Chapter 2: Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live?
Today the secular West has largely lost the values that used to be called the Judeo-Christian heritage [3.256] Or as Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks wrote ‘They – people- are as they are because people think in terms of certain ideas – and ideas have a history.’ [2.23] (*1)
The chapter title here above was used in some form of other by Gauguin (*2), Francis Schaeffer and Jonathan Sacks to point to the eternal question that only religion and faith in G-d, the God of Abraham, Isaac & Jacob, can answer.
‘Faith is the call to human responsibility [1.100] The whole thrust of modern thought has been toward reducing the sphere of individual moral responsibility. Human behavior is increasingly seen as the product of impersonal forces – economic (Marx)., social (Durkheim), or socio-biological (the neo-Darwinians). We are what we are because of things over which we have no control, from the distribution of power to the “selfish gene” [1.103] it is said.
The slow demise of morality and faith, is that which characterizes today the 21st century and is becoming the plight of Europe and USA’s survival. That which is needed for a society to function optimally is what Lord Sacks calls the ”moral bond” that links individuals in the shared project of society [2.35]
Freedom has never worked without deeply ingrained moral beliefs …where individuals … conform voluntarily to certain principles said Friedrich Hayek [2.37] The G-d of Israel is on the side of freedom AND human dignity [1.33] Sacks furthermore noted in 2017 that: God can change nature said Maimonides , but He cannot or choose not to change human nature, precisely because Judaism is built on the principle of human freedom.
There are no morals without discipline and authority….Morals do not look like obligations to us …unless there exist about [outside] us and above us a power which gives them sanction, wrote Emile Durkheim [2.37] When people say ‘x is not right, y is’, they do not realize they have unwittingly acknowledged that there is a principle or moral ‘right,’ say z’, outside and above x & y.
[One can define the Hebrew faith as a life of discipline and devotion– more about that later. See Chapters 6, 16 & 17],
“A person with all the faculties we associate with humanity except for the capacity to understand right and wrong is someone who could slaughter people with an axe the way you and I mow the lawn. …We call them sociopaths.” [8.7]
“Until recently [± 1960], serious thinkers argued that society depends on moral consensus…This view began to crumble with the rise of individualism. If morality is private, there is no logic in imposing it on society by legislation.” [2.47]
“When there are no shared standards, there can be no conversation, and where conversation ends, violence begins.” [2.47] This statement by Jonathan Sacks actually defines what is happening in Europe and the USA today. ” Morality has mutated into politics. Morality is about virtue; politics is about power.” [2.45] Already in 1927 Julien Benda said ‘Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds’. And today this is even more so.
“You cannot combine Greek military courage, Roman civic pride, Christian humility, Taoist wisdom and Buddhist otherworldliness into a single system… You cannot cast characters from a Greek tragedy, a Shakespearean comedy, a D H Lawrence novel and a Henry James short story in the same narrative.” [2.34] The world-views of these characters and the context in which they operated differ very much.
“It seems that as a people, we have somewhat lost our way; is there a ‘North Star’ we are somehow missing? And can we find a way to reconnect with it? (*3)
In 1986 Lord Patrick Devlin stated: If men and women try to create a society in which there is no fundamental agreement about good and evil they will fail….the society will disintegrate. Devlin was severely criticized for saying this. If there are areas within a given society that are left to individual conscience, there is no universal rule. Yet, throughout the ages philosophers have sought the Absolute, Universal, Timeless ethics & morality for mankind.
Can Multiculturalism work? On a public holiday in South Africa, at the Beach Front in Durban, people of one of the cultures in the mix that make up the population, slaughtered sheep in the open on the sidewalk opposite one of the international hotels. And, at the start of the soccer world cup 2010 in South Africa, it was decided to slaughter an ox to the ancestors in the stadium. Yet South Africa with its 50+ million black and 5million white peoples regard itself as a Christian majority country. Well today, especially after the so called first democratic vote in 1994, we observe under the Marxist black government of South Africa an accelerated disintegration of the unfortunately named ‘rainbow nation’ of South Africa. (See also footnote *4 of Chapter 1)
During the 1970’s Francis Schaeffer warned about the disintegration of society and the loss of the underlying Hebrew moral and ethical code of western society. Then in 1981 Alasdair MacIntyre in his book After Virtue wrote: ‘Moral language, had broken down. All we have left is fragments of earlier beliefs. The words survive: the beliefs that gave them meaning do not. We are unable to have genuine moral arguments any more…..all truth has become subjective or relative….Which prevails will depend not on reason but on power.’ [2.41]
In-your-face contemporary examples are the debates about same-sex marriage, abortion and gender. The scurrility of the discussion in the mass media is ad infinitum and will never reach common ground. In the 1957 Wolfenden Committee Report on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, they made a clear distinction between morality and law: ‘It is not, in our view, the function of the law to intervene in the private lives of citizens’ they said. [2.38]
Johnathan Sacks wrote ‘The sixties were the years of liberation. Within a few years the liberal revolution confirmed what philosophy taught – that there were no rules, only preferences. Moral judgments were expressions of subjective emotion, not objective truths.’ [1.27] In 2004 Rocco Buttiglioni, was disqualified to be commissioner of justice for the European Commission because some political parties criticized his conservative Roman Catholic views. “He was then disqualified…on the grounds that his private moral convictions [that homosexual behavior is a sin] were ‘ in direct contradiction of European law”. [2.43]
Ideas have power and the human freedom bestowed on man by his Creator (*4), opens up to us a wide range of choices. :The natural world consists of causes and effects. The human world is different. It is made in freedom of choices made possible by ideas. What we think shapes what we do. [cf Schaeffer & Rookmaaker]
“We have many options, and no generation in history has had a wider choice. We can live for work or success or wealth or fame or power. We can have a whole series of lifestyles and relationships. We can explore any of a myriad of faiths, mysticism or therapies. ” [1.40] Of course to many, many people the question: ‘ what is right and what is wrong; what is not ethical; is my behavior or deeds moral?’- never crosses their mind.
Thomas Cahill wrote in The Gifts of the Jews, to a large degree, Western civilization is framed in terms of concepts first articulated by the Jews . Furthermore Sacks writes: “Judaism is God’s perennial question mark against the conventional wisdom of mankind, and this has been the fate of Jewish identity in modern times. It belongs to a language, a way of seeing and thinking, that become hard to translate into the concepts of today.” [1.41] (*5) To be Jewish meant watching your words, lest they cause someone else harm; it meant strong family values and an emphasis on education; it meant respecting people for their inner qualities, not their social mobility. [Aish.com]
Yet few perspicacious people throughout history glimpsed the truth; as Tolstoy said: “The Jew is that sacred being who has brought down from heaven the everlasting fire, and has illumined with it the entire world. He is the religious source, spring and fountain out of which all the rest of the peoples have drawn their beliefs and their religion” [1.3]
So let me now here state and spell out what Tolstoy and others like him like e.g. [Mark Twain] actually said reading between the lines: Our guidebook or instruction manual is the Torah and Tenach] [Old Testament]; the word of G-d, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. When we read: ‘All Scripture is breathed out by Elohim and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for setting straight for instruction in righteousness, that the man of Elohim might be fitted, equipped for every good work.’ [2Tim.3:16,17], said by Paul, he is referring to the Tanach (the OT). That was the only Scripture available then! Christians usually ignore or forget this fact!
So I have tried in this short piece to point out to you that morals, ethics and rules have always been part of a society to function optimally. Yet on what these are based, by whom these are commanded, varied from culture to culture; and over time also drastically changed. “Under a ‘Spirit-led’ economy of personal revelation, who could say whether a particular act constituted a transgression or not?” [17.261] (*6)
Let us try to define morality. This is what Jonathan Sacks writes: ( it may surprise you, but as a believer, it shouldn’t!) “Morality is not factual (how things are) or subjective (how I desire them to be) but covenantal, meaning: God gives His word to man, and man gives his word to God. God teaches, man acts, and together they begin the task of tikkun olam.” (*7) [1.60] As the Rabbis explain it: We are partners in the work of creating this world.
FOOTNOTES
*1 See footnote *4 in Chapter 1.
*2 Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? 1897. Paul Gauguin. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
*3 See Rav Binny Freedman’s Small Tastings of Torah, Judaism and Spirituality, Shavuot, 6780
*4 See Genesis2:16,17
*5 The Jews started it all – and by ‘it’ I mean so many of the things we care about, the underlying values that make all of us, Jew and gentile, believer and atheist, tick. Without the Jews, we would see the world through different eyes, hear with different ears, even feel with different feelings. And not only would our sensorium, the screen through which we receive the world, be different: we would think with a different mind, interpret all our experience differently, draw different conclusions from the things that befall us. And we would set a different course for our lives. [41.3]
*6 Also read: The Story we Tell. Bo; Covenant and Conversation, 5778, Life-Changing Ideas in the Parasha, by Jonathan Sacks.
*7 To repair or, better the world. It is seen as the duty of every BELIEVING Jew.