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enc ompasses c ivil, c riminal and moral law as well. T he moral component, however,
is not distinguished in any way from the other c omponents of Halakhah and, at
least from within the system, is seen as drawing its authority, as does the rest of
the Torah, from God’s c ommand. Sinc e Halakhah c ontains an ethic al c omponent it
must be asked whether ‘the Jewish tradition rec ognizes an ethic independent of
Halakhah’ (see Aharon Lic htenstein’s artic le by this name in Kellner, 1978). Can
there be, that is, signific antly Jewish ethic al norms not inc luded in Halakhah?
T his is a thorny problem. If Judaism recognizes the existence of two
authentic ally Jewish yet independent realms, one of Halakhah and one of ethic s,
how do they interrelate? Can Halakhah be c orrec ted on the basis of Jewish ethic al
c onsiderat ions? T his possibility is abhorrent to those Jews who maintain that
Halakhah is the unc hanging expression of God’s will on earth. Can ethic s be
c orrec t ed on t he basis of halakhic c onsiderat ions? T his possibilit y would probably be
unac c eptable to those Jews who see Halakhah as an expression of an early stage of
God’s dynamic and ongoing revelat ion. T his issue may be rephrased as follows: if
Halakhah and Jewish ethic s are both authentic ally Jewish, is one superior to the
other? If not, what do we do when they c onflic t? If they never c onflic t , in what
sense are they different?
And there are yet further problems: if there exists a supra-halakhic Jewish
et hic , what is it s relat ionship t o non-Jewish c ivil law? What is t he obligat ion of t he
Jew with respect to imposing that ethic upon or offering it to non-Jews?
More quest ions arise: if moralit y must be universally rec ognizable, t hen not
only must Jewish et hic s apply t o all human beings, but it must be available t o t hem
as well. If a supra-halakhic Jewish et hic exist s, is it really universally available, and,
if it is, what is spec ific ally Jewish about it?
So muc h for the problems raised by the notion of Jewish ethic s generally. If, as
is often maintained, Jews are like everybody else, only more so, it is appropriate
that the notion of Jewish et hic s be as problemat ic as t he not ion of religious et hic s,
only more so. But sinc e, as the Yiddish expression has it, no-one has ever died
from having an unsolved philosophic al problem, we c an turn to the sec ond part of
our disc ussion and desc ribe what in fac t has been passing as Jewish ethic s all these
many years.
Following t he lead of Isaiah T ishby and Joseph Dan we may divide t he
lit erat ure of what is ordinarily c alled Jewish et hic s int o four main c at egories:
biblic al, rabbinic , medieval and modern. Certain rec ent sc holars (suc h as Israel
Efros and Shubert Spero) have maintained that the (Hebrew) Bible is self-
c onsc iously aware of a dist inc t area of human ac t ivit y parallel t o what we c all
ethics. I do not agree: while the Bible is surely permeated wit h et hic al c onc ern, it
does not see the laws mandating ethic al behaviour as being in any signific ant sense
dist inc t from it s laws governing c ivil, c riminal, and rit ual mat t ers: t hey all ‘are given
from one Shepherd’ (Eccl. 12: 11). Biblical Hebrew does not even have a word for
‘ethic s’ in our sense of the term. The Bible, then, teac hes ethic s, but not self-
c onsc iously and as suc h: it is a sourc e of Jewish et hic s while not seeing it self, so t o
speak, as an ethical text...