EXOD178 See [[EXOD159]] Exodus 12:27 say SACKS 93-95

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EXOD186 See [[EXOD159]] Exodus 12:27 say SACKS 93-95

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EXOD204 See [[EXOD115]] Exodus 7:5 destroyed SACKS 86

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EXOD276 See [[EXOD7]] Exodus 1:9 numerous SACKS 99

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EXOD305 There must be transparency and accountability when it comes to public funds even if the people involved have impeccable reputations. People in positions of trust must be, and be seen to be, individuals of moral integrity. Yitro, Moses' father-in-law, had already said this when he told Moses to appoint subordinates to help him in the task of leading the people. They should be, he said, "Men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain" [This verse]. Without a reputation for honesty and incorruptibility, judges cannot ensure that justice is seen to be done.

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EXOD331 [Continued from [[EXOD872]] Exodus 23:9 oppress SACKS xxx]. This is what Judaism's dual covenant represents. On the one hand 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 that 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 because of my wife'" (Gen. 20:11). 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" [this verse]. 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. The classic example was the European Enlightenment. However, group identity returned in the 19th-century, in the form of the nation-state and 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 inter-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 respecting 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)].

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EXOD333 Kindness is the equivalent of care, which is the opposite of harm. Justice and righteousness are specific forms of fairness. In other words, the prophetic virtues are close to those that prevail today in the liberal democracies of the West. That is a measure of the impact of the Hebrew Bible on the West ... The point is that kindness and fairness are about relationships between individuals. Until Sinai, the Israelites were just individuals, albeit part of the same extended family that had undergone Exodus and exile together. After the Revelation at Mount Sinai the Israelites were a covenanted people. They had a sovereign: God. They had a written constitution: the Torah. They had agreed to become "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" [this verse]. Yet at the Golden Calf they showed that they had not yet understood what it is to be a nation. They were a mob. The Torah says, "Moses saw that the people were running wild and that Aaron had let them get out of control and so become a laughing stock to their enemies" (Exodus 32:25). That was the crisis to which the Sanctuary and the priesthood were the answer. They turned Jews into a nation.

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EXOD337 To be sure, in the Torah itself we see the Israelites as a recalcitrant, obstinate people complaining and rebelling against God. Yet the prophets in retrospect saw things differently. The wilderness was a kind of yihud, an alone-togetherness, in which the people and God bonded in love. Most instructive in this context is the work of anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, who focused attention on the importance of rItes of passage. [The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1960)]. Societies develop rituals to mark the transition from one state to the next-from childhood to adulthood, for example, or from being single to being married-and they involve three stages. The first is separation, a symbolic break with the past. The last is incorporation, re-entering society with a new identity. Between the two comes the crucial stage of transition when, having cast off one identity but not yet donned another, you are remade, reborn, refashioned. Van Gennep used the term liminal, from the Latin word for "threshold," to describe this transitional state when you are in a kind of no-mans-land between the old and the new. That is what the wilderness signifies for Israel: liminal space between slavery and freedom, past and future, exile and return, Egypt and the Promised Land. The desert was the space that made transition and transformation possible. There, in no-mans-land, the Israelites, alone with God and with one another, could cast off one identity and assume another. There they could be reborn, no longer slaves to Pharaoh, instead servants of God, summoned to become "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" [this verse].

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EXOD677 Morality, in Jonathan Haidt's phrase, binds and blinds. [Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012)]. It binds us to others in a bond of reciprocal altruism. But it also blinds us to the humanity of those who stand outside. It unites and divides. It divides because it unites. Morality turns the "I" of self-interest into the "we" of the common good. But the very act of creating an "us" simultaneously creates a "them," the people not like us. Even the most universal of religions, founded on principles of love and compassion, have often seen those outside the faith as Satan, the infidel, the antichrist, a child of darkness, the unredeemed. They have committed unspeakable acts of brutality in the name of God. Neither Platonic knowledge nor Adam Smith's moral sense nor Kantian reason has cured the heart of darkness in the human condition. That is why two sentences blaze through Parashat Mishpatim like the sun and emerging from behind the clouds: "You must not mistreat or oppress the stranger in any way. Remember, you yourselves were once strangers in the land of Egypt" [this verse] and "You must not oppress strangers. You know what it feels like to be a stranger, for you yourselves were once strangers in the land of Egypt (Exodus 23:9). The great crimes of humanity have been committed against the stranger, the outsider, the one-not-like-us. Recognizing the humanity of the stranger has been a historic weak link in most cultures.

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EXOD872 We favour kin over non-kin, friends over strangers, in-group over out-group. Without this, groups would not exist at all. And we need them, because we are social animals, not isolated individuals: "It is not good for man to be alone" (Gen. 2:18). Belonging to a group is essential to the sense of identity. On the other hand, a moral system that failed to acknowledge duties to strangers would simply generate endlessly warring tribes. Indeed, it seems to be implicit in the Torah that the Israelites experienced exile and enslavement in order to engrave this truth in collective memory: "You must not oppress strangers. You know what it feels like to be a stranger, for you yourselves were once strangers in the land of Egypt" [this verse]. [Continued at [[EXOD331]] Exodus 19:6 SACKS nation xxxi]

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