This verse]. Eve then saw the fruit was “pleasing to the eyes” Genesis 3:6. The couple ate the fruit and “the eyes of both of them were opened” Genesis 3:7. They sought to cover their nakedness. For the first time they saw themselves as they might be seen by others and the experience shame. Then they heard “the voice of God” Genesis 3:8 and tried to hide. All of these are unmistakable signs of a shame culture. The story of Adam and Eve is not about Original Sin or about knowledge as such. It is about the danger of following the eyes rather than listening to the Word of God with the ears. The Hebrew verb shema, a key term of Jewish faith, means both to “listen” or “hear” and “to obey.” Judaism, is a morality of guilt, not shame.  SACKS xxv-vi

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GEN369 See [[GEN351]] Genesis 2:25 ashamed SACKS xxv-vi

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GEN374 See [[GEN351]] Genesis 2:25 ashamed SACKS xxv-vi

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GEN383 See [[GEN351]] Genesis 2:25 ashamed SACKS xxv-vi

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GEN435 Rashi begins his commentary to Genesis with the question: If the Torah is a book of law, why does it not start with the first law given to the People of Israel as a whole, which does not appear until Exodus 12? Why does it include the narratives about Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the patriarchs and matriarchs and their children? Rashi gives an answer that has nothing to do with morality -- he says it has to do with the Jewish people’s right to their land. But Netziv (Rabbi Naphtali Zvi Yehuda Berlin; 1816 – 1893) writes that the stories of Genesis are there to teach us how the patriarchs were upright in their dealings, even with people who are strangers and idolaters. That, he says, his why Genesis is called by the sages, “The book of the upright.” Haamek Davar to Genesis, Introduction. Morality is not just a set of rules, even a code as elaborate as the 613 commandments and their rabbinic extensions. It is also about the way we respond to people as individuals. The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is at least in part about what went wrong in their relationship when the man referred to his wife as isha, “woman,” a generic description, a type. Only when he gave her a proper name, Chava, Eve, did he relate to her as an individual in her individuality, and only then did God “make [them] garments of the skin and clothed them” [this verse]. This too is the difference between the god of Aristotle and the God of Abraham. Aristotle thought that God knew only universals, not particulars. This is the god of science, of the Enlightenment, of Spinoza. The God of Abraham is the God who relates to us in our singularity, and what makes us different from others as well as what makes us the same. This ultimately is the difference between the two great principles of Judaic ethics: justice and love. Justice is universal.  It treats all people alike, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, making no distinctions on the basis of color or class. But love this particular. A parent loves his or her children for what makes them in each unique. The moral life is a combination of both. That is why it cannot be reduced solely to universal laws. That is what the Torah means when it speaks of “the right and good” [referencing Deuteronomy 6:18 – AJL] over and above the commandments, statutes, and testimonies. A good teacher knows what to say to a weak student who, through great effort, has done better than expected, and to a gifted student who has come to the top of the class but he still performing below his or her potential.  A good employer knows when to praise and when to challenge. We all need to know when to insist on justice and when to exercise forgiveness. The people who have had a decisive influence on our lives are almost always those we feel understood us in our singularity. We were not, for them, a mere your face in the crowd. That is why, though morality involves universal rules and cannot exist without them, it also involves interactions that cannot be reduced to rules. SACKS 283-4

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GEN452 What God was doing when He asked Abraham to offer up his son was not requesting a child sacrifice but something quite different. He wanted Abraham to renounce ownership of his son. He wanted to establish as a non-negotiable principle of Jewish law that children are not the property of their parents. That is why three of the four matriarchs found themselves unable to conceive other than by a miracle. The Torah wants us to know that the children they bore were the children of God rather than the natural outcome of a biological process. Eventually, the entire nation of Israel would be called the children of God. A related idea is conveyed by the fact that God chose as His spokesperson Moses, who was “not a man of words” Exodus 4:10. He was a stammerer. Moses became God’s spokesman because people knew that the words he spoke were not his own but those placed in his mouth by God. The clearest evidence for this interpretation is given at the birth of the very first human child. When she first gives birth, Eve says: “With the help of the Lord I have acquired [kaniti] a man” [this verse]. That child, whose name comes from the verb “to acquire,” was Cain, who became the first murderer. If you seek to own your children, your children may rebel into violence. If the analysis of Fustel de Colanges The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956) and Larry Siedentop Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (London: Penguin, 2014) is correct, it follows that something fundamental was at stake. As long as parents believed they owned their children, the concept of the individual could not yet be born. The fundamental unit was the family. The Torah represents the birth of individual as the central figure in the moral life. Because children—all children—belong to God, parenthood is not ownership but guardianship. As soon as they reach the age of maturity (traditionally, 12 for girls, 13 for boys) children become independent with their own dignity and freedom. Sigmund Freud famously had something to say about this too. He held that a fundamental driver of human identity is the Oedipus complex, the conflict between fathers and sons as exemplified in Aeschylus’ tragedy. By creating moral space between fathers and sons, Judaism offers a non-tragic resolution to this tension. If Freud had taken his psychology from the Torah rather than from Greek myths, he might have arrived at a more hopeful view of the human condition. Why then did God say to Abraham about Isaac: “Offer him up as a burnt offering”? [Genesis 22:2 - AJL] So as to make clear to all future generations that the reason Jews condemn child sacrifice is not because they lack the courage to perform it. Abraham is the proof that they do not lack the courage. The reason they do not do so is because God is the God of life, not death. In Judaism, as the laws of purity and the rite of the Red Heifer show, death is not sacred. Death defiles. The Torah is revolutionary not only in relation to society but also in relation to family. To be sure, the Torah’s revolution was not fully completed in the course of the biblical age. Slavery had not yet been abolished. The rights of women had not yet been fully actualized. But the birth of the individual—the integrity of each of us as a moral agent in our own right—was one of the great moral revolutions in history.  SACKS 25-26

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GEN458 See [[GEN493]] Genesis 4:8 killed SACKS 159-60

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GEN475 [One of the features of the ethic of Torah that makes it transformative and uniquely sustainable over time …] is the emphasis the Torah places on personal and collective freedom. This too flows from the logic of monotheism. The gods of the ancient world were part of nature. They were more powerful than humans and they did not die, but they existed within the natural world. God of the Torah transcends nature because He created nature as a free active will. Because God is free and endowed us with His image, we too are free. This gift of freedom defines the human drama as set out in the early chapters of Genesis because it meant, fatefully, that humans could disobey God. Adam and Eve, the first humans, disobey the first command. Cain, the first human child, became the first murderer. By the time of Noah the world was full of violence. God “Regretted that He had made human beings on the earth, and His heart was deeply troubled” Genesis 6:6. Despite this, there is no suggestion anywhere in Tanakh [i.e., the Hebrew Bible – AJL] that God ever considered taking back the gift of freedom. Implicit in the Torah is the radical idea that the free God seeks the free worship of free human beings. Freedom is one of the fundamental principles of Jewish faith. Rambam [i.e., Maimonides-AJL] codifies it as such. Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuva 5:3. We are each capable he said, of becoming as righteous as Moses or as wicked as Jeroboam. The point is made both at the beginning and end of the Torah. At the beginning it is contained in a short speech by God to Cain, who He knows is in the grip of anger and is about to commit an act of violence [this and previous verses].  In other words: it is human nature to be subject to deep-seated drives that may, at times, be necessary for survival but at others are dysfunctional and destructive. We have to be able to control our passions. As Freud said, civilization is marked by the ability to defer the gratification of instinct. Much of Torah law is dedicated to inculcating this. At the end of the Torah, Moses, having recapitulated the history of the Israelites, poses a supreme choice: “This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, that you and your children may live” Deuteronomy 30:19. Individually and collectively we are free to choose between good and evil and our fate is determined by our choices. We are moral agents, and therefore responsible and called to account for what we do. This emphasis on freedom is one of the defining characteristics of Judaism. Most other civilizations have to some extent denied it. We are, thought the Greeks, subject to fate and forces beyond our control. That is the basis of Greek tragedy. We are, said Paul, in the grip of sin, still scarred by the disobedience of the first humans. Therefore we need someone else’s sacrificial act to atone for us. The Jewish belief that we are untainted by original sin, and capable of choosing between good and evil without special divine help, is not shared by all forms of Christianity, where it is known as the Pelagian heresy. Note that Judaism does not take freedom for granted. It is not easy at either the individual or collective level. As God said to Cain, sin is crouching at the door and desires to dominate us [this verse].  In neuro-scientific terms, the pre-frontal cortex allows us to understand the consequences of our actions, and thus choose the good, but the limbic system-faster and more powerful-means that we are often in the grip of strong emotion. Hence the importance of the life of self-discipline engendered by the commands. Hence also the centrality of the family as the matrix of moral education.  God chose Abraham, the Torah tells us,” 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 in just” Genesis 18:19 It takes strong families, cohesive communities, and a shared moral code to yield individuals with the strength to be free. The same is true at the collective level. The entire burden of the Torah in the beginning of Exodus to the end of Deuteronomy is about what it is to create a free society, as opposed to the slavery the Israelites experienced into Egypt. "There is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty,” said Alexis to Tocqueville. Democracy in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1954), 1:256. God, who created the universe and freedom, wants humankind, to whom He gave the gift of choice, to create a social universe where all can live in liberty. SACKS xxi-xxiii

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GEN482 We lose our freedom gradually, often without noticing it. The classic statement of free will appears in the story of Cain and Abel. Seeing that Cain is angry that his offering has not found favor, God says to him: “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it” [this verse]. The maintenance of free will, especially in a state of high emotion like anger, needs willpower. … what Daniel Goldman calls an “amygdala hijack” can occur, in which instinctive reaction takes the place of reflective decision and we do things that are harmful to us as well as to others. Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam, 1995). That is the emotional threat of freedom. Then there is a social threat. After the Holocaust, a number of path-breaking experiments were undertaken to judge the power of conformism and obedience to authority. Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments in which eight people were gathered in her room and were showing a line; they were then asked which of three others was the same length. Unknown to the eighth person, the seven others were associates of the experimenter and were following his instructions. On a number of occasions the seven gave an answer that was clearly false, yet in 75% of cases the eighth was willing to give an answer, in conformity with the group, which he knew to be false. Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram showed that ordinary individuals were willing to inflict what appeared to be devastatingly painful electric shocks on someone in an adjacent room when instructed to do so by an authority figure, experimenter. Stanley Milgrom, Obedience to Authority: The Experimental View (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).  The Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by Philip Zimbardo, divided participants into the roles of prisoners and guards. Within days the “guards” were acting cruelly and in some cases abusively towards the prisoners and the experiment, planned to last a fortnight, had to be called off after six days. Philip G. Zimbargo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007). The power of conformism, as these experiments showed, is immense. That, I believe, is why Abraham was told to leave his land, his birthplace, and his father’s house. [Genesis 12:1 – AJL] There are three factors-culture, community, and early childhood-that circumscribe our freedom. Jews through the ages have been in but not of society. To be a Jew means keeping a calibrated distance from the age and its idols. Freedom needs time to make reflective decisions and distance so as not to be lulled into conformity. Most tragically, there is the moral threat. We sometimes forget, or do not even know, that the conditions of slavery the Israelites experienced in Egypt were often enough felt by Egyptians themselves over history. The great pyramid of Giza, built more than a thousand years before the Exodus, even before the birth of Abraham, reduced much of Egypt to a slave labor colony for twenty years. Toby Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (London: Bloomsberry, 2010), 72 – 91. When life becomes cheap and people are seen as a means, not an end, when the worst excesses are excused in the name of tradition and rulers have absolute power, then conscience is eroded and freedom lost because the culture has created insulated space in which the cry of the oppressed can no longer be heard. That is what the Torah means when it says that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Enslaving others, Pharaoh himself became enslaved. He became a prisoner of the values he himself had espoused. Freedom in the deepest sense, the freedom to do the right and the good, is not a given. We acquire it, or lose it, gradually. In the end tyrants bring about their own destruction, whereas those with willpower, courage, and the willingness to go against the consensus acquire a monumental freedom by resisting the idols and siren calls of the age. SACKS 88-9

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