It’s one of the most persistent and uncomfortable questions in philosophy. Some argue that morality is objective, like mathematics, something true whether we agree on it or not. Others claim it’s all social convention, a kind of collective delusion that helps us get along but carries no intrinsic truth.
As with the other binaries that philosophers like to dream up, this is a false one.
The Jewish ethics framework I've been developing, built to serve both believers and skeptics, offers a different answer. It doesn’t claim to prove moral truth like a scientific law, and it doesn’t reduce ethics to a matter of taste or tribal custom. Instead, it treats moral values the way we treat medicine: not as absolute, eternal truths, but as structured, tested systems that help us survive and flourish. We don't ask whether medicine is "true" - we ask whether it works. That is how Jewish philosophy works - not based on theoretical questions but on real world practice. As we've said before, it isn't geometry - it is engineering. Just as we don’t trust equations alone to keep our buildings upright - we trust the engineers, the architects, and the building codes - so too we trust ethics that have stood the test of stress, scrutiny, and time.
This approach matters because it answers the skeptic’s challenge without collapsing into relativism. You don’t need to “believe” in germs or viruses to notice what happens to societies that ignore them. Similarly, you don’t need metaphysical certainty to know that truth, justice, and human dignity are not optional if you want to build something that lasts. When regimes deny human dignity, we get gulags. When truth becomes relative, propaganda takes over. When mutual responsibility erodes, communities fall apart. You don’t need a philosopher to tell you values are real. A historian will do.
What’s striking is that this realism isn’t just a modern workaround. It’s embedded in the Torah itself. The foundational stories of Genesis are filled with people making moral decisions without any divine instruction. Noah is called righteous in a corrupt generation, without receiving a single command. Abraham argues with God about justice: not because God taught him the concept, but because he already understands it and expects God to live up to it. Lot, for all his flaws, operates with a warped but sincere moral code, choosing what he sees as pikuach nefesh - his guests’ lives - over his daughters' safety. Pharaoh and Abimelech recoil in horror at the idea that they nearly committed adultery, even though they had no access to Jewish law. These stories aren’t about keeping and violating commandments. They’re about what human beings know, or should know, about right and wrong before Sinai.
The implication is powerful. Ethics, in the Jewish view, doesn’t begin at revelation. It begins with being human. The giving of the Torah didn't create morality. It calibrates it. It takes something instinctive but fragile and makes it transmissible, accountable and communal. Just as early medicine relied on intuition until it was systematized into science, early morality relied on conscience until it was shaped into covenant.
Torah, then, is not a divine mandate of human ethics: it’s a refinement, a reinforcement, a response to the fact that instinct alone is not enough and cannot last for generations.
What this means is that the origin of ethics is not relevant to whether we should practice them today. If you believe in divine revelation or not, the 3,500 year history of a people bound by these ideas that survived centuries of dispersion and persecution is plenty of evidence that the system works.
The AskHillel project doesn’t demand belief in revelation, but it does take seriously the structure that revelation provided. It asks whether values can be traced, whether reasoning can be made transparent, whether disagreement can be handled with dignity rather than collapse. It holds that moral truth doesn’t need to be absolute to be binding. It only needs to be strong enough to hold under stress, and open enough to be refined over time. Just like medicine, ethics doesn’t become invalid because it changes. It becomes more real and relevant as it is refined, and more vital the more it’s tested.
So are values real? Not like gravity. Not like math. But not like fashion either. They are real like oxygen: invisible but you cannot have a meaningful life without them.
AskHillel is built on that principle. It doesn’t offer certainty in ethics - it offers a system that has proven itself under stress. It doesn’t require faith - it requires fidelity. And it insists that the moral structure described in the Torah and refined over generations by rabbis and thinkers is still one of the strongest frameworks we’ve ever had for building a society that works, no matter whether you believe that it came from God or man. That makes it real enough to matter.
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