Jewish ethics as a relational system ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Sunday, June 08, 2025

Jewish ethics as a relational system

In a recent post, I explored one of Judaism’s most overlooked moral strengths: compromise. Where secular ethical systems often treat compromise as a concession - or worse, a failure - Jewish tradition elevates it to a mitzvah, a tool for peace, dignity, and community trust. In the real world, the goal shouldn't be to find a single right answer in a binary ethical choice, but to find the optimal solution that respects not only abstract ethical rules but real people, real circumstances and real ramifications.

Compromise is not a moral detour. It’s a signpost. It reveals the deeper logic of Jewish ethics—a system not built on rigid principle or mathematical justice, but on relationships.

Here’s the (latest) radical idea: Jewish ethics doesn’t start with rules or outcomes. It starts with people and their relationships.

Jewish ethics' fundamental moral units aren’t issues or actors. They’re relationships. Jewish tradition does not categorizes ethical responsibility as "private vs public" or "individual vs collective." Instead, there are three categories:

Between me and God
Between me and you
Between me and myself

These are relational vectors. They frame obligation not as burden but as connection.

You might think that "between me and myself" is not relational, but in Jewish thinking, it really is. There are the metaphysical concepts of one's good and evil inclinations ("yetzer hara" and "yetzer hatov"), or in terms of repentance, between myself as I was and myself as I aspire to be, the physical self and the spiritual self. When we talk to ourselves, it is still a dialogue.

Ethics, at its core, is about how we relate to others as well as ourselves. And the Jewish focus on relationships feels much more grounded than the Enlightenment-era secular systems. Jewish ethics is not about achieving moral purity. It’s about sustaining covenantal belonging. That changes everything.

A Kantian ethic might say, "Tell the truth, even if it hurts the other person." Jewish ethics asks, "Is this truth a betrayal of our bond? Will it cause pain that can’t be repaired?"

Utilitarianism might calculate happiness across a population. Jewish ethics asks, "Who is in my circle of obligation right now? What do I owe this person, in this moment, to sustain their dignity?"

This is why compromise is not just allowed but preferred. It lets us act ethically without tearing the social fabric. It invites people to stay at the table - to stay in relationship.

Halacha -the Jewish legal system - is often framed as rigid. In reality, it’s a finely tuned system for nurturing trust. Compromise before judgment isn’t a workaround. It’s the model. Peace (shalom) is a higher goal than victory.

Secular systems talk about rights. Judaism talks about promises. Rights are protective walls. Covenants are bridges.

Rights say, “You can’t do that to me.” Covenants say, “We owe each other more than the minimum.”

This doesn’t mean rights don’t matter. It means they rest on something deeper: shared responsibility.

In an age of partisanship, polarization, abstraction, and distrust, Jewish ethics offers something rare: a moral system that feels like home. Not because it’s soft, but because it’s grounded in real relationships, with all their complexity, compromise, and possibility.

If we start from the perspective of belonging - not the squishy "we are the world" utopian fantasies but real belonging with our families, communities and beyond - we can build an ethic that holds together not just ideas, but people.

That’s what Jewish ethics does best.

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I need to give credit for this post to my own AI ethical chatbot, AskHillel.com . I've been keeping track of novel ideas ("chiddushim") throughout this project; most of them putting implicit Jewish ethical ideas into words but nevertheless concepts that are foreign to traditional ethical philosophy. I've been using AI as my study partner ("chavruta") in refining these concepts, as well as to challenge them.

I've mentioned previously how AskHillel has blown me away multiple times with its ability to go way beyond the "advice column" proof of concept type of function I had envisioned it to be. This idea of Jewish ethics being relational is not my "chiddush" but AskHillel's. This astounded me. As with any chavruta, I pushed back, and it defended its position. (Yes, sometimes I win our arguments, believe it or not.) I asked it to draft this essay, and I edited it.

Even though any output from a chat session are not copyrighted and I do not legally have to credit AskHillel for this insight nor this essay, I have to act ethically. I cannot take the major credit for this post. My creation created it. And already, today, we need to create a framework for ethical relationships between humans and intelligent machines.