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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GEN1016 The sages Genesis Rabbah 49:9 suggested that Abraham was referring to [immoral conduct that brings dishonor to God’s law as a code of justice and compassion] when he challenged God on His plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah if this meant punishing the righteous as well as the wicked: “Far be it from You [chalila Lekha] to do such a thing” [this verse]. God and the people of God must be associated with justice. Failure to do so constitutes a chillul Hashem. SACKS 196

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GEN1018 … Moses … bring[s] the Torah to a close with a theme that has been there from the beginning. God, creator of universe, made a world that is fundamentally good, the word that echoes seven times in the first chapter of Genesis. It is humans, granted free will as God’s image and likeness, who introduce evil into the world and then suffer its consequences. Hence Moses’ insistence that when trouble and tragedy appear, we should search for the cause within ourselves and not blame God. God is upright and just. The defect is in us, His children. This is perhaps the most difficult idea in the whole of Judaism. It is open to the simplest of objections, one that has sounded in almost every generation. If God is just, why do bad things happen to good people? This is the question asked not by skeptics and doubters, but by the very heroes of faith.   We hear it in Abraham’s plea [this verse]… it is an argument that has never ceased. It continued through the rabbinic literature. It was heard again in the kinot, the laments, prompted by the persecution of Jews in the Middle Ages. It sounds in the literature produced in the wake of the Spanish expulsion, and echoes still when we recall the Holocaust. The Talmud says that of all the questions Moses asked God, this was the one to which God did not give an answer Berachot 7a. The simplest, deepest interpretation is given in Psalm 92, “The song of the Sabbath day.” Though “the wicked spring up like grass” 92:7, they will eventually be destroyed. The righteous, by contrast, “flourish like a palm tree and grow tall like a cedar in Lebanon” 92:13. Evil wins in the short term but never in the long. The wicked are like grass, the righteous like a tree. Grass grows overnight but it takes years for a tree to reach its full height. In the long run, tyrannies are defeated. Empires decline and fall, goodness and rightness win the final battle. As Martin Luther King said in the spirit of the psalm: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” “Out of the Long Night,” The Gospel Messenger, February 8, 1958, 14.… Difficult though Jewish faith is, it has had the effect through history of leading us to say: if bad things have happened, let us blame no one but ourselves, and let us labor to make them better. It was this that led Jews, time and again, to emerge from tragedy, shaken, scarred, limping like Jacob after his encounter with the angel, yet resolved to begin again, to rededicate ourselves to our mission and faith, to ascribe our achievements to God and our defeats to ourselves. Out of such humility, a momentous strength is born. SACKS 331-3

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GEN1092 … Judaism’s dual covenant represents … On the one hand that we are human, and we share a set of basic obligations to one another by virtue of that fact. We are all in the image and likeness of God. We are all bound by the basic rules of justice and fairness. Every life is sacred. Violence and murder are assaults against the human condition. This is what Abraham meant when he explained to Avimelekh, king of Gerar, why he said Sarah was his sister, not his wife: “I said to myself, ‘There is surely no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me’” [this verse]. Fear of God-identified as Elokim rather than Hashem -- is assumed in Genesis to be a basic, shared set of principles as to what morality requires, even between strangers.  On the other hand, the covenant of Sinai is not addressed to humanity as a whole. It is addressed specifically to the Israelites in their role as “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” Exodus 19:6. This is more demanding than the Noah covenant, both because the Israelites are expected to be exemplars and role models of the holy life, and because there are strong ties of kinship between them. They share a past, a set of memories, and a fate. They are like an extended family. Much of the social legislation, for example in Leviticus 25, uses the language of kinship: “When your brother becomes poor….” There have been ages in which the primary group has been the tribe. The result was war. There have also been attempts to abolish groups altogether in favor of the universal. A classic example was the European Enlightenment. However, group identity returned in the 19th century, in the form of the nation–state and the [worship of] race. The result of European nation– states was two world wars. The worship of race brought about the Holocaust. We cannot escape identity, and hence the tension between in-group and out-group. The only solution known to me that addresses this issue clearly and in a principled way is that of the Torah with its two covenants, one representing our duties to humanity as a whole, the other our duties to our fellow members of the community of fate and faith. This unusual duality represents the two great features of the moral life: the universality of justice and the particularity of love. On this, see Jonathan Sacks, Not in God’s Name (New York: Schocken, 2015), and Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).  SACKS xxxi

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GEN1113 See [[GEN1406]] Genesis 33:11 blessing SACKS 37-9

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GEN1152 People looked up to as role models must act as role models. Piety in relation to God must be accompanied by exemplary behavior in relation to one’s fellow humans. When people associate religiosity with integrity, decency, humanity, and compassion, God’s name is sanctified. When they come to associated it with contempt for others and for the law, the result is a desecration of God’s name. [A] radical idea, central to Jewish self-definition, [is] that God has risked His reputation in the world, His “name,” by choosing to associate it with a single and singular people. God is the God of all humanity. But God has chosen Israel to be His “witnesses,” his ambassadors, to the world. When we fail in this role, it is as if God’s standing in the eyes of the world has been damaged. For almost 2,000 years the Jewish people was without a home, a land, civil rights, security, and the ability to shape its destiny and fate. It was cast in the role of what Max Weber called “a pariah people.” By definition, a pariah cannot be a positive role model. That is when Kiddush Hashem took on its tragic dimension as the willingness to die for one’s faith. That is no longer the case. Today, for the first time in history, Jews have both sovereignty and independence in Israel, and freedom and equality elsewhere. Kiddush HaShem must therefore be restored to its positive sense of exemplary decency in the moral life. That is what led the Hittites to call Abraham “a prince of God in our midst” [this verse].   It is what leads Israel to be admired when it engages in international rescue and relief. The concepts of kiddush and chillul Hashem forge an indissoluble connection between the holy and the good. Lose that and we betray our mission as “a holy nation.” The conviction that being a Jew involves the pursuit of justice and the practice of compassion is what led our ancestors to stay loyal despite all the pressures to abandon it. It would be the ultimate tragedy if we lost that connection now, at the very moment that we are able to face the world on equal terms. Long ago, we were called to show the world that religion and morality go hand-in-hand. Never was that more needed than in an age riven by religiously motivated violence in some countries, rampant secularity and others. To be a Jew is to be dedicated to the proposition that loving God means loving His image, humankind. There is no greater challenge, nor, in the 21st Century, is there a more urgent one.   SACKS 198-9

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GEN1200 See [[GEN1406]] Genesis 33:11 blessing SACKS 37-9

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GEN1210 See [[GEN1253]] Genesis 27:34 sobbing SACKS 35-7

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GEN1211 Was Jacob right to take Esau’s blessing in disguise? Was he right to deceive his father and to take from his brother the blessing Isaac sought to give him? Was Rebecca right in conceiving the plan in the first place and encouraging Jacob to carry it out? These are fundamental questions. What is at stake is not just biblical interpretation but the moral life itself. How we read a text shapes the kind of people we become. Here is one way of interpreting the narrative: Rebecca was right to propose what she did and Jacob was right to do it. Rebecca knew that it would be Jacob, not Esau, who would continue the covenant and carry the mission of Abraham into the future.   She knew this for two separate reasons. First, she had heard it from God Himself, in the oracle she received before he twins were born: [this verse]. Esau was the elder, Jacob the younger. Therefore it was Jacob who would emerge with greater strength, Jacob who was chosen by God. Second, she had watched the twins grow up. She knew that Esau was a hunter, a man of violence. She had seen that he was impetuous, mercurial, and man of impulse rather than calm reflection. She had seen him sell his birthright for a bowl of soup. She watched while he “ate, drank, rose, and left. So Esau despised birthright” Genesis 25:34  No one who despises his birthright can be the trusted guardian of a covenant intended for eternity. Third, just before the episode of the blessing we read: “When Esau was 40 years old, he married Judith daughter of Berri the Hittite and also Basemath daughter of Elon the Hittite.   They were a source of grief to Isaac and Rebecca” Genesis 26:34 This too was evidence of Esau’s failure to understand what the covenant required. By marrying Hittite women he proved himself indifferent both to the feelings of his parents and to the self-restraint in the choice of marriage partner that was essential to being Abraham’s heir. The blessing had to go to Jacob. If you had two sons, one indifferent to art, the other an art-lover and aesthete, to whom would you leave the Rembrandt that has been part of the family heritage for generations?   And if Isaac did not understand the true nature of his sons, if he was “blind” not only physically but also psychologically, might it not be necessary to deceive him? He was by now old, and if Rebecca had failed in the early years to get him to see the true nature of their children, was it unlikely that she could do so now? This was, not just a matter of relationships within the family, since God had repeatedly told Abraham that he would be the ancestor of a great nation who would be a blessing to humanity as a whole. And if Rebecca was right, then Jacob was right to follow her instructions. This was the woman whom Abraham’s servant had chosen to be the wife of his master’s son, because she was kind, because at the well she had given water to a stranger and to his camels as well. Rebecca was not Lady Macbeth. She was the embodiment of lovingkindness. She was not acting out of favoritism or ambition. And if she had no other way of ensuring that the blessing went to one who would cherish it and live it, then in this case the end justified the means. This is one way of reading the story and it is taken by many of the commentators.   SACKS 33-35

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