Why Jewish Ethics Cannot Be Fitted Into Western Models (And Shouldn't Be) ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Wednesday, June 04, 2025

Why Jewish Ethics Cannot Be Fitted Into Western Models (And Shouldn't Be)

Over Shavuot, I have been reading The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality, an overview of the field. Since I have been coming to this project of universalizing Jewish ethics from outside the system, I wanted to know if there was anything I was missing that needs to be addressed in what appears already to be a very strong conceptual framework.

The book traces the history of Jewish ethics, from the Biblical and Talmudic eras through the brilliant medieval philosophers and into the twentieth century. But as I read, one thing kept bothering me: the most prominent names in Jewish philosophy, from Maimonides to Joseph Soloveitchik, keep trying to answer how Jewish ethics fits within the dominant secular philosophies of their eras - Aristotle, Kant, and beyond. These thinkers were undoubtedly brilliant and advanced Jewish ethics immeasurably, but their arguments are, at root, apologetic: an attempt to show that Jewish ethics can hold its own in the language of secular philosophy.

Yet my project has been systematically showing the gaps in secular models of ethics. The Jewish system, I argue, is a superset of the secular ethical systems: it doesn’t merely adopt values, duties, or virtues, but integrates all of these within a much more comprehensive framework rooted, above all, in the concept of covenant. The Jewish model is not a loose collection of values: it is an entire ecosystem, designed to grapple with complexity and real-world dilemmas, to prioritize between conflicting goods, and to treat compromise not as a failure but as a strength. It works at the personal, communal, national, and international levels, without losing coherence.

Trying to fit Jewish ethics into the much narrower frame of existing secular models is, in my view, a category error. If anything, secular ethics should be looking to Jewish ethics for solutions to its persistent shortcomings - shortcomings that philosophers themselves have been identifying and debating for centuries.

I shudder at the thought that I am doing something beyond the giants. Yet it appears I do have one giant on my side, though mentioned only peripherally in the Oxford Handbook: Judah Halevi, the brilliant author of the Kuzari. Halevi was anti-Aristotelian; he argued that Greek ethics, while clever and full of useful tools, were far too limited to serve as a model for Jewish ethics, which is rooted in revelation and lived communal experience. He criticized Greek ethics for focusing on individual perfection and neglecting communal responsibility, a theme that resonates with my own critique. (Notably, he also distinguished between universal rational morality and revelatory law, another similarity with my approach.)

If I am right, then Jewish philosophy took a fateful turn with Maimonides, one that positioned secular ethics as the standard Jewish thought must live up to. This was understandable: Jewish philosophers living in exile often felt compelled to justify Judaism to the dominant cultures around them. But today, with a restored Jewish state and a changing world, perhaps it is time to recognize the genius of Jewish ethics—not as a supplement to Western philosophy, but as a comprehensive, practical, and universal model in its own right that can stand up to, and surpass, the best secular ethical philosophies.

In my next post about this topic I hope to show how the Jewish ethical system brilliantly and seamlessly covers individual, communal, national- and international-level ethics in a single conceptual idea - and how that can be universalized for the entire world.