GEN902 The only way to account for the shrillness, the passion, and the near-hysteria of the Hebrew prophets in their denunciation of immorality is to understand that the prophet looks upon the world through the perspective of God, who has a stake in the human situation, who cares for man, who in some sense is involved in the affairs of men. “For I know their sorrows.”
Exodus 3:7 If, indeed, God is mercy and love and justice, then any act of injustice anywhere must, in some sense, “affect God.” [By this we are to understand that God is involved in history – in the affairs of men – to a degree which is best described by saying that “He is affected” by the deeds of man.] One poor man cries out and foundations seem to tremble. “And it shall come to pass, when he crieth unto Me, that I will hear.”
Exodus 22:26 “The prophet’s word is a scream in the night, … while the world is at east and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven.”
A. J. Heschel, The Prophets
(New York: Harper & Row, 1955), p. 16. There is another insight which can assist us in understanding the dominant moral passion of the Bible. The rational bias in philosophy, which is our legacy from the ancient Greeks, has influenced us all to assign higher value to the universal over the particular, the abstract over the concrete. This has its origin in Greek ontological theory and epistemology. Thus Plata had little regard for the visual arts because their artifacts were twice removed from the Ideal Forms, and Aristotle thought more of drama than history because the latter dealt only with particular events while drama is more general, depicting types of character and kinds of events. It is for this reason that general terms like “justice,” “righteousness,” “ethics,” and “morality” seem to possess an air of sublimity and nobility, while particular acts of morality, embedded in all the prosaic details of their concrete situation, may, by contrast, appear trial and insignificant. Yet, when we stop to consider the nature of morality, we find that the very reverse is the truth. Justice and righteousness for all of their sonorous sound are mere concepts – empty and disembodied. Moral reality is achieved only when these moral ideals are realized in human affairs and actualized in concrete human deeds and actual human relationships. It is this emphasis on particular moral acts that characterizes the Torah approach to morality. The very first story told of Abraham after he enters into the covenant with God and becomes, as it were, the first Jew, involves an act of hospitality. Weary strangers appear at Abraham’s tent, and although weak from his recent circumcision and presumably still experiencing the presence of God, the aged Patriarch breaks off the divine encounter and “runs to meet them.” [this verse] After inviting them in, we are told, “Abraham ran to the herd and fetched a calf … and he took curd and mild … and he stood by them under the tree and they did eat.”
Genesis 18: 7-8 This wealth of detail describing the personal devotion of the Patriarch in a series of benevolent actions reveals what is the ultimate task of the Jew and the human being: to realize abstract moral concepts in the myriad situations of everyday life. SPERO 122-3
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