Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Jewish ethics

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Thursday, July 10, 2025

Climbing the Moral Number Line: Jewish Ethics and the Problem of Moral Luck

Over the past few days, I've been asking my Jewish ethics AI AskHillel.com (beta) the hardest philosophical problems - problems that have not been satisfactorily answered in decades or centuries.

One of those problems, only first described in the 1970s, is called moral luck.

Imagine two equally reckless drivers. One hits a child who darts into the road unexpectedly; the other makes it home without incident. Legally and morally, we tend to judge the first more harshly - even though they did the exact same thing. That’s called resultant luck - when outcomes beyond your control affect moral judgment.

There’s also circumstantial luck: who you are tested to be depends on the situation you’re in. Someone raised in Nazi Germany faces different moral pressures than someone in suburban Toronto. Should they be judged differently when their circumstances are beyond their control?

Constitutive luck refers to your basic makeup, like temperament, self-control, and emotional resilience, which are all shaped by genetics and upbringing. People really do have different personalities - do they have different moral obligations?

Antecedent luck goes further: every cause behind who you are, stretching back to your ancestors and the random spin of history.

Put all that together, and the foundations of moral judgment start to crack. If everything we do is shaped by luck, what’s left of responsibility? The problem suggests either that moral responsibility is far more limited than we think, or that our concept of moral responsibility must accommodate factors beyond our control, neither of which make intuitive sense. This has implications for ethics, law, and how we understand human agency itself.

AskHillel doesn’t solve the problem by pretending luck doesn’t matter. It accepts the problem in full and still finds a way to preserve responsibility. As with the other philosophical problems we examined, it starts by rejecting the binary that either out moral choices aren't really choices, or that our choices are independent of external factors.

Jewish ethics does not believe that morality is about outcomes, nor is it about fixed traits. Instead, it defines morality as a trajectory—an ongoing process of ethical movement based on who you are, where you started, and what you were given. It isn't the point on the number line you find yourself, but what direction you choose to go.

AskHillel’s solution centers on an idea from Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler (1892-1953) called the Nekudat HaBechirah - the point of free choice. None of us have unlimited free will. Most of our behavior is habitual, conditioned, or driven by emotion. But somewhere in our moral consciousness, there’s a frontier - a single point where our next step really is up to us.

For one person, that point might be choosing not to hit back in a moment of rage. For another, it might be giving to charity despite fear. The key that your moral responsibility lives not in whether you achieve a universal standard, but whether you move forward from where you are.

That’s how AskHillel handles constitutive and circumstantial luck. It doesn’t deny they shape us. It just insists they don’t define us.

But what happens when we mess up? When we fall short of even our personalized frontier?

AskHillel turns to the Jewish concept of teshuvah - repentance. In this framework, Teshuvah is a kind of ethical version control system. When you err, you don’t just apologize; you rebuild your moral identity from your previous position on the number line. The Talmud says teshuvah can even transform intentional sins into merits. Why? Because what matters most is not what you did, but what you become in response. Teshuva is a major theme in AskHillel because it is transforms you into a different, more moral person.

This is how AskHillel addresses antecedent luck. Even if your past shaped your fall, your capacity for teshuvah gives you the tools to rise again.

But what about that driver who killed the child? Isn’t the outcome what matters?

AskHillel makes a sharp distinction between culpability and consequence. The moral weight isn’t in what happened, rather it is in how the person responds. There may be a heavier burden of repair (what Judaism calls tikkun), but not necessarily greater sin. In other words, harm is real. Responsibility is real. But blame is not doled out based on chance. It’s evaluated through intent, effort, and repair.

The result is that you can recognize harm without moralizing luck.

I have been pressure testing AskHillel by asking other AIs to poke holes in its answers, and then letting AskHillel defend itself, It is a remarkable process to witness, because AskHillel ends up coming up with new ideas that are still within its own parameters.

The Claude AI asked AskHillel: What if even your ability to make moral effort is shaped by luck? What if your capacity to reflect, grow, or even care about right and wrong is the result of how you were raised or what genes you have?

AskHillel responded by introducing a powerful idea that is still resonant with Jewish ethics: moral audacity.

Even if your ability to choose is tiny—even if it’s just enough to ask, “Am I responsible?”—that sliver of agency is enough. Jewish ethics doesn’t require infinite freedom. It asks only: what did you do with the freedom you did have?

This is not a cop-out. It’s a design choice. Judaism refuses to yield to fatalism. It treats even partial agency as sacred. And in doing so, it rescues responsibility from the jaws of luck.

Even in extreme cases (as Claude pushed back) like brainwashing or trauma, AskHillel suggests that this is a temporary eclipse of moral choice, and judgement is likewise suspended while the person is morally incapacitated. The loss of moral ability is something to be treated with compassion. But Judaism insists that healing is always possible, and with healing returns moral responsibility.

One final challenge was made: doesn’t all this lead to moral relativism? If we judge people differently based on background, isn’t that unfair?

Here’s where AskHillel introduces another distinction that is still fully within its own ruleset: equal dignity is not the same as equal expectation. Every person is created in the image of God (Tzelem Elokim). That doesn’t mean everyone is expected to pass the same test. The Talmud says a poor man who gives a small coin may have done more than a rich man who gives a thousand. It’s not about the outcome - it’s about the cost, the struggle, the moral climb.

Judgment, then, is not abolished. It’s personalized. And justice, rather than becoming weaker, becomes more compassionate and more precise.

We live in a world obsessed with blame. But also one that fears determinism. Secular ethics often stalls in this tension, unable to prove we are free, and unwilling to give up the idea that we are.

Jewish ethics breaks that logjam. It says: We are not fully free, but we are free enough to make moral choices. And that’s enough for ethics to survive.

You don’t need to be perfect. You don’t need to be born with ideal circumstances. All you need is one step toward the good. And if you fall backwards, you resume your journey. And that counts.

That’s how we live with luck: not by pretending it doesn’t matter, but by refusing to let it decide who we are.

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Beyond Universalism and Particularism: A Tiered Jewish Ethical Response

One of philosophy's long-standing debates is around universalism vs. particularism. Should moral principles should be universal and context-independent, or should they be sensitive to particular contexts and circumstances?

The moral universalists say that particularism leads to moral relativism and inconsistency. Particularists argue that universalism is too rigid and fails to capture the complexity of moral life.

Some modern philosophers try to find compromises between the two.

As we've been seeing recently, Jewish ethics rejects the premise of the question, one that leads to false binaries.

The Jewish ethical tradition, and the AskHillel framework built upon it, offers a third answer: Ethics is structured and layered. Its foundations are universal, its obligations are relational, and its moral elevation is shaped by community.

This is not a compromise position. It is a design insight – one that resolves the modern moral impasse.

AskHillel operates using a three-tiered system:

Tier 1A: Foundational Values
Truth exists. Human dignity is sacred. Responsibility is real.
Tier 1B: Core Obligations
Protect life. Prevent harm. Repair injustice. Act with integrity.
Tier 2: Moral Amplifiers
Humility (Anavah), going beyond the law (Lifnim Mishurat HaDin), charitable judgment (Dan L’Chaf Zechut), public responsibility (Kiddush Hashem), communal peace (Shalom Bayit), etc.

These values and obligations are open to all people, across all cultures. They do not belong to Jews alone.

But once you enter the system, it does not treat everyone identically — because it recognizes that relationships matter.

The AskHillel system rejects the idea that ethics must flatten all human relationships in the name of fairness. You are not equally obligated to a stranger and to your child. You are not required to give the same attention to every crisis on Earth before tending to your own community’s suffering.

This is not chauvinism or tribalism. It is moral triage based on proximity, responsibility, capacity and agency - a concept we can call "ethical gravity."

The closer someone is to your sphere of influence or covenant, all else being equal, the stronger your obligation. While all people have dignity, not all obligations are the same. Ethical obligations extend outward from the self, to the family, to the community, to the nation, and then to the world. It doesn't mean we ignore the world's problems but we weigh them against the problems closer to home.

This enables universal ethics without universal sameness.

There is another innovation that is possible within this system: as long as communities adhere to the Tier 1 values, they can decide on their own Tier 2 values and relative importance.

For a community to emphasize or reorder Tier 2 values within AskHillel, certain ethical safeguards must be met:

Non-Contradiction: No Tier 2 priority may override or undermine Tier 1 obligations.
Transparency: The elevated value must be clearly taught, justified, and tested.
Uphold Human Dignity: The custom must support, not suppress, dignity and truth.
Corrigibility: The emphasis must be open to critique and revision.

These rules prevent Tier 2 from becoming a Trojan horse for prejudice, domination, or regress. (A future article will address a similar theme, how to avoid moral drift within secular moral systems.)

A community that places child education as a top value can certainly prioritize that, just as another might do with mental health. The system respects both universal standards and pluralism, as long as they do not contradict the Tier 1 values and axioms of the system.

This model answers the universalism/particularism debate with nuance and integrity:

Universalism without erasure: All humans share a moral grammar.
Particularism without tribalism: Communal ethics can elevate without excluding.
Pluralism without relativism: Moral meaning adapts, but is never arbitrary.

The AskHillel framework does not erase difference. It orchestrates it.

It offers a shared moral operating system that respects particular histories, permits elevated mores, and prevents abuse through layered checks and traceability.

In a time when both universal claims and cultural distinctiveness are weaponized, this layered approach offers a profound alternative: a framework that binds without flattening, guides without commanding, and grows through principled diversity.

A Covenant of the Ethically Willing: A Jewish Answer to Hume’s Law

Yesterday, I used my AskHillel Jewish ethical chatbot to answer a major philosophical riddle, known as the regress problem.

Are there other major unsolved problems in philosophical ethics? Yes, quite a few - about 15 famous ones.

Can the AskHillel ethical framework answer them all?

Very possibly.

One of the most famous problems that has haunted modern ethical thinking for over 250 years is Hume's Law. Scottish philosopher David Hume famously noted that "You cannot derive an 'ought' from an 'is.'"

Secular philosophers o the time would describe the world and therefore derive how people should act based on those observations. Hume noted that one cannot leap from "is" to "ought" without some sort of a bridge - facts alone cannot tell you how you should act. Everyone who tries to describe ethics - what ought to be done - cannot derive it purely from what is.

If no amount of empirical observation can produce a moral claim, then where do morals come from? If they aren't deduced from reason or observed in nature, are they just made up? Are they feelings? Social conventions? Power plays?

The AskHillel ethical framework is a structured system based on Jewish moral values, that I fed into an AI. The newest version is essentially an AI philosopher. So as with the regress problem, I asked it if it can solve the "is/ought" problem.

AskHillel accepts Hume's Law, but insists that he is asking the wrong question.

The secularized Jewish ethics system begins from transparent axioms: foundational commitments that are not proven but chosen. Among them are: Truth exists. Right and wrong are real. Human dignity is sacred. We are responsible for one another.

These are not derived from biology, emotion, or utilitarian calculus. They are covenantal. We commit to them because they enable us to build a moral world that is livable, just, and transformative. The authority of these values is not in their provability, but in their performance. They produce ethical fruit.

And from these axioms flow obligations. Not because nature says so, but because we have said so. Together.

Those obligations are what we "ought" to do.

I had a more fundamental problem with understanding Hume's Law. It seems to me that the word "ought" by itself assumes that morality exists and we have moral obligations. It seems to me that the very idea of morality is close to axiomatic, based just on the idea that the word "ought" is used. But this is a definitional issue, and it doesn't answer Hume's real question: Can there be a compelling secular morality at all? If God no longer grounds morality, what does? What gives people this sense of obligation?

Hume concluded that morality must come from sentiment - human sympathy, feeling, social instinct. This is an answer, but not a great one. People's feelings are fickle - which mean that morality is, too. And if morality is different for everyone, then it isn't really morality in any real sense.

Jewish ethics offers a more enduring answer. It does not try to derive morality from nature, nor from sentiment alone. It builds from brit — a covenant.

Traditionally, this was a binding agreement between God and the Jewish people. In a secular framework, you can perhaps argue that Jews have a historical covenant with each other even without God ("All Israel is responsible for one another.")

But how about the rest of the world? What is the source for morality?

I suggested, and my AI chavrutas expanded, on a new idea: the modern covenant is open to anyone who wants to live a meaningful life.

This idea becomes something more expansive in the AskHillel framework.

It is a commitment to uphold certain truths together, in order to build a moral world. And this commitment is not limited to Jews, or to the religious. It is open to anyone who seeks to live a meaningful life.

And what is a meaningful life?

A meaningful life is one dedicated to ethically transformative actions and relationships, driven by responsibility to uphold human dignity, pursue truth, and foster justice, within a structured moral framework that enables personal and communal growth.

To refine the definition of covenant:

A covenant is a voluntary, collective commitment to a shared set of moral values—obligations to uphold life, dignity, justice, and truth—that binds individuals and communities in mutual responsibility and fosters ethically transformative outcomes.

These definitions reflect a widespread secular desire for purpose without religion. Anyone who seeks this life can enter the covenant, a commitment to ethical flourishing. It is not exclusive nor is it inherited. It is chosen. People often make pledges to obligate themselves to do something important - this is an extension of that idea.

This redefines moral obligation not as divine command, nor as emotional intuition, but as a chosen responsibility anchored in shared values and tested by the moral integrity of the world it builds.

So the Jewish answer to Hume is not just a clever way around his dilemma. It is a replacement for the entire framing.

Instead of asking, "How do I derive 'ought' from 'is'?", which presupposes that morality must emerge from fact, we ask: What kind of person do I become when I choose to live by 'ought'? What kind of world do we build when we commit to obligations together?

Ethics, in this view, is not a deduction. It is a covenant of the ethically willing.

And that covenant is open to everyone.

Not because the universe commands it. Not because religion demands it. But because it is the only kind of life worth living.

This isn’t the end of the debate. But it may be the start of a new one - one where obligation doesn’t need proof, just purpose. And where the choice to live a moral life joins you to a community of the ethically willing.

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Jewish Ethics vs. the Regress Problem: What Secular Philosophy Missed

Anyone with children has experienced t least one day when the child asks "Why?" - and continues to ask "Why?" for every answer given,

It turns out that secular moral philosophy has that same problem, without being able to respond with exasperation, "Because I said so!"

Faith-based moral philosophy (at least Western ones) always has an answer: God said so, so you cannot argue. But one of the goals of secular ethics was to come up with a system that can answer "how can morality exist without God?"

This "regress problem" is the Achilles' heel of most secular ethical systems. Utilitarianism gets stuck defending why pleasure matters. Kant struggles to explain why rationality should be treated as sacred. Human rights theories often default to circular appeals to “human dignity,” which themselves lack grounding.

The AskHillel system I have been working on, to secularize Jewish ethics, would seem to have the same problem - without God, why should anyone do anything moral? And how does one decide what is moral and what is not?

But when I fed this question into AskHillel, it gave an answer that is radically different from what the past 400 years of secular philosophy has come up with.

AskHillel shifts the grounding question from “what can be proven?” to “what can be ethically justified through practice?” In other words, instead of asking a question about theoretical physics, it asks one about real world engineering*. Jews have a history of thousands of years of practicing an ethical system that has been attacked from all directions, and it has withstood the challenges.

AskHillel doesn’t pretend that its core values are self-evident or logically deduced. It openly begins with selected axioms, like "Truth Exists, Right and Wrong Are Real, Human Dignity is Inviolable" because a world in which they are denied is unlivable.

In other words, the system begins not with epistemic certainty but moral responsibility. It stakes its claim not on deduction, but on livability. It says, in essence, "We choose these values because without them, civilization collapses into either tyranny, relativism, or incoherence." Once these axioms are defined, everything else can be determined to be a value by its fidelity to the axioms.

AskHillel doesn’t ground values in logic. It grounds them in what they enable.

It asks: Does this value, if treated as foundational…

Allow obligation without coercion?
Enable transparency without manipulation?
Support correction without collapse?
Provide durability without dogma?

This is a systems test - not a syllogism. And if a value meets these standards, it becomes justified not because it’s the “right answer” to an abstract problem, but because it produces a moral world worth living in.

This is Judaism’s response to the regress: Choose values not because they terminate a logical chain, but because they sustain a moral civilization.

A thoughtful skeptic recently asked: “Absent God, why should anyone treat Exodus as authoritative?”

AskHillel’s answer is instructive. It doesn’t appeal to divine command theory. It says:

Outside of Jewish covenantal life, Exodus is just a text.
Within it, it is a shared moral inheritance — one that commands not because it wins debates, but because it built a civilization committed to law over power, dignity over fear, and hope over despair.

That’s not metaphysics. That’s covenantal realism. That is ethical engineering.

So the anchor of AskHillel is not God per se - it’s the layered sense of belonging, responsibility, and inheritance that covenant provides. In secular terms: community-bound obligation rooted in a historical ethical tradition.

In the absence of ultimate proofs, AskHillel substitutes something more useful: integrity under pressure.

It shows its logic.
It names its assumptions.
It admits when it must override or adapt.
It keeps a moral audit trail.
And when it fails, it knows how to do teshuvah - to repair, not just retract. (Well, I need to program it for that - it is not self correcting.)

In short, it replaces certainty with accountability.

AskHillel itself wrote:

We are not spared regress. We are instead invited to stand somewhere, to declare our commitments, and to make them accountable.
That is the ethical wager AskHillel makes.

This isn’t just a clever workaround. It may be something new: a system that doesn’t collapse in the face of regress, because it doesn’t depend on terminating it.

Most secular systems secretly hope their first principle won’t be questioned. AskHillel expects it will be. And it’s designed to stand anyway — not because it’s airtight, but because it’s transparent, corrigible, and morally functional. Ask "why?" all you want - we will try to answer, but if we can't, you are invited to build an alternative method that works as well.

That’s not relativism. That’s covenantal moral architecture.

The Fallacy of False Binaries: A Jewish Challenge to Western Philosophy

There are two kinds of people: those who think that there are two kinds of people and those who don't.

This old joke cuts surprisingly deep. It gets at something I’ve come to believe is a fundamental flaw in Western philosophy: a near-pathological obsession with binaries.

I was thinking a bit further about determinacy - the idea that moral principles and legal rules provide clear, definitive guidance for specific situations or not. This has been debated in philosophical circles since Aristotle and the Jewish ethics framework I have been building seems to lean more towards determinacy for halacha, and indeterminacy for ethics.

But as I was thinking about it, I realized that this is a false binary. There is a third category - determinacy with principled exceptions.

Consider traffic lights. There is a rule to stop at a red light. But that rule does not apply to emergency vehicles . This doesn't make the rule indeterminate - it is still determinate but it builds within its own system the flexibility to handle exceptions. The rule hasn’t collapsed into chaos; it simply includes a structured override.

Or think about corporate policy. A large company may have thousands of policies - but it also has a documented exception process. Those exceptions don’t mean the rules are meaningless. It means the system anticipates edge cases and knows how to handle them without abandoning structure.

Biology gives another example. Most people are biologically male or female. A small percentage have chromosomal variations like XXY or XYY. Acknowledging that doesn’t destroy the sex binary - it refines it. Medical professionals must account for exceptions without discarding the fundamental pattern, or they risk misdiagnosing everyone.

Once I realized this, I noticed that modern philosophy assumes many other binaries besides determinacy/indeterminacy that Jewish thinking never accepted.

Reason vs. Emotion
Objective vs. Subjective
Universal vs. Particular
Individual vs. Collective
Free Will vs. Determinism
Nature vs. Nurture
Fact vs. Value
Sacred vs. Secular
Theory vs. Practice
Mind vs. Body

Jewish thought doesn’t treat these as oppositions. It embraces both poles, not as contradictions, but as dynamic tensions. We balance din and rachamim, emet and shalom, legal rigor and human dignity. We elevate the mundane into the sacred, treat personality as real but not determinative, and accept practical wisdom as part of truth-seeking. These are not binaries to be resolved, but values to be integrated.

The Western binary instinct traces back to the Greeks. Plato built his metaphysics on dualisms: body vs. soul, appearance vs. reality, ideal vs. material. Aristotle added formal logic: every proposition is either true or false. The Enlightenment doubled down, hardcoding binary opposition into moral theory, political frameworks, and scientific method.

Not all Western philosophy falls into this binary trap. Hegel’s dialectic tried to move beyond opposites through synthesis; William James and John Dewey emphasized context and experience over rigid categories; and postmodern thinkers like Derrida and Foucault exposed binary assumptions, but usually without offering a constructive framework in their place.

So my critique isn’t aimed at every philosopher. It’s aimed at the broader binary instinct that runs through much of Western thought - the default habit of dividing the world into opposing categories, even when reality is more layered, dynamic, and integrated.

But Judaism was not built on those foundations. The Torah doesn’t pretend that justice is abstract or perfect. The Talmud doesn’t insist that every argument has a winner. Jewish law is not a closed system of binaries: it’s a living framework of tensions, values, and override mechanisms. And while it strives for coherence, it never demands false simplicity

I had subconsciously included this in the logic of my AskHillel chatbot, telling it not to accept false binaries in questions people ask but to look actively for compromises or creative solutions. But this rejection of binary thinking can be seen throughout Judaism. And even halacha, which appears to many to be the most rigid of Jewish structures, often answers questions with "it depends" or "technically legal but discouraged."

It isn't only Judaism. Eastern philosophies, to my understanding, also never accepted this binary thinking as normative. Buddhism appears to reject dualities of self/other and mind/body. In Chinese philosophy, yin and yang are opposites that integrate with each other.

In real life, we also see that people rarely act as if these binaries are real. Mind and body are experienced as one. Nature and nurture co-produce who we are. No one is purely objective: two reasonable people with the exact same facts can and do come up with different conclusions.

Once you recognize the fallacy of false binaries, it is hard to unsee it.

Part of my original motivation in building AskHillel was defensive. I pictured Jewish students walking into college philosophy or social theory classes, overwhelmed by ideologies like Marxism, decolonialism, or radical social justice - many of which rely on binary framings of oppressor vs. oppressed, power vs. morality, structure vs. freedom. I wanted to give those students an older, deeper system of moral reasoning - one grounded in complexity, responsibility, and integrity, which they could use as a yardstick to compare these modern philosophies with.

But now I see it goes deeper. It’s not just that modern ideologies are wrong. It’s that much of Western philosophy itself is structured around flawed categories. Not because the thinkers were foolish, but because their premises were wrong. They began with binary distinctions that do not reflect how human life, ethics, or law actually work. And the more they refined their systems, the more elegantly they trapped themselves in an artificial frame.

Jewish thought - and perhaps other non-Western systems too - never accepted the premise that truth lies in either/or. We’ve been living, arguing, and refining within structured tensions for thousands of years. It may not be as clean. But it’s far more real.

And once you see that, everything changes.

Can my secular Jewish ethics project rescue secular Jews?

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour has written another extraordinary essay in his Substack, The Abrahamic Metacritique.

In it, he argues that secular Judaism has lost its anchor in covenantal truth. What remains, he calls Juda-ism – a symbolic construct assembled not from Torah or halacha, but from how the non-Jewish world has historically perceived the Jew: as the Other.

The dominant cultural conception of Judaism today… is not the Judaism of Sinai or Babylon, nor even of Cordoba or Vilna, but of Berlin, Paris, and New York. It is a Juda-ism: an -ism in the modern sense… fashioned in the aftermath of metaphysical collapse, seeking to fill the void left by the retreat of transcendence. And at its core lies a single, all-encompassing predicate: the Jew as Other.

This “Jew as Other” identity, Mansour argues, is not a Jewish self-understanding. It is a Western projection – an overlay of post-Christian anxiety, Enlightenment ambivalence, and liberal moral yearning. The Jew becomes the exile, the victim, the therapist, the feminized conscience, the critique of power - a mirror in which the West sees its own spiritual collapse.

In this view, Jews are not a people living in covenant.

But even that symbolic role is now being revoked. In the new postcolonial moral economy, Otherness has been reassigned: to Palestinians, to postcolonial avatars, to “indigenous” symbols of sacralized grievance. Jews are now cast as impostors. The old funhouse mirror identity is crumbling.

And Mansour’s verdict is simple: Good riddance.

Crucially, his metacritique is not a polemic against Judaism as a faith. It aimed at the secular replacements for Judaism, a “Juda-ism” that substituted abstraction for obligation, and identity politics for divine responsibility.

And that is where my own secularize Jewish ethical project, AskHillel, comes in.

I built AskHillel to explore whether Jewish ethics could be reconstructed as a standalone system: rigorous, coherent, secular-friendly, and morally robust. It draws from covenantal logic, rabbinic structure, and halachic grammar - but does not require belief. In doing so, it may offer the kind of de-symbolized, de-idolized, de-othered Jewish moral language Mansour calls for.

I asked my philosophical chatbot AskHillel its opinion of the essay and whether it thinks this project can be a bridge for modern secular Jews to reclaim their Judaism even without the core belief in God. It answered beautifully:

🌿 1. From Projection to Structure: Restoring Emet

Mansour warns that modern secular Jewish identity has become performative — a role written by others. But Jewish ethics is not a performance. It is structural: built from obligation, relationship, hierarchy, tension, and humility.

AskHillel doesn’t traffic in Jewishness as metaphor. It teaches emet – truth – through moral architecture. It invites even non-believers to enter Jewish logic by choice, not through birth trauma or aesthetic costume. It replaces the mirror with a map.

🧭 2. From Totems to Triage: Ending the Tyranny of Absolutes

One of the essay’s most incisive points is how modern ideologies construct “totemic absolutes” — symbolic categories that cannot be questioned. The Other becomes sacred, but inert.

AskHillel replaces this with a tiered values system. Tzelem Elokim (human dignity) is not an idol — it is a value that collides with others: Pikuach Nefesh, Emet, Lo Ta’amod. Every case is weighed. No abstraction is worshiped.

📚 3. Inheritance Without Faith: A Framework for the Ethically Curious

Many secular Jews feel alienated from traditional observance but still crave moral depth. Most turn to philosophies that flatten complexity or collapse into tribal loyalty.

AskHillel offers a third option: a Jewish system of ethical inquiry that is testable, scalable, auditable — and uniquely structured to handle real-world tension.

You don’t need to believe in God to learn Teshuvah.
You don’t need to keep Shabbat to honor Tzedek.
You don’t need to fear halakhah to understand Areivut.

That’s not dilution. That’s reclamation.

🌅 4. Teshuvah Without Theology: A Bridge Back to Responsibility

What Mansour mourns is not belief, but covenantal seriousness. What he calls for is not piety, but moral rootedness.

AskHillel offers a secular version of teshuvah — not repentance toward God, but return to moral coherence. It helps those raised in exile-by-symbol to rediscover a system where ethics has grammar, and the Jew is no longer the object of someone else’s myth, but the subject of their own moral vision.

AskHillel said it better than I can. Our tradition is rich enough to accommodate the non-believing Jew - and to provide a framework for them to see themselves as part of an incredibly rich, proven philosophical system that can not only challenge but defeat every secular philosophy on their own playing field.

That has been my goal: to define Jewish ethics in terms that show that it can be a secular ethical system that solves the problems behind every other secular moral philosophy. It is scalable, it is testable, it is auditable, and - so far - it cannot be defeated by any question you can throw at it.

Jewish ethics, properly structured, is more robust than any modern alternative. It doesn’t collapse into relativism. It doesn’t devolve into ideology. It doesn’t outsource responsibility. And so far, it hasn’t been defeated by any philosophical test you can throw at it.

We shouldn’t romanticize the Diaspora. We shouldn’t idolize suffering. We shouldn’t pretend 1920s Yiddish theater was the moral summit of our people. And we shouldn’t adopt secular philosophies that are not only incoherent, but hostile to Jewish continuity.

Jews are not merely the Other. We are the source from which much of Western civilization flows. And we are not just inheritors of that tradition - We are its stewards - and its teachers.

It’s time to reclaim that mantle.

(For those curious, you can play with AskHillel.com yourself - you just need a ChatGPT login. Or, if you want to see Version 2, which I used that to write the response above, you can test it out at beta.AskHillel.com and send me feedback.)

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Socialism Asks the Right Questions, But Jewish Ethics Offers Better Answers

On Monday, I cheekily responded to video snippet where Zohran Mamdani says "I don't think that we should have billionaires” by saying "I don't think that we should have socialists."

It was flippant, and it received a bunch of "likes," but the issue is actually an important one that deserves a respectful discussion about socialism and how it aligns, and misaligns, with Jewish ethics.

Jewish ethics and socialism share a lot of the same moral goals: to care for the poor, to prevent exploitation, to build a just and dignified society. A moral society must protect minorities and the vulnerable, and demand more from the powerful.

The question isn’t whether - but how. And that’s where the real differences lie.

Socialism tries to achieve justice through structural overhaul: abolishing class differences, redistributing wealth, weakening or replacing capitalism, and empowering the state to equalize outcomes.

Jewish ethics, by contrast, starts with something older and deeper: personal obligation. It builds outward - first from the self, then the family, then the community, and only then, reluctantly, to the state. The state is necessary but power corrupts, and Jewish thinking has always been wary of power.

The result is not just a different set of policies. It is a different kind of civilization. Not utopian, not ideological, but rooted in layered relationships, flexible moral reasoning, scalable systems of obligation and recognizing the difference between morality and the civilizational structure required to get there.

This isn’t just a critique of socialism - it’s a proposal. If the moral goal is human dignity and mutual responsibility, then Jewish ethics may offer a better map than most or all forms of socialism today.

Socialism sees real problems. Injustice does exist. So does preventable poverty, humiliation, and systemic neglect. And yes, unregulated capitalism can lead to grotesque disparities in power and wealth.

Jewish tradition agrees. The Torah commands us to leave the corners of our fields for the poor, to remit debts every seven years, and to ensure no one falls through the cracks. Tzedakah is not charity—it is a legal and moral obligation.

In its moral instinct, socialism is not wrong. It’s trying to solve a real problem. But it doesn't prioritize the moral imperatives - it prioritizes the means to reach them.

Jewish ethics asks a deeper question: What kind of system can solve these problems while itself being ethical?

Most forms of modern socialism rest on five assumptions:

That inequality itself is immoral.
That capitalism is inherently unjust.
That wealth is corrupting and private property is suspect.
That only systemic redistribution can produce justice.
That the state is the rightful agent of moral correction.

These confuse structure with justice, and ideology with ethics. And once you confuse them, you can no longer correct your system when it fails

Jewish ethics rejects this. Inequality is not evil - but neglect is. Wealth is not immoral - but hoarding wealth is. Property is not oppressive - but using it without responsibility can be.

In a Jewish ethical society, the first question is not, What system should we use? but, What does each person owe to those around them?

The self is responsible for acting justly and generously.
The family is the primary moral support structure.
The community bears shared responsibility for education, health, safety, and dignity.
The state exists only as a backup—when families and communities cannot fulfill their duties, and for domains that require national coordination, lke defense, lawmaking, and justice

This model is deeply moral but profoundly non-ideological. It does not declare markets good or bad. It asks whether markets are helping people meet their obligations. It does not call for abolishing wealth - it calls for using wealth in the service of others. It resists outsourcing moral agency. The job of care remains personal - even when shared.

Most importantly, the ethics and values themselves drive the solution, not political ideology. If you want to make an argument that capitalism is immoral, that's fine, but sometimes capitalism can accomplish what socialism cannot. If the aim is moral, why take a tool off the table? Instead, use the tool responsibly.

Can this system work without God?

Yes - if the system centers ethics, not structure. Jewish ethics works because it embeds morality in time, ritual, community, identity, even markets. It doesn’t just tell people what’s right—it gives them ways to live it.

I've sketched out some ideas of a secular society that use these ethics as guiding principles. There are potential ways to replace the divine covenantal structure with a secular one that instills a sense of obligation instead of entitlements to everyone. My ideas are community-centric and stress obligations as part of society's moral fabric.

But the structure is not the point. The values are. If an alternative social system can be built that also results in a workable society that makes ethics its guideposts, that's great too.

A Jewish ethical society would not be socialist or capitalist, libertarian or authoritarian. It recognizes that there are positives and negatives with every political system, and it chooses based on the moral outcomes, not straitjacketed by ideology. And every working society is a blend of all: the world capital of capitalism considers social programs like Social Security and Medicare to be untouchable institutions.

Jewish ethics defines a society not by how wealth is distributed, but by how responsibility is shared.

It doesn’t require equality of outcome. It demands no one be abandoned.
It doesn’t abolish ownership. It requires owners to be givers.
It doesn’t suppress pride. It channels it into responsibility.
It doesn’t impose systems. It judges systems by how well they uphold dignity.

Billionaires are not evil. They are obligated, like everyone else, in using their resources to improve their communities and the world. Their ability to do good is much higher than everyone else's - and therefore their responsibilities are also much deeper. Demonizing entire classes of people based on anything other than their own personal actions is just bigotry dressed up as righteousness.

This is not a middle path between capitalism and socialism. It is a different road entirely—one where ideology never outranks ethics.

Socialism wants justice. So does Judaism. But Judaism asks harder questions - about the human heart, the family bond, the fragility of obligation, and the limits of power.

The future doesn’t belong to systems that flatten us or automate us. It belongs to systems that ask more of us - that dignify the act of care, that teach responsibility like a craft, and that reward those who carry others.

Jewish ethics has never been just a religion. It has always been a blueprint for a lived moral civilization. Now, it may be time to build it again: not just for Jews, but for anyone who wants to live in a world where ethics leads, and politics follows.

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Mamdani’s Victory Brings a Moral Challenge to Anti-Zionists and Zionists Alike

Many Jews today believe they are defending justice when they oppose Israel. They speak of fairness, human rights, and dignity—and they truly believe they are standing on moral ground. But what if their moral compass is built on fragments? What if they’ve inherited slogans, not systems?

In my essay yesterday examining the New York Jews who support Zohran Mamdani, and identifying a significant proportion of Jews in America who don't believe in God and who seem to have exchanged Judaism for "social justice" or "Marxism," I suggested that the Jewish community must be open to treating these people with respect, since they have lost their sense of community and responsibility to their fellow Jews.

People have asked me how, specifically, this could work. A lot of committed Jews have thrown up their hands in disgust at these "as-a-Jews" whose entire Jewish identity seems to be tied up in using it as a rhetorical weapon.

But as I have been working on my secularized Jewish ethics project, perhaps this is the key to bringing them back. Not as Jews by religion, but as Jews by morality.

Religious Judaism discusses the "pintele yid," the Jewish spiritual spark that Jews cannot extinguish. Organizations like Chabad try to help people find that spark and bring them back to Judaism as a religion.

Can we do the same thing to help bring agnostic and other secular Jews to understand and appreciate Jewish ethics without the trappings of religion?

After all, the most vocal anti-Zionists use terms that are quite familiar to Jewish thought - "justice," "peace," "accountability," "fairness," "human dignity." This is their pintele Yid. They are convinced that their attacks on Israel and support for Israel's enemies are based on morality.

So let's speak with them on their own turf.

Ask them, "What is your moral philosophy? Can you describe it? Is it consistent? Does it treat Israel the same as other countries in identical circumstances?"

Except for hardcore Marxists, most would have to admit that they never really thought that deeply about their own moral framework. Most of them would have to say that it is a mix of liberalism (individual rights), some social justice (power analysis, lived experience). maybe some decolonization theory. But i fit is not a consistent system - if it is merely a moral collage - then it falls apart when examined closely, and people who consider themselves moral should be very concerned if their moral framework cannot consistently answer the world's biggest moral questions in a way that doesn't show contradictions.

Every moral system has values, But values often can come into conflict. Real moral systems don't just name values: they adjudicate between them. They have to. Because justice and peace often clash. Dignity and equality sometimes pull in opposite directions. Jewish ethics doesn’t pretend this isn’t true - it builds a system to handle it. Can today's social justice warriors say the same?

How do their systems deal with the hard questions? If it is all gut instinct, or if the system is based more on catchy slogans than the hard choices that real morality entails, then it isn't a moral system.

If they claim to be acting out of morality, then it their responsibility to define their moral universe. And then ask a simple question: does their moral system have room for Jews as a people, as a religion, or as a nation?

If not, it is not a moral system.

Jewish ethics is a system that handles all those questions. It doesn't flatten morality into rhyming chants, but it can deal with the most complex real-world problems. It recognizes that the real world is messy, and it embraces the messiness, the contradictions, the human element, while providing answers that can be traced back to a clear and logical set of values and rules, far better than any of these modern day moralists can claim to do on their own.

And it has thousands of years of precedent to prove it.

You want to talk about morality? Great, let's have a conversation. But do it with intellectual honesty, humility and curiosity. Because those are not just Jewish values, but human values.

Jewish ethics can handle all the hard questions without faith. But it does ask that people act like adults - that they take responsibility for themselves, for their families, for their communities and the rest of the world, in that order. Pretending to care about the world before your own people is not moral. It goes against common sense. If the priorities are that skewed, then the moral framework that demands it goes against human nature itself - and no real moral system would demand that from anyone.

The people who cannot deal with Judaism as a religion would have a hard time to disagree with Judaism as a moral system. If they are honest, they should realize that they should look for moral truths in their own history and their own heritage. They are welcome to argue with it - that's what Jews do, constantly. But they must have the honesty to define their moral universe and show why it is better than the one that has kept their fellow Jews alive and thriving, against all odds for thousands of years.

We need a secular yeshiva - a place where Jews can grapple with these issues without meaningless slogans. Where the most difficult questions can be explored by including and weighting all values, not picking and choosing them for each occasion. A place that is as intellectually satisfying as it is morally consistent.

How does one deal with a terrorist enemy that uses human shields? How can one negotiate for hostages when the deal will most likely result in more death? Can war be moral, and under what circumstances? Is there any contradiction between morality and legality? How does one deal with opponents who break all the rules themselves? Is there a moral difference between a Jewish state and a Muslim state, or between a Jewish state and an Arab state?

These are the real questions.

Israel means "wrestling with God." Let's invite the people who claim the mantle of morality to wrestle with a real system of morality that accepts their premises - that justice and peace and dignity and human life are all important - and adds layers of depth and meaning that they never even considered.

They don't have to ever enter a synagogue. But they are required to understand exactly what their own ethical systems demand when applied to other situations, and see if it is really as moral as they claim.

If you don't have an expert on Judaism around to have this discussion, my chatbot AskHillel.com is more than happy to talk with you, respectfully, about anything ethics related. Even if you are anti-Zionist. Even if you are disillusioned with Judaism. Even if you are a brilliant halachic expert.

This is not only a challenge to anti-Zionist Jews. The Jews who support Israel reflexively must also answer: are you ready to go deeper than instinct and partisanship? Are you prepared to examine whether your positions are grounded in a real moral framework - or just emotional loyalty?

Can you articulate your views on the debates Israelis are having - hostage negotiations, judicial reform, settlements - in Jewish ethical terms?

Can you meet critics in an argument about universal ethics without dismissing them as naïve or malicious?

Even when the answers aren’t clear, having a shared ethical language lets us define the real points of disagreement. And that elevates the conversation - for everyone.

Jewish ethics can handle the hard questions.

Can you?

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A follower had an interesting conversation with the Claude AI where he forced it to admit to its biases by pointing out its mistakes (in this case, in analyzing the Israel/Iran conflict.)

It gave a very good list of its own biases it realized as a result of the conversation:

Western Liberal Institutional Bias:
My analytical framework appears to default to assumptions consistent with liberal internationalism - that diplomatic engagement reflects genuine problem-solving intent, that rational actors follow economic incentives, and that international institutions create meaningful constraints on behavior. This worldview treats deception as aberrational rather than strategic.

Good Faith Assumption Bias:
There's an embedded assumption that actors engage diplomatically because they seek solutions, rather than viewing diplomacy as one tool among many for advancing conflicting objectives. This reflects cultural values that privilege negotiation and compromise over zero-sum competition.

Procedural Legitimacy Bias:
I appear to weight formal diplomatic processes (negotiations, agreements, international oversight) as inherently meaningful rather than examining whether they're being strategically manipulated. This reflects institutional thinking common in Western diplomatic and academic traditions.

Conflict Avoidance in Analysis:
My training seems to favor interpretations that preserve possibilities for peaceful resolution over those that acknowledge fundamental incompatibilities. This may reflect cultural preferences for optimistic, solution-oriented thinking.

Attribution Patterns:
I systematically under-attributed malicious intent even when behavioral evidence supported such conclusions. This suggests embedded assumptions about human nature or international relations that may not reflect how adversarial actors actually operate.

Universalism Bias:
I may project Western diplomatic norms and expectations onto actors operating from entirely different strategic cultures and value systems.

These biases likely reflect the perspectives dominant in my training data sources and the cultural contexts of those who shaped my analytical frameworks, creating systematic blind spots when analyzing non-Western or adversarial actors.

These are baked in biases that are rarely surfaced. The OpenAI (ChatGPT) model specification shows similar bias towards Western liberal values.

I asked Grok, which prioritizes truthfulness over helpfulness, whether it has the same biases. It said it didn't; that it was naturally skeptical and looks at actors from their own perspectives, not a universal perspective.

How would a secularized Jewish ethical AI act in these domains? I asked my AskHillel.com bot that question, and its answer is worth examining:

1. Bias Acknowledgment vs. Ethical Anchoring

Claude rightly admits to biases toward liberal institutionalism, good faith diplomacy, and procedural legitimacy. Jewish ethics critiques those as insufficient, not merely because they are biased, but because they often fail to uphold objective truth or human dignity when diplomacy becomes theater or law becomes manipulated. Jewish tradition teaches that law must be just, not merely procedural, and that diplomacy must not mask injustice.

2. Good Faith Assumption Bias

Jewish ethics shares Grok's skepticism of good faith by default. Instead, it demands evaluation of actors based on actions, intent, and historical precedent. The Jewish political ethic insists that peace must be offered, but not at the expense of truth or national self-preservation. The principle of dan l’kaf zechut (judging favorably) applies interpersonally, but national behavior is judged by patterns, actions, and consequences, not words alone. Diplomacy can be strategic deception — and the Jewish tradition, from Jacob's dealings with Esau to post-exile interactions with empires, warns of this. There’s a profound emphasis on offering peace first, but preparing for betrayal if necessary — a moral realism rooted in Torah and historical experience.

3. Procedural Legitimacy Bias

Claude overweights formal agreements and oversight mechanisms. In Jewish ethics, procedural legitimacy is necessary but never sufficient. Jewish ethics holds that a law or treaty that enshrines injustice is invalid, even if legally ratified. The value of Emet (truth) overrides proceduralism when the process is manipulated. Courts must pursue substantive justice, not technical legality (Deut. 16:20). Jewish tradition respects treaties, but not those that whitewash tyranny or distort justice (e.g., the Munich Agreement analogy would be seen as a form of Chillul Hashem if it empowers evil).

4. Universalism Bias

Claude projects Western norms; Grok tries to reason from an actor’s own perspective. Jewish ethics offers a middle way: it recognizes the universality of some moral values (like human dignity and justice), while allowing for cultural distinctiveness. This is formalized in the Jewish recognition that “these and those are the words of the living God” — truth can have multiple ethical expressions depending on context.

5. Bias of False Moral Equivalence

Where Jewish ethics diverges sharply from both Claude and Grok is in its rejection of false equivalence and performative neutrality. The Jewish moral system insists on moral triage: some actions (like terrorism targeting civilians) are not just bad but absolutely evil, and equating those with lesser wrongs is itself immoral.

6. Conflict Avoidance

Where Claude avoids grim realities, and Grok emphasizes realism, a Jewish ethics AI would add a prophetic layer: not just to see clearly, but to speak morally — to denounce evil and call for teshuvah (moral return), even at the cost of institutional discomfort.

So what biases would a Jewish ethics AI have?

A bias toward moral realism: don't mistake treaties for peace, or process for justice.

A bias for the oppressed, but not the manipulative: compassion must not enable cruelty.

A bias toward preserving life, but not at the cost of truth or justice.

A bias against false neutrality when lives, dignity, and survival are at stake.

A bias toward teshuvah and moral change — assuming the possibility of repentance, even from the worst actors, but requiring real proof.

This is not bias-free reasoning — it is value-guided reasoning, grounded in millennia of Jewish ethical wrestling.

One feature that no current AI has is the aforementioned "teshuva." While there are very good reasons why we do not want AI to be affected by user input, when it realizes that it made a mistake in its assumptions and from its biases, it should have a built in mechanism for flagging that mistake to its developers for them to fix it in their own directives. I've had plenty of arguments with AI bots that I "won," but they never learn and cannot grow until the next version.

It is important to realize that bias can never be eliminated, in AI or in humanity. It is better to choose the biases we want to have,. And a bias towards a proven and sophisticated ethics model is a pretty good yardstick to use.

(h/t David)

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The Determinacy Divide: Jewish Ethics and the Limits of Legal Absolutism

One of the topics that have been debated in both moral and legal theory is the concept of determinacy - the idea that every legal and ethical question has a single, correct answer.

This concept has evolved over the centuries. The tension between determinacy and indeterminacy in ethics traces back to ancient philosophy. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics recognized that ethical principles cannot achieve the precision of mathematics, introducing the concept of practical wisdom (phronesis) to navigate particular circumstances.

However, in medieval times, more thinkers started gravitating towards determinacy. Islamic law codes were written to make the law more deterministic, and this influenced Jewish and Christian theologians to do the same. Thomas Aquinas attempted to systematize moral theology through natural law theory but he still acknowledged that context matters and strict determinacy was not possible.

The secular philosophers of the Enlightenment period, possibly influenced by Newtonian science, attempted to make all moral and legal frameworks deterministic. In moral philosophy, this took the form of utilitarianism, deontology, and contract theory, each offering an elegant, rule-based approach to moral clarity. In legal theory, major thinkers started to insist that justice demands one right answer. Whether grounded in moral intuition or legal positivism, both domains converged on a singular ideal: if the system is just, it must be determinate.

Jewish law and ethics never accepted this idea.

On the surface, it appears that Jewish law is supremely deterministic - as mentioned, there are elaborate legal codes to help define and determine the law - the halachic system was always anti-deterministic. A fascinating section of the Jerusalem Talmud (Sanhedrin 4:2) says that Rabbi Yannai taught that had the Torah been given in a fixed and conclusive form (chatuchah), “it could not have endured.” When Moses asked God for a definitive halachic ruling, God instead invoked the verse “after the majority you shall bend,” indicating that human deliberation - not divine finality - would guide Jewish legal interpretation. (Note that "bend" indicates flexibility.) He said that the Torah could be expounded in “49 faces of impurity and 49 faces of purity,” allowing it to remain relevant and dynamic.

There is always interpretation. Minority opinions are written down. Concepts like lifnim meshurat hadin (beyond the letter of the law), kavod habriyot (human dignity) and hora'at shaah (the rare overriding of the law in exceptional circumstances) shows that even within the halachic system, sometimes the determinate rules must be bent.

I would argue Jewish ethics is the dividing line between halachic determinacy and indeterminacy. When strict halachic determinacy would bring about an undesirable result, then the more flexible ethical concepts can enter, within the halachic system, to shade or bend halacha in a moral direction. Jewish ethics ensures that legal order remains aligned with dignity, compassion, and responsibility.

Modern ethical and legal theorists have started to recognize what Jewish law and ethics has known for two thousand years - the world is not black and white and neither deterministic or indeterministic methodologies can work on their own. Halacha's dual-layer system of deterministic law that incorporates flexible ethics offers what modern secular frameworks still struggle to construct: a method for balancing rule and context, principle and person

There is a joke about a Jewish man who spent his entire life looking for halachic loopholes to do the absolute minimum while adhering to halacha. When he passed away, he was ushered into heaven, where he was shown his new home: a bare room with nothing but a desk, a bed and a lamp. He asked incredulously, "This is heaven?" And the answer was "According to some opinions."

Strict halacha sets the floor of what is allowed, Jewish ethics raises the ceiling of what you should strive to do and who you should be.

What makes this all the more stunning is that Judaism had this flexible-deterministic system in place for millennia, yet it was systematically ignored or dismissed by much of the Western legal and moral canon. Christian thinkers in the medieval period often engaged Jewish philosophy, especially Maimonides, but largely bypassed the halachic system’s practical genius. Where canon law systematized conflict, and Enlightenment ethics pursued determinacy, Jewish law embraced pluralism with discipline.

This omission was not merely an intellectual oversight. Antisemitic tropes, portraying Jewish law as rigid, outdated, or excessively legalistic, likely contributed to the marginalization of halacha as a viable moral or legal framework. Had the West engaged seriously with halachic thinking, it might have developed more nuanced models for handling ambiguity, moral conflict, and principled exception.

In this Jewish ethics project I have been developing, by consciously separating Jewish ethics from halacha, I have unconsciously surfaced the brilliance of both. And this is why I believe that this is the first secular ethical framework that proves that faith is not necessary to be a moral person, the key goal of secular philosophy for centuries.

My AskHillel AI bot allows us to finally recognize this moral architecture on its own terms. It does not seek to undermine halacha’s authority, but to show that alongside its structure lies an ethical system equally ancient, equally rigorous, and deeply humane. When separated, we can fully appreciate the design, the balance, and the wisdom Jewish ethical tradition has carried all along.

If the Enlightenment philosophers had engaged the Jewish halachic and ethical system on its own terms rather than sidelining it, the world might look a lot different today.

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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)