Moses Pava’s scientific contributions

The purpose of this chapter, and the chapters that follow, is not to describe Jewish ethics as it existed in some imagined past or as it is now, nor is it to prescribe lists of ethical rules, principles, or rubrics. Rather this chapter is an invitation to the reader to participate in an ongoing, living, and open-ended process. The attempt here is to introduce new ways of thinking about old problems and old ways of thinking about new problems.

It is relatively easy to describe the future of Jewish ethics—both its theory and its practice—in pessimistic terms, especially if one expects the near future to be anything like the recent past. What is more difficult and urgent at this particular juncture in our history is to construct an optimistic case for the future of Jewish ethics, one rooted in our tradition, and at the same time, fully-informed of the facts of our current situation. What is less necessary is a utopian thought experiment disengaged from social realities. It is to this urgent and constructive project that I will return and devote most of my attention in this chapter. But before imagining an optimistic and hopeful scenario, a plausible path out of the Escher-like maze we find ourselves lost in today, it is sobering to pause and consider as a backdrop to our discussion the following recent and notorious examples of ethics failures in the Jewish community: On January 4th, 2006, Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy to bribe public officials. After serving three and a half years in prison, Abramoff is now working at Tov Pizza in Baltimore, MD.

Jewish ethics in a new key is self-consciously tentative, reflective, critical, and selective in its use of tradition to help resolve ethical problems. We sur-vey, recover, and interpret tradition for the many lost but usable treasures it contains, but we must also be wary of its perennial temptations, risks, and dangers. Religious traditions are full of dire warnings about the many temptations “out there.” “But you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die” (Genesis 2:17), the Torah commands Adam and Eve in Eden. But, what about tradition’s own built-in temptations, and the negative effects these can have on our desire to live an ethical life?

Moral criticism, or as the Bible puts it rebuke (tokhehah in Hebrew), is a necessary activity for social learning and improvement.1 Moral criticism is part of a give and take among individuals who must necessarily share, at least, a minimal set of core values, including most importantly respect for one another, a common ethical vocabulary, and a basic moral grammar. For moral criticism to take hold and to have any possibility of truly being effective there must already exist meaningful channels of communication. As the philosopher Michael Walzer has noted, “We do not have to discover the moral world because we have always lived there. We do not have to invent it because it has already been invented” (1987, p. 20).

The use of imagination can improve the quality of ethical dialogues in several distinct ways. It is imagination that allows us to empathize with those with whom we disagree, and, as we identify with and understand someone else’s feelings, the emotional distance between us is presumably shortened. Further, at a cognitive level, imagination helps us to understand and to see the world, not only from our own point of view, but from the perspectives of others. Each of us has our own beliefs, ideas, and history, and we know that it is these beliefs, ideas, and the accidents of history that color our perceptions of the environment and impact the information we take in and filter out.

Although there is always a great temptation to do so, it is impossible to think of ethics as complete and perfect. Even as we surrender to an ethical system, as we always must, we do so playfully.1