Mindflex- Morality- Is it possible to be a good person without the Torah?- Adam Rosenblum

okay so we're going to be talking about morality and whether or not morality can exist without the torah so i'd like to begin by talking about the establishment of divine authority as we find in brexit in genesis immediately after the creation of mankind god commands adam not to eat from the tree on pain of death and in so doing he establishes his absolute authority and also the value that we place on preserving human life while weighty can also be overwritten if a person is deserving of death if a person conducts himself in a manner that's not befitting to a human being then god will take his life and by extension the jewish courts were later empowered to punish a number of transgressors with death so this is really the first illustration that even though there are are moral imperatives but they really aren't absolute they can be overridden by god's command as the ultimate authority on what is right and wrong the talmud in sanhedrin says mitzvos hashem avodah zara giloi arrios ushvich the sages taught us in hebraisa that the descendants of noah meaning all humanity were commanded to observe seven commandments first the mitzvah of establishing the court system courts of judgment secondly the prohibition against cursing the name of god third the prohibition against idol worship fourth the prohibition against forbidden sexual relations fifth the prohibition of bloodshed sixth the prohibition of robbery and seventh of prohibition against eating the limb of a living animal now if we were to sit down and discuss these very specific moral imperatives i think that we could agree that most nations most peoples most cultures would be on the same page with respect to most of them maybe not idolatry but we're going to get to that in a few minutes but the idea of forbidden sexual relationships murder robbery these are things that are relatively universal and have been over the course of history but there have been some exceptions to this nonetheless the talmud teaches us that after the flood noah and his sons and his family were given these seven commandments that are otherwise known as the seven noahide laws but maimonides the rambam in the laws of kings says something very interesting maimonides says quote that one who accepts the seven noahide laws and is meticulous in their observance is from the righteous of the nations of the world and has a share in the world to come provided that he does so because god commanded him so in the torah if however he observes them because his mind so dictates he is not from the righteous of the nations nor is he from the wise ones and we see from this passage in maimonides is that a person is required according to maimonides definition of the righteous among the nations to make sure that the reason that the person is doing these things is because god commanded him to do so in the torah so we can have two people they both adhere to these rules religiously but if a person does so because his mind so dictates because of logical and rational reasons then he's not considered righteous he's only considered righteous if he does so because god dictates so we see something very interesting here which is that the rambam is clear maimonides is clearly saying that there has to be the divine authority piece of it a person can simply conduct himself or herself in a moral and ethical manner and be considered righteous if god isn't part of that if god isn't the one who ordained that and as this class unfolds we're going to start to understand why that's so important why it's so key for an order for a person to be defined as righteous in the eyes of maimonides that requires the person to be doing these things or not doing these things because of divine authority but let's move on so we spoke a little bit about adam we spoke a little bit about noah and the next personality that the torah talks about extensively is that of abraham avraham avinu avraham our father the first of the patriarchs and the question has been asked that there were other righteous people that existed prior to abraham now adam had some sin that he committed but he was otherwise a righteous person at least to our understanding there were shame and aver who were other individuals they even had a yeshiva they had a house of study and yet they were not considered the forefathers and all of these generations that angered god says ethics of the fathers from noah stopped when it came to abraham so clearly people had not taken the lessons of the flood and we know the story of the tower of babel was an example of that and people who had corrupted themselves at the time of the flood didn't quite learn the lessons until abraham came along and accepted their reward is the way the ethics of the fathers characterizes it and why was it that abraham accepted that reward why was it that he was considered the father of the jewish people the first monotheist when clearly both adam and eve noah and others had direct relationships with god and i think the answer is that abraham was the father of ethical monotheism he wasn't the first monotheist but he was the first individual that developed in such a way over the course of his life that it became clear to him that ethics and morality had to be divinely ordained and had to stem from one god and not a multiplicity in those days i don't know that there was anybody that didn't believe in a god or gods but the majority of people until abraham came along believed in many gods they were polytheistic and abraham when he came along and he became the first so to say first the first monotheist and we're going to see why was the first person to actually teach and preach monotheism and spread that throughout the world and in fact we know that abraham had many followers because it says that when god told him to leave kharan and to go to the land of canaan to canaan it brought that he brought with them the nephesh they were the people that he had inspired to follow in that path and so this was really an interesting contrast between avraham and noah between abraham and noah noah was the person who pulled inward he was the person who of course believed in god it says actually that noah walked with god which is a pretty big compliment that he was someone that fulfilled what god had to say but according to the rabbinic teachings he didn't go far enough he didn't teach people he didn't motivate people he didn't inspire people and in fact the flood came and the only ones that were saved were him and his family all of the people of his generation that could have been positively influenced by him ended up drowning in the flood abraham turned judaism outward he taught monotheism he taught all of the lessons that he learned in his life which we're going to talk about now and he taught the people that in order for there to be morality in the world in order for us to have a moral and ethical society we need to adhere to one god now let's go back a little bit and talk about abraham's upbringing our sages teach us that abraham was born into an idolatrous family in fact his father tara actually owned an idol shop his job was to sell idols and one could not imagine the more unlikely source for the future of monotheism than the son of this individual except for the fact that oftentimes children do rebel against their parents and their upbringing but regardless even as a young child the midrash tells us that avraham could not make sense of the idea of polytheism he couldn't make sense of the fact that the sun rises during the day and then the moon takes over and then there are the stars and what happens if warring gods get into a debate well this time today this god won but tomorrow another god is going to win and that one is going to be paramount and he started to see even from a very very young age that it didn't make logical sense that there shouldn't be one god that was in charge that created and was in charge of the entire world and in fact as the story goes he smashed all of his father's idols and when his father except for one when his father came home he had placed a hammer in the hand of one of the idols and when his father came home and he says abraham what did you do and abraham says well i what do you mean what did i do look look what happened one of the idols here is holding the hammer so clearly he smashed all the other idols and his father says ah you fool how could that be idols can smash other idols they're just figures of stone and abraham said you see so if that's the case then you see that they really have no power so the whole thing didn't make sense to him and he got to the point where he clearly understood that there was only one god and that god is the ultimate moral decisor ultimately can killing be ethical yes it can be ethical if commanded by god rules of morality like thou shall not kill aren't absolute they're guidelines but we also understand that god gives us certain circumstances under which we're required to do so and we know that the ultimate test of the ten tests that abraham overcame was the commandment to sacrifice his son and of course we know that god stopped him but in his mind this must have been such an incredibly difficult challenge because here he understood that there are morals and those morals are ordained by god and he was meant to repudiate idolatry and all of the contradictions that it brought how can we have morality when at the same time people are sacrificing their children to idols and yet on the other hand god comes to him and tells him to do exactly what he would have thought should not be done but the message is it can be done if god commands it to be done because morality there's no blanket rule when it comes to that it's all defined by god we as human beings it's not up to us to define it but rather it's up to god to define it if god tells you to go to war to eradicate evil and people need to be killed in that war killing isn't murder but that's only because we understood that it was something that we did as a result of god's command and god's directive interestingly abraham who assumed that obligation not only internalized it but also taught it to others and that is why he was considered the father of ethical monotheism because he was the one who was responsible for spreading those teachings throughout the world but as we know many generations later ultimately hashem gave us the torah and firmly established the divine moral imperative he gave us 613 commandments the ones that are in the written torah and many many hundreds of commandments as part of the oral torah and one of the things historically that happened was that the torah was actually given immediately after the jewish people descended down into egypt as we know and they were slaves for 210 years and they were involved in the most depraved and corrupt society that history has ever known the egyptians were idolatrous the egyptians were murderous they were enslavers of the jewish people pharaoh directed that they commit infanticide that they kill the babies or throw them into the nile and we're told that as a result of that environment the jewish people descended to the lowest level of spiritual defilement the 49th level and very shortly after their exodus they received the torah and the torah required them to be on the highest level of spirituality and so god in giving the torah establishes his divine authority and also with respect of course to the moral imperative pierre que avo the ethics of the fathers in fact is the only tractate of mishnah to begin with a recording of the transmission of the torah from moses from moshe who received it at mount sinai all the way through to the generation of the men of the great assembly and one of the reasons for that is that pierre que avos is largely a collection of moral teachings and many of which are logical and easy to comprehend so a person may think that these moral and ethical rules or guidelines were not divinely ordained but rather they just developed over the course of time so the reason that mishnah gives us what we call the mess over the tradition of each one being passed down from teacher to student all the way back from moses is for us to understand that this is not something that happened as a result of a cultural development of ethical and moral standards but rather these moral teachings came from sinai came from the fact that god gave us together with the torah and all the various rules of what we're supposed to eat and what we're not supposed to eat also ethical and moral rules in order for us to consider those as much a part of the torah as everything else now we look at divinely ordained morality that's really one side of this issue the other side of the issue is what we might call moral relativism the concept of moral relativism is the idea that there is no absolute morality that is ordained by god but rather morality is relative it's relative to time to place to culture and so on and so forth and in fact we talk about the track of jewish history there's also the track of world history and if we look back at the track of world history we can see that there are tremendous examples of moral relativism things that today would never be considered acceptable but back then were considered morally and ethically proper for example infanticide we talked a little bit about that in terms of the pharaoh in egypt but there were many ancient cultures where babies were killed on a regular basis for multiple reasons population control gender selection which usually meant killing the newborn girls because boys were considered more favored ridding the society of potentially burdensome or deformed members euthanasia interestingly aristotle who of course was one of the most influential thinkers in western history wrote quote there must be a law that no imperfect or maimed child shall be brought up and to avoid excessive population some children must be exposed for a limit must be fixed to the population of the state and it sounds like what he is saying is he's advocating for the fact that we have certain limits certain population limits that need to be set and in order for us to make sure that there's no excess in population well that's just the way that it works that some children need to be exposed and the ones that are going to be exposed meaning disposed of are ones that are imperfect ones that are named ones that have certain illnesses and so on and so forth that's one example another example is human sacrifice we know that the funeral rites of nobility and kings whether they were in ancient egypt china or the vikings often included sacrificing servants young girls and prisoners the incas who lived in the andes they were to mountain gods and they sacrificed their children on the peaks of the highest mountains we had mentioned that in ancient times there was an idol called molach people would sacrifice their son tamale and that was part of the ritual of worshiping that god and the torah specifically says that we're not allowed to sacrifice our son to mullah just like people would do in those days in many civilizations instead of dedicating a new building with a cornerstone laying ceremony people would actually be sacrificed and buried in the foundations of the buildings and in fact remains of human sacrifices have been found in many sites in northern europe which were believed to have been from thousands of years ago and very often these bodies that were found were associated with pagan occult objects so we see that at that point in time sacrificing slaves other undesirables was just something that was part of it there were people who were considered part of part of these pagan rituals and as part of these pagan rituals it was considered completely acceptable and actually beneficial a gift to the gods to be able to sacrifice human life if we turn to the mighty roman empire we know that there were stadiums that were built for the purpose of bloodsport very often people who were condemned for whatever reasons or slaves were specifically put into the arenas in order to fight to the death and you have crowds of tens of thousands of people that would actually watch this occur so for that time in place these types of activities were considered normal we know that in the earlier part of the 20th century there was also a movement called the eugenics movement and it stemmed as a result of concerns of overpopulation also the idea that there were certain people that were considered genetically inferior and if we were going to allow these people to survive and propagate then certain illnesses and certain other undesirable conditions would continue to be perpetuated the heruli they were a germanic tribe during the migration period and they used to place the sick and elderly on a tall stack of wood and stabbed them to death before lighting them on fire and in certain intuit cultures when food ran short the old and sick were just looked upon as drained on the community's resources and they killed them or threw them to sea put them out onto the ice until they died and so all throughout the course of history for various different reasons many of them logical it was believed that these people are either not contributing to society or even worse or drain on society and therefore they need to be eliminated and so it's not completely out of the question for us to think about a society that may rise at one point in time and that society decides that once a person reaches age 75 or 80 they no longer can usefully contribute to society and if we think about the drain that it puts on our economy and our resources the medical field that has to cater the insurance companies that have to cater to these people and all of their various illnesses and challenges we can imagine that there are those that may take the position that because these people are a drain on society then their lives are not worth living and that's really a possible result of the concept of moral relativism if on the other hand morality is divine is defined by god and it's absolute in the sense of thou shalt not kill with certain exceptions then clearly we have no right to end somebody's life just because they don't contribute or just because they don't uh they have certain undesirable traits and one can think that perhaps this is a contributing factor to why many of these societies might have ultimately fallen thomas jefferson once said that a nation as a society forms a moral person and every member of it is personally responsible for society if a person loses their morality eventually they lose their liberty the the result of a moral society is one of liberty everybody is free to be able to conduct themselves in an organized fashion but only if they conduct themselves in a moral way which is why moral relativism is such a fallacy in more modern times in 1947 the american anthropological association submitted a statement to the united nations commission on human rights and the paper criticized the moral objectivism of the united nations that some viewed as an attempt by the west to impose its values on other societies in the name of quote universal human rights and this statement said that quote standards and values are relative to the culture from which they derive so that any attempt to formulate postulates that grow out of the belief or moral codes of one culture must to that extent detract from the applicability of any declaration of human rights to mankind as a whole meaning that because human rights vary so much from place to place in culture or culture there can't be any universal standard on human rights it all depends on the time and place or the culture and in more recent times the case of terry shivo touched off a national debate on physician-assisted suicide meaning the right to die so we move from a question of whether or not a society should impose restrictions on life as a result of moral relativism to the question of self-determination do i have a right to end my life if i feel that i am no longer contributing to society or worse i am a drain on society and the case of terry shivo involved a woman whose family wanted to exercise their right to die they felt that at this point she had expressed wishes earlier on before she became debilitated that if she were ever to become in a pbs persistent vegetative state she that she would have wanted her life to end and there was a big debate in her family as to whether or not they should as a result of that take her off the machine so that she would be able to die but we know that for example jack kevorkian who was a very very controversial figure was a champion of of an individual's right to die and he was actually convicted of of manslaughter or murder on multiple occasions because there were laws on the books that of course were rooted in what we would call i guess judeo-christian values that assisting somebody to die is considered murder and yet his perspective was that a person should have the right to say when their life is over so the question is what's the torah's view on the subject so i'd like to quote for for you an article from robbie it's like breidowitz and the article is entitled the right to die a halachic approach and he says as follows in the toe review life is an infinite not relative value and mathematically any fraction of infinity must also be infinite once life is assigned the relative value once we start making judgments as to which lives are worth living and which are not once we assign value to people because of what they do instead of what they are we have demeaned the intrinsic sanctity of existence for all human beings and have embarked on a dangerous exercise of wine drawing what about the elderly what about the severely what about the handicapped are they any less human because their productivity is impaired judaism rejects the notion of unlimited personal autonomy our bodies and our lives are not our own to do with as we will they are temporary bailments given to us by god for a specific purpose and duration which only god can terminate and just as we don't have the moral right to kill or harm others we don't have the moral right to kill maim or injure ourselves or to authorize other persons to do those things to us you know what's interesting is that an american society there's a prevailing view that as long as you're not harming somebody else you can do to yourself whatever you want if i go and i lock myself in a room and i decide to take drugs i decide to do something that's going to be very negative ultimately to my body into my future myob mind your own business it's not up to you to decide and to say whether or not i'm going to be killing myself essentially that's perhaps an extreme example but here what we have is we have moral judgments that are rubbing up against rationality this person feels that they're in a lot of pain or this person feels that they're not contributing to society but ultimately god being the ultimate authority on this subject gives us the rules and tells us that we have no right to decide that he is the only one that has the right to decide that and that's why a person is enjoined against committing suicide similarly a person is enjoined against killing somebody else if they feel that the person is not contributing to society in a valuable way and so god gives us these rules with the ultimate objective to absorb these moral lessons and actually to liberate us rabbi jonathan sachs of blessed memory says that true freedom is the ability to control oneself without having to be controlled by others ultimately god wants us to get to the point where through learning the torah and studying the torah it gets us to internalize these moral imperatives and that leads to an ultimate functioning of society of course there are many times where something doesn't seem moral something just doesn't feel right but we have to do it because that's what the torah says to do but in the vast majority of cases a person is following a moral directive that's logical that's rational and even if they don't feel like doing it they're going to be mandated to do it because the torah says to do it and herein lies the big difference between god ordains morality and a person's own moral compass it's not just the fact that a person is going to have a certain sense of unassailable morality and we're going to talk about this in a moment but the fact that a person is going to have the divine imperative to carry that out a person might not feel like doing the moral thing all the time but if a person has fear of god then a person is going to be compelled in order it's compelled to carry that out and in fact abraham says to his wife he is concerned that they're going to kill him why because in eurasia there is no fear of god in this place abraham clearly sees that the linchpin of a society that is that is moral and that conducts itself in the proper way is fear of god because if a person is god fearing they are going to act in a moral way even if they don't feel like it the holy time would say if torah's study has stopped then perforce the faith will also stop and without faith the world can endure and he explained that verse in genesis that there is no fear of god in this place and they will kill me because of my wife the verse says the word only and what that means is that there is nothing in the world that has the power to hold back the animal in man besides the fear of god and the chavez says in our times and how precious he was because he passed away before the second world war and he said but in our times where the denial of god has spread throughout the world human beings have become snakes which bite each other and the proper countries among the nations are those which believe in the holy writings meaning those that believe in the godly ordained law one need not look back that far to see the most extreme example of moral relativism we know that during the holocaust the way that the nazis justified killing jews was that jewish people were sub-human they were worse than animals in fact one of the things that is not as well known is that the that there was widespread support for animal welfare in nazi germany adolf hitler may his name be erased and his top officials took many measures to ensure that animals were protected many of their leadership including goring hermann goring were supporters of animal rights and conservation many nazis were environmentalists and species protection and animal welf welfare were significant issues in the nazi regime himmler put forward an effort to ban the hunting of animals goring was a professional animal lover and a conservationist who was instructed by hitler to to command germans who violated nazi animal welfare laws to concentration camps and in his private diaries the propaganda the the nazi propaganda minister goebbels described hitler as a vegetarian whose hatred of jewish and christian religions in large part stems from the ethical distinction that these faiths drew between the value of humans and the value of other animals and globals also mentions that hitler planned to ban slaughterhouses in the german reich following the second world war and so we see very clearly that left to a person's own devices they can go down the moral slippery slope a person can decide that if this person deserves death whether it's because they're racially inferior whether it's because they're a drain on society whether it's because they themselves think that their life no longer has a value or whether it's because this class of people is sub-human is less than an animal then we might not be able to kill animals because animals lives have value but we can kill these particular humans because their lives not only don't have value but actually are the cause of all the olds of the world but have these people subscribed to a moral imperative that was divinely ordained then they wouldn't have the right to make that choice because it's very very clear that the torah wouldn't sanction murder under these circumstances so to answer the question if there is no divinely ordained moral imperative is there still morality well of course a person who doesn't believe in god and doesn't believe in the torah can still behave with morals there's no question about that and sometimes people may get very offended at that thought well i'm an atheist do you mean to tell me that i'm not a moral person now of course a person who is an atheist of course a person who doesn't believe in god and of course a person who doesn't believe in the torah can act in a moral way there's no question about it but the idea behind the torah's morality and the torah standards of morality is that we need to have a certain absolute nature to morality in order for us to adhere to it strictly and that's why god gave us these rules that's why god gave us the torah in order for us to have an unassailable code of morality that is going to survive time and place and culture and history and as we've seen that if we ultimately don't have that then there is going to be relativity when it comes to morality there's going to be relativity when it comes to human rights over the course of history there are countless examples of societies that have preyed on other societies societies that have enslaved other societies and justified it by some type of moral or cultural justification but had they had a torah had they had god which ordained that these particular things should have been done then there's no way that they could have reached that conclusion rationally and so we have the torah and we have the gift of the torah in order to make sure that hashem put us on the right path the straight path and the moral path through the betterment of ourselves and for the betterment of society the world over and one final point the mishnan tractate evo says who is a person who is truly free only somebody that is involved in torah and the question that gets asked time and time again is how is the torah of freedom if anything the torah is very restricting we have all different types of restrictions that tell us what to do when to be at a certain place what things we have to do in terms of obligations on shabbat our obligations in terms of prayer and also our moral and ethical obligations so it sounds like having to apply ourselves and having to adhere to a certain set of structures and specific laws and details would be something that's almost the opposite of being free in fact in old time olden times people would refer to somebody who is not religious as being fry fry and yiddish means free so this person's free they're free from all obligations and all restrictions that are placed upon us by the torah but actually under the moral imperative it makes perfect sense a person who doesn't have a moral imperative a person who doesn't have a divine moral imperative may be very very heavily weighed down by the choices that they're required to make because they don't know what to do they don't know how to choose is this right or is this wrong i wish i had some type of of guidance i wish i had some type of guidebook i wish i had something like the torah i wish i was able to turn to a rabbi to give me some guidance to help determine what decision to make what's right and what's wrong if i can't decide based on a clear reading of the text i need to go to a scholar i need to go to somebody who's going to be able to delve into the torah because it also says that when a person turns over and turns over the torah they find that everything is in the torah every possible moral and ethical and legal decision that a person may have to reach is all in the torah and so i'm going to turn to a scholar and the scholar is going to tell me that this is the right thing to do and this is not the right thing to do and if it's determined that it's the right thing to do that this is what god would want me to do i'm going to do it and if it's something that i'm not meant to do that i it's clear to me that i'm not supposed to do i'm not going to do it and that leads a person to freedom freedom of mind the freedom of the burden of being able to have possibly made the wrong decision or the immoral decision if everything is relative and morality is relative then maybe we as a society are making the wrong decision now by deciding that this particular thing is moral or immoral but if the torah is our guide and we realize that the torah is divine and unassailable then we we don't have to question ourselves it's going to be very clear to me how i'm going to vote on this issue it doesn't matter what politics has to say doesn't matter what this particular politician has to say about the issue i want to go in accordance with what the torah says is moral and what the torah says is just and true and to me that's true freedom