GEN538 It was Judaism that posited love of fellowman as the guiding principle of ethics; in doing so it incidentally illustrated its concept of the relationship between religion and ethics. The religious attitude finds its ultimate source in awareness of values in life and the world. It is characterized, moreover, by the effort to transcend the self-interests of the individual.  The pragmatic attitude underlying science takes things to be the “objects” of the experience and “environment” of the individual.  It evaluates them from a utilitarian viewpoint.  Religion, on the other hand, assumes that the personality is aware of itself in relationship to that which is beyond itself and its attitude towards the latter is based on the feeling of awe.  This attitude involves an absolute not a utilitarian evaluation.  The basic achievement of Jewish ethics is it application of this absolute evaluation whose original setting is the religious situation—man confronting God—to the area of life where man confronts his neighbor. On the simplest level, our fellow men are objects of our experience and really constitute a part of our environment. To be sure, in social life the relationship between persons takes on a specific character, one that distinguishes it from the individual’s relationship to all other objects. Common interests bind people together; occasionally, so closely together that the other may even become part of one’s own ego. Even on this level, the relationship to the other is still based, strictly speaking, on what may be called a higher selfishness.  The emotional stance toward the other may that of affection, aversion, or indifference.  In each instance, the motivation is subjective and determined by relative considerations. The Biblical commandment of love of one’s fellow man stands on an altogether different level. In its universalistic and normative character it demands that one’s fellow man should be not merely an object of personal affection but should rather be loved for his own sake.  In this paper, we propose to establish the theoretic meaning and religious basis of this universalistic and binding commandment and to define its scope and limits in the practical realm.  Ahad Ha-Am’s efforts in this direction In his essay “Between Two Stools” in Al Parashat Derakhim, vol IV were much too cursory and the apologetic tendency that informed his famous essay led him to formulate the differences between Jewish and Christian ethics somewhat superficially. The Hebrew essayist saw the basis of Jewish ethics in the twin ideas of justice and the moral worth of man. Aside from the fact that he deliberately omits the religious source of these ideas, he contrasts the “objective” value of justice, native to Judaism, with the “subjective” value of love central to Christian ethics. This characterization does not, as we have already indicated, exhaust the full meaning of the Biblical commandment of love of fellowman. Hermann Cohen, in his early writings, Ethik des reinen Willens, vol. II, pp. 116ff. approached the problem from a not too dissimilar viewpoint. On religious grounds, he found the ethic of love inadequate since by its very nature it is subjective and selective and hence far too limited to express the universalism that must be the hallmark of ethics. He proposed instead that ethics orient itself towards jurisprudence where the relationship of the self and other is most characteristically expressed in the legal contract. Whatever validity this criticism of the ethic of love and its alternative may possess, it is hardly applicable to Judaism in which the two—jurisprudence and ethics—are brought into an intimate relationship. Both Ahad Ha-Am’s grounding of Jewish ethics in the value of justice as opposed to love and Hermann Cohen’s critique of the latter are implied in a famous Talmudic controversy between Rabbi Akiva and Ben Azzai. Sifra Kedoshim and parallel passages. Rabbi Akiba declared the biblical commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself “the great maxim of the Torah.” For Ben Azzai, the essential role of the Torah is contained in [this verse]. As did Hillel before him, Rabbi Akiva followed the lead of the prophets who asserted that love was the highest demand made on man by religion. Hosea 6:6; Micah 6:8; Zachariah 7:9  With penetrating insight, Ben Azzai discerned in the verse in Genesis a broad and firm foundation for ethics— the essential unity of mankind and the dignity of the individual. (By Chaim W. Reines, "The Self and the Other in Rabbinic Ethics") KELLNER 162-4