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GENESIS — 9:6 sheds

GEN722 [One of the features of the ethic of Torah that makes it transformative and uniquely sustainable over time …] is the principle set out in the Noahide covenant-the covenant God made with Noah after the Flood, and through him with all of humanity: [this verse]. Life is sacred. We are each in God’s image, His only image since making images is otherwise absolutely forbidden. Therefore murder is more than the crime. It is an act of sacrilege, a dishonouring of God Himself.  In general, the Torah is the protest against the use of violence to attain human ends. The human drama can be summed up as follows: God is free. God creates order. God gives man freedom. Man then creates chaos. Hence the question to which the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, and Judaism as a whole, are directed: can freedom and order coexist? The answer is the moral life as the Torah envisages it. The alternative to morality is violence. Violence is the attempt to satisfy my desires at the cost of yours. I want X; you have X; you stand in the way of my having X; therefore if I am to have what I desire, I must force you to relinquish X.  Violence is the imposition, by force, of my will on the world. Thus is born the rule of might. As the Athenians said to the Melians, “You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Thucydides,“The Melian Dialogue,” 5.84-116. Or as Thrasymachus says in Plato’s Republic, justice is whatever serves the interests of the stronger party. This is what Nietzsche saw as the fundamental principle of human existence: the will to power. Judaism is a sustained protest against this way of life. Even God Himself, creator of the universe, rules by right, not might. That is the meaning of the story of the Exodus and why it is central to the Torah. The supreme power intervenes in history to liberate the supremely powerless. The reason God sent plagues against Egypt, the most powerful empire of the ancient world, was to show Egypt that those who rule by power are defeated by power.  The reason God chose a tiny and otherwise inconsequential nation to be the bearers of His covenant was, at least in part, to show the power of the powerless when they have right, not might, on their side.  The alternative to power is law: law freely accepted and freely obeyed. Only by observing the rule of law -- law that applies equally to the rich and poor, the powerful and powerless -- do we escape the tragic cycle of freedom that begets conflict that leads to chaos, resulting in the use of force that generates tyranny, the freedom of the few and the enslavement of the many. God reveals Himself in the form of law, because law is the constitution of liberty.  SACKS xxiv-v

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GENESIS — 12:10 famine

GEN788 According to Ramban [Nachmanidies – AJL], Abraham should have stayed in Canaan; he should have had faith in God that He would sustain him despite the famine. Abraham’s decision to leave was not his only error; it also put Sarah in a position of moral hazard because, as a result of going to Egypt, she was forced to tell a lie. In saying that she was Abraham’s sister and not his wife, she was taken into Pharaoh’s herem where she might have been forced to commit an act of adultery. This is a very harsh judgment, made more so by Ramban’s further assertion that it was because of this lack of faith that Abraham’s children were sentenced to exile in Egypt centuries later.  SACKS 16

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GENESIS — 16:4 despise

GEN857 Ramban [Nachmanides] criticizes Sarah. Despairing of having a child, she asks Abraham to sleep with her handmaid Hagar in the hope that she might bear him a child.   Abraham does so, and Hagar becomes pregnant.  The text then says that Hagar “began to despise her mistress” [this verse].   Sarah complains to Abraham and then “afflict[s] Hagar” Genesis 16:6 who flees from her into the desert. On this, Ramban writes: “Our mother [Sarah] transgressed by this affliction, as did Abraham by allowing her to do so.  God heard her [Hagar’s] affliction and gave her a son who would be a wild ass of a man to afflict the seed of Abraham and Sarah with all kinds of affliction. (Commentary to Genesis 16:6).   SACKS 16

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GENESIS — 18:19 instruct

GEN969 [Continued from [[GEN1335]] Genesis 31:19 idols SACKS xxvii] And there is a corollary principle about the Abrahamic faith, that the relationship between God and humanity, and specifically between God and the people of the covenant, is one of love --- love moralized, love as deed, love as commitment and mutual obligation. The biblical word emuna, usually translated as “faith,” does not mean this at all. It is not a cognitive attribute, meaning something you believe to be true. It belongs to an entirely different sphere of discourse. It is a moral attribute and means faithfulness, as in a marriage. Faith in the Hebrew Bible is the story of a love -- the love of God for creation, for humanity, and for a particular family, the children of Abraham, a love full of passion but one that is not always, or even often, reciprocated. Sometimes, as in the Mosaic books, it is described like the relationship between a parent and a child. At other times, particularly in the prophetic literature, it is envisaged as the love between a husband and an often faithless wife. But it is never less than love. Judaism was the first moral system to place interpersonal love at the center of the moral life: love of God “with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might” Deuteronomy 6:5, love of “your neighbor as yourself” Leviticus 19:18, and love of the stranger because “You know what it feels like to be a stranger” Exodus 23:9. This was later adopted by Christianity and remains a distinctive element of the Judeo-Christian ethic. All moral systems have at their heart a system a principle of justice, or reciprocal altruism: do as you would be done by. But love is something different and more demanding. Hence the fundamental importance of sexual ethics in Judaism, and of the sanctity of marriage and the family as the matrix of society and a place where children are inducted into the moral life. This is announced early in the biblical story. In the only place where the Torah states why Abraham was chosen, it says, “For I have chosen him and his household after him that they may keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just” [This verse]. Hence also the significance of circumcision as a sign of the covenant, as if to say that holiness has a direct connection with the way we conduct our sexual relations. It seems that the Torah sees the Darwinian drive to pass on one’s genes to the next generation, and with that the phenomenon of the alpha male who dominates access to females, as one of the prime causes of violence within society. Judaism is as much about the moralization of sex as it is about the moralization of power, and the two are connected.  SACKS xxvii-viii

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GENESIS — 18:19 instruct

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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GENESIS — 18:19 instruct

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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