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