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Learn to do good,

Seek justice,

Aid the oppressed.

Uphold the rights of the orphan,

Defend the cause of the widow.

(Isaiah 1:17)

Since this book is about religious ethics, we ought to confront at the outset the most compelling argument that religion is not a force for good. In one of the more famous passages of modern times, Karl Marx in 1844 delivered his verdict. Religion is, he said: ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’ Religious faith, Marx believed, was what reconciled people to their condition their poverty, their disease and death, their ‘station in life’, their subjection to tyrannical rulers, the sheer bleakness of existence for most people most of the time.

Faith anaesthetized. It made the otherwise unbearable bearable. Things are as they are because that is the will of God. God made some people rich and others poor; some people rulers and the others ruled. Religion was the most powerful means ever devised for keeping people in their place and preserving the status quo. It robed their lives with ritual. It dignified their tears into prayer. It gave the social order metaphysical inevitability. So, if the world is to be changed, Marx concluded, religion must go:

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is at the same time the demand for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about their condition is a demand to give up a condition that requires illusions. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chains so that man may throw off the chains and pluck real flowers. Religion is only the illusory sun around which man revolves so long as he does not revolve around himself.

A century and a half later, we know what Marx himself could not, that the earthly paradise he envisaged turned, under Stalin, into one of the most brutal, repressive regimes in the history of humankind. The dream of utopia ended in a nightmare of hell.

Marx’s family background was Jewish: his grandfather had been a rabbi. His relationship tojudaism was, however, hostile, and his descrip tion of religion fails as a description of the Hebrew Bible. Judaism is not a religion that reconciles us to the world. It was born as an act of defiance against the great empires of the ancient world, Mesopotamia and Egypt, which did what he accused all religions of doing— sanctifying hierarchy, justifying the rule of the strong over the weak, glorifying kings and pharaohs and keeping the masses in place. In the Bible God removes the chains of slavery from his people; he does not impose them. The religion of Israel emerged out of the most paradigm-shifting experience of the ancient world: that the supreme power intervened in history to liberate the powerless. It was in and as the voice of social protest that the biblical imagination took shape.

There is a scene that, in 4,000 years, has not lost its capacity to take us by surprise. God has just sent messengers, in the guise of three strangers passing by, to Abraham and Sarah to give them the news that Sarah will have a child. Sarah, by then ageing and post-menopausal, laughs in dis belief, but God assures her that it is true. The strangers take their leave, and at that point the scene should end. But it does not. What happens next is the birth of a new drama in the relationship between heaven and earth, quite literally a world-changing event:

 The Lord said, ‘Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, seeing that Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? For I have chosen him so that he may instruct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so that the Lord may bring about for Abraham, what He has promised him’.

Then the Lord said, ‘How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin! I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to Me; and if not, I will know’. (Gen. 18:17—21)

It is a strange passage. Is God speaking to Abraham or not? If so, why? does he expect Abraham to have anything to say about the cities of the plain? Could there be anything Abraham might know that God himself does not know? There cannot be. God knows and sees all, including things we can never know: the private thoughts of others, their intentions and motives, the impact of their actions on the moral ecology of the world. Yet Abraham overhears these words and responds with an astonishing address:

Then Abraham came near and said: ‘Will You indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city: will You then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from You to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth dojustice?’ (Gen. 18:23—5)

God accedes. If there are 50 righteous people in the city, he will not destroy it. Abraham does not let the matter rest. Calling himself ‘dust and ashes’ he none the less continues the argument relentlessly. What if there are 45, 40, 30, 20? Is there a precise calculus ofjustice? Eventually God and Abraham agree. If there are even ten righteous individuals (ten form a quorum; their virtue is public, not private), God will save the city. The dialogue ends.

The conversation has a sequel. Two of Abraham’s visitors, by now iden tified as angels, arrive at Sodom where they are greeted and given hospitality by Abraham’s nephew Lot: ‘But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house, and they called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we may know them”’ (Gen. 19:4—5). The text leaves us in no doubt that what they have in mind is a crime. They are intenton homosexual rape. Many evils are implicit in their threat: physical assault, sexual impropriety, an abuse of hospitality and a belief that strangers have no rights and may be mis treated at will. The narrative is pointedly telling us something else as well. The curiously reiterated phrases, ‘young and old’, ‘all the people’, ‘to the last man’, are intended to show us that as a matter of fact Abraham’s con jecture was false. There were not ten righteous people in the city. There was not one. So the city and its surrounding towns are destroyed. Lot and his family alone are rescued, evidently by virtue of Abraham’s merit. Abraham’s prayer failed. Why then did he make it?

The answer is given at the beginning of the story, when God as it were thinks aloud in Abraham’s hearing. There can be only one reason. God wants Abraham to respond. His very act of communication is an invitation to Abraham to pray. Nor is this all: he gives Abraham guidance as to the terms in which he is to pray. He says, ‘For I have chosen him so that he may instruct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice [mishpat]’. God wants Abraham to live by these values, and it is these two words that form the heart of Abraham’s prayer The word tzaddik, ‘righteous’, appears seven times in the course of Abraham’s appeal (a sevenfold repetition is the bible’s way of signaling a key theme). The word mishpat forms the beginning and end of the most important sentence: ‘Shall not the judge [of all the earth do justice [ Abraham has precisely followed God’s cues.

But this only deepens the mystery. Why does God invite Abraham to pray? Why does he in effect teach him how to pray? It cannot be that Abraham knows anything that God does not know. Nor can it be that God expects him to raise any moral consideration he has neglected. For God is just and righteous. If he were not, he would not have told Abraham to live by justice and righteousness. Whichever way we look at it, the episode seems unintelligible — not just within our categories but within the narrative logic of the text itself.

With monotheism a question was born. Why do the righteous suffer? Why do bad things happen to good people? Or, as the prophetJeremiah later asked, ‘Why does the way of the wicked prosper?’ (Jer. 12:1). In polythe istic or secular cultures, the question does not arise. There is no single force governing the universe, Instead there are many conflicting powers. In ancient times, they were the sun, the sea, the storm, the wind, the god of rain and the goddess of the earth, the pantheon of greater and lesser deities. Today we would speak of the global economy, terror, technologi cal progress, the international arena, the media and the biosphere. They control our lives but cannot be controlled. They are not the work of a single mind but the unpredictable outcome of billions of decisions. They clash, sometimes producing order, at others chaos, leaving human beings as victims or spectators of forces at best indifferent, at worst hostile to humankind. In such a world — or rather, in such a way of seeing the world — there is no justice because there is no supreme Judge.

The single greatest protest against such a universe is monotheism. It was born in the faith that the world that gave birth to us is not indifferent to our existence. Nor is it accidental that we alone of all life-forms ask questions There is something at the heart of being — something that is the heart of being — that responds to us as persons and teaches us to ask questions. We are here because someone wanted us to be. Nor are we condemned to ignorance as to who or what that someone is. For in its most radically humanizing gesture, the Hebrew Bible tells us that God speaks. The universe is not silent. And with those words from the One-who-speaks, a question takes shape in the mind of the one-who-listens.

Its classic expression takes the form of an apparent contradiction God is all powerful and all good. But there is injustice in the world. One or other of these statements must, it seems, be false. Either God cannot prevent injustice or he can but chooses not to. If he cannot, he is not all powerful. If he chooses not to, he is not all good. The alternative is that there is no injustice and what seems to be wrong from our limited perspective is in fact right if looked at from a wider or more long-term point of view. These or so it seems — are the only alternatives: to deny the power or goodness of God or to deny the existence of unjustified evil.

The first view, that of Karl Marx, says simply that there is no God. There is therefore no reason to expect that history will be anything other than the tyranny of the strong over the weak, of might over right, of the ‘will to power’ over the will to good. Justice is (as Plato’s Thrasymachus argued in The Republic) whatever serves the interests of the most powerful. This is a world of Darwinian natural selection. The strong survive. The weak perish. Homino homini lupus est, ‘Man is wolf to man’. Nietzsche was its greatest exponent. For him, words like kindness, compassion and sympathy were either disingenuous or naive. There is nothing in nature nor in the untutored human heart to lead us to confer on others a moral dignity equal to our own. We do what is in our interest and what we can get away with. All else is an illusion, wishful thinking. There is no justice because there is no Judge.

Against this, the second voice says No. God exists. There is a judge, therefore there is justice and what seems to us injustice is not ultimately so. Those who suffer do so because they are being punished for their sins. In one version, they may be suffering for Adam’s sin, which still stains humankind. It may be that suffering is not punishment for past vice but preparation for future virtue. It cures us of our pride. It teaches us strength and courage. It gives us sympathy with those who suffer, a sympathy we could not have, had we not suffered ourselves. The world, said Keats, is a ‘vale of soul-making’ (‘Do you not see’, he added, ‘how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?’). God exists, therefore injustice does not exist.

God exists, therefore there isjustice. But it is divinejustice —justice from the perspective of one who knows all, sees all, and considers all: the uni verse as a whole, and time as a whole, which is to say, eternity. But we who live in space and time cannot see from this perspective, and if we did, it would not make us better human beings but worse.

To be a parent is to be moved by the cry of a child. But if the child is ill and needs medicine, we administer it, making ourselves temporarily deaf to its cry. A surgeon, to do his job competently and well, must to a certain extent desensitize himself to the patient’s fears and pains and regard him, however briefly, as a body rather than as a person. A statesman, to do his best for the country, must weigh long-term consequences and make tough, even brutal decisions: for soldiers to die in war if war is necessary; for people to be thrown out of jobs if economic stringency is needed. Parents, surgeons and politicians have human feelings, but the very roles they occupy mean that at times they must override them if they are to do the best for those for whom they are responsible. To do the best for others needs a measure of detachment, a silencing of sympathy, an anaesthetizing of compassion, for the road to happiness or health or peace sometimes runs through the landscape of pain and suffering and death.

If we were able to see how evil today leads to good tomorrow — if we were able to see from the point of view of God, creator of all — we would understand justice but at the cost of ceasing to be human. We would accept all, vindicate all, and become deaf to the cries of those in pain. God does not want us to cease to be human, for if he did, he would not have created us. We are not God. We will never see things from his perspective. The attempt to do so is an abdication of the human situation. My teacher, Rabbi Nahum Rabinovitch, taught me that this is how to understand the moment when Moses first encountered God at the burning bush. ‘Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God’ (Ex. 3:6). Why was he afraid? Because if he were fully to understand God he would have no choice but to be reconciled to the slavery and oppression of the world. From the vantage point of eternity, he would see that the bad is a necessary stage on the journey to the good. He would understand God but he would cease to be Moses, the fighter against injustice who intervened whenever he saw wrong being done. ‘He was afraid’ that seeing heaven would desensitize him to earth, that coming close to infinity would mean losing his humanity. That is why God chose Moses, and why he taught Abraham to pray.

A Holocaust historian was once interviewing a survivor of the extermination camps. He was a hassidic rebbe (the name given by hassidim Jewish mystics, to their leader). Astonishingly, he seemed to have passed through the valley of the shadow of death, his faith intact. He could still smile. ‘Seeing what you saw, did you have no questions about God?’ she asked.

‘Yes’, he said, ‘Of course I had questions. So powerful were those questions, I had no doubt that were I to ask them, God would personally invite me to heaven to tell me the answers. And I prefer to be down here on earth with the questions than up in heaven with the answers’. He too belonged to this ancient Jewish tradition.

There is an aspect of Genesis 18, the text with which I began, which has not been adequately understood, yet it is fundamental not only to the encounter between Abraham and God, but to the whole message of the Hebrew Bible and its distinctive tone of voice.

The conversation about the cities of the plain does not take place in a vacuum. It is preceded by another episode. We recall that the purpose of the three visitors was to tell Abraham and Sarah that they were about to have a child. The two events seem to have nothing to do with one another. What does the prospect of a child have to do with the fate of Sodom or an argument about justice?

Yet this will not do. These are not two episodes but one. The text is explicit on this point. Between the first half and the second we read this verse: ‘The men turned away and went towards Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before God’ (Gen. 18:22). ‘Remained standing’ tells us that this is not a new scene but a continuation of what has gone before. The Hebrew Bible always announces a break in the narrative. ‘And it came to pass that. . .‘ which means, in effect, the end of one scene and the beginning of the next. There is no such direction here. To the contrary the text goes out of its way to signal a seamless transition, an unbroken conversation

To make doubly certain we do not miss the point, the narrative explicitly links the two subjects. In the course of disclosing his plans for Sodom, God makes reference to the fact that Abraham is about to have a child: ‘For I have chosen him so that he may instruct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice’. Abraham’s role, the task for which he has been chosen, is to be a father. That is what his name means: ‘You shall be called Abraham for I will make you the father of many nations’. The second half of the chapter is thus intimately related to the first half. In inviting him to enter into a dialogue about the fate of Sodom, God is about to teach Abraham what it is to be a father.

All talk of God in the Bible is by way of metaphor. God, the prophets tell us, is a king, a judge, a shepherd, a husband, and many other images, each of which captures a fragment of the relationship between heaven and earth while none expresses all. Undoubtedly, though, the most powerful and consistent metaphor in the Bible is of God as a father. ‘My child, my firstborn, Israel’ (Ex. 4:22), says God when he is about to rescue his people from slavery. Sometimes the prophets, Isaiah especially, speak of God as a mother: ‘Like one whom his mother comforts, so shall I comfort you’(Is. 66:13). Either way, however, though it is highly anthropomorphic, the entire biblical tradition tells us that if we seek to understand God — something we can never fully do by any act of the imagination — the best way to do so is to reflect on what it is to be a parent, bringing new life into being through an act of love, caring for it, protecting it while it is young, and then gradually withdrawing so that it can learn to walk, speak and exercise responsibility.

The use of a metaphor, however, may at times change the meaning of the metaphor itself, and that is the case here. Alongside a revolutionary concept of God, Judaism gave rise to an equally revisionary understanding of what it is to be a parent. In the ancient world, children were the property of their parents without an independent dignity of their own. That gave rise to the form of idolatry most repugnant to the Bible, child sacrifice (against which the story of the binding of Isaac is directed: God wants Abraham not to sacrifice his child). It also set in motion the tragic conflict between sons and fathers dramatized in the myth of Oedipus, which Freud, wrongly I believe, saw as endemic to human culture.

The Hebrew Bible tells the long and often tense story of the childhood of humanity under the parenthood of God. But God does not want humankind to remain in childhood. He wants them to become adults, exe responsibility in freedom. In Jewish law, the obligations of children to parents begin only when they cease to be children (at the age of 12 for girls, 13 for boys). Before then they have no obligations at all. Paradoxically, it is only when we become parents that we understand our parents — which is why the first recorded command in the Bible is that of parenthood (Be fruitful and multiply’). A weak parent seeks to control his children. A true parent seeks to relinquish control, which is why God never intervenes to protect us from ourselves. That means that we will stumble and fall, but only by so doing does a child learn to walk. God does not ask his children not to make mistakes. To the contrary, he accepts that, in the Bible’s own words, ‘There is none on earth so righteous as to do only good and never to sin’ (Eccl. 7:20). God asks us only to acknowledge our mistakes and learn from them. Forgiveness is written into the structure of the universe.

The connection between the two halves of the chapter lies in an utterly new understanding of what it is to be a parent. Abraham, about to become father to the first child of the covenant, is being taught by God what it means to raise a child. To be a father— implies the Bible — is to teach a child to question, challenge, confront, dispute. God invites Abraham to do these things because he wants him to be the parent of a nation that will do these things. He does not want the people of the covenant to be one

•that accepts the evils and injustices of the world as the will of God. He wants the people of the covenant to be human, neither more nor less. He wants them to hear the cry of the oppressed, the paln of the afflicted and the plaint of the lonely. He wants them not to accept the world that is, because it is not the world that ought to be. He is giving Abraham a tutorial in what it is to teach a child to grow by challenging the existing scheme of things. Only through such challenges does a child learn to accept responsibility; only by accepting responsibility does a child grow to become an adult; and only an adult can understand the parenthood of God.

To be a Jewish child is to learn how to question. Four times the Mosaic books refer to children asking questions (the ‘four sons’ of the Haggadah) 8 The most significant family ritual, the seder service of Passover, begins with the questions asked by a child. Against cultures that see unquestioning obedience as the ideal behaviour of a child, Jewish tradition, in the Haggadah, regards the ‘child who has not learned to ask’ as the lowest, not the highest, stage of development (Solomon ibn Gabirol said, ‘A wise question already contains half the answer’). A famous verse in Judaism’s holiest prayer, the Shema, is usually translated as ‘You shall teach these things diligently to your children’ (Deut. 6:7). The great eleventh-century commentator Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki), however, translates the verb not as ‘you shall teach diligently’ but as ‘you shall sharpen’. Education, in Judaism, is active, not passive. It is about honing the mind, sharpening the intellect, through question and answer, challenge and response.

Judaism is God’s perennial question-mark against the condition of the world. That things are as they are is a fact, not a value. Should it be so? Why should it be so? Only one who asks whether the world should be as it is, is capable of changing what it is. That is why Marx was wrong. Biblical faith is not a conservative force. It does not conceal the scars of the human condition under the robes of sanctity and inevitability. There may be — there is — divine justice in or beyond history, but God does not ask us to live by the standards of divine justice for if we could understand divine justice we would no longer be human. We are God’s children, not God. By teaching Abraham how to be a child, challenging, questioning, defending even the wicked in the name of human solidarity, God was instructing him in what it is to be human, keeping ‘the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice’.

God exists, therefore the universe is just. But we are merely human, and God has empowered us to seek the justice that is human — not justice from the point of view of the universe and eternity but from the point of view of the fallible, frail, ephemeral, vulnerable beings that we are. We who live in space and time cannot but see injustice. We cannot know the rewards of a life beyond the grave. We cannot judge the remote consequences of an event all too vividly present in the here and now. Our pain is not made less by the belief that it is necessary for the good of the whole. Still less is it made bearable by the belief that it is justified as punishment for sin. That — as Job’s comforters belatedly discovered — is not a form of comfort but a double affliction. In the book ofJob, the comforters who defend the justice of God are condemned by God himself, because He asks of us not to take his part but to be human, the essence of which is acknowledging that we are not God.

God in making humanity conferred on us the right and duty to see things from a human point of view. If evil exists within our horizons, then it is real no matter how limited those horizons are. Making us human, not divine, God calls on us to judge and act within the terms of our humanity. ‘The Torah was not given to ministering angels’, said the sages. It was given to human beings, and the justice it asks us to fight for is human justice. That is why God empowered Abraham to challenge him on the fate of Sodom and the cities of the plain.

God knew that there were no righteous in the city. But Abraham did not and could not know. Had he said nothing — had he accepted the divine decree —justice would have been done, but not seen to be done, not at any rate in a way intelligible to us on earth. There had to be a fair trial, an advocate for the defence, a plea in mitigation. That was

Abraham’s role and his courage — the courage God invited him to show. For the faith Abraham was being asked to initiate would be one that in every generation strove for justice in human terms. It is not a faith that accepts the status quo as God’s will. On the contrary, it is a faith in which God invites human beings to become his partners in the work of redemption; to build a society on the basis of a justice that people understand as such; a human world, without hubris (the attempt to be more than human) or nemesis (a descent into the less-than-human).

‘The Torah speaks in the language of human beings’, said Rabbi Ishmael, meaning, it is addressed to us within the parameters of our understanding. ‘It is not in heaven’, said Moses at the end of his life, ‘nor is it beyond the sea’ (Deut. 30:12—13). There is plenary truth in heaven; on earth, we live among its reflections and refractions. We could not understand God’s justice without being gods ourselves. God does not ask

Opium of the people? Nothing was ever less an opiate than this religion of sacred discontent, of dissatisfaction with the status quo. It was Abraham, then Moses, Amos, and Isaiah, who fought on behalf of justice and human dignity — confronting priests and kings, even arguing with God Himself. That note, first sounded by Abraham, never died. It was given its most powerful expression in the book of Job, surely the most dissident book ever to be included in a canon of sacred scriptures. It echoes again and again in rabbinic midrash, in the kinot (laments) of the Middle Ages, in hassidic tales and the literature of the Holocaust. In Judaism, faith is not acceptance but protest, against the world that is, in the name of the world that is not yet but ought to be. Faith lies not in the answer but the question — and the greater the human being, the more intense the question. The Bible is not metaphysical opium but its opposite. Its aim is not to transport the believer to a private heaven. Instead, its impassioned, sustained desire is to bring heaven down to earth. Until we have done this, there is work still to do.

There are cultures that relieve humankind of responsibility, lifting us beyond the world of pain to bliss, ecstasy, meditative rapture. They teach us to accept the world as it is and ourselves as we are. They bring peace of mind, and that is no small thing. Judaism is not peace of mind. ‘The righteous have no rest, neither in this world nor the next’, says the Talmud.’ I remain in awe at the challenge God has set us: to be different, iconoclasts of the politically correct, to be God’s question-mark against the conventional wisdom of the age, to build, to change, to ‘mend’ the world until it becomes a place worthy of the divine presence because we have learned to honour the image of God that is humankind.

Biblical faith demands courage. It is not for the faint-hearted. Its vision of the universe is anything but comfortable. However free or affluent we are, on Passover we eat the bread of the affliction and taste the bitter herbs of slavery. On Sukkot (Tabernacles) we sit in shacks and know what it is to be homeless. On the Sabbath we make our living protest against a society driven by ceaseless production and consumption. Every day in our prayers (Psalm 146) we speak of God who ‘brings justice to the oppressed and food to the hungry, who sets captives free and opens the eyes of the blind, who straightens the backs of those who are bent down . . . who watches over the stranger and gives heart to the orphan and the widow’. To imitate God is to be alert to the poverty suffering and loneliness of others. Opium desensitizes us to pain. The Bible sensitizes us to it.

It is impossible to be moved by the prophets and not have a social con science. Their message, delivered in the name of God, is: accept responsibility. The world will not get better of its own accord. Nor will we make it a more human place by leaving it to others — politicians, columnists, protestors, campaigners — making them our agents to bring redemption on our behalf. The Hebrew Bible begins not with man’s cry to God, but with God’s cry to us, each of us, here where we are. ‘If you are silent at this time’, says Mordekhai to Esther, ‘relief and deliverance will come from elsewhere . . . but who knows whether it was not for such a time as this that you have attained royalty?’ (Esth. 4:14). That is the question God poses to us. Yes, if we do not do it, someone else may. But we will then have failed to understand why we are here and what we are summoned to do. The Bible is God’s call to human responsibility.

NOTES

1. Karl Marx, ‘Towards a critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right: introduction’. Quoted in Don Cupitt, The Sea of Faith (London: BBC, 1984), p.

2. Ibid.

3. George Steiner, in his In Bluebeard’s Castle: some notes towards the redefinition of culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), pp. 29—48, argues that the socialism of Marx, Trotsky and Ernst Bloch has its roots in biblical messianism. There is, however, a difference in kind between religious and secular On the latter, see J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Penguin, 1986).

4. See Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: anti-Semitism and the hidden language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp.

188

5. The Republi6 338c; C. R. E Ferrari (ed.), trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 15.

6. John Keats, ‘Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 14 February—3 May,

1819’, in The Letters of John Keats, 1814—1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

7. Nahum Rabinovitch, Darkah shel Torah [ (Jerusalem: Maaliyot,1999), pp. 185—91.

8. Ex. 12:26; 13:8, 14; Deut. 6:20.

9. Rashi, Commentary to Deut. 6:7. to. Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 25b.

11. Ibid., 31b.

12. Babylonian Talmud, Moed Katan 29a.

A Study of Sephardic and Ashkenazic Liturgy[1

            The core of Jewish liturgy traces back to the early rabbinic period, and is universally followed in traditional communities worldwide. Over the centuries, Sephardim and Ashkenazim developed different nuances in their prayer liturgies. It is valuable to learn about the differences that emerged, to see how rabbinic interpretations and cultures shaped the religious experiences underlying prayer. This essay will briefly survey a few aspects of Sephardic and Ashkenazic liturgy.

Connection to Tanakh

            Although many rabbinic prayers draw inspiration from Tanakh, Sephardim often prefer an even closer connection to Tanakh than do Ashkenazim.

            For example, the Pesukei de-Zimra/Zemirot offer psalms of praise to draw us into the proper religious mindset for the mandatory prayers—the Shema, the Amidah, and their associated blessings. On Shabbat morning, Sephardim read the psalms in order of their appearance in the Book of Psalms. Ashkenazim read the psalms in a different order, presumably arranged for thematic reasons. Rabbi Shalom Carmy recently wrote an article offering a conceptual explanation for the Ashkenazic arrangement.[2] To understand the reasoning behind the order of the Sephardic liturgy, just open a Tanakh.

            In a similar vein, in Minhah of Shabbat, Sephardim and Ashkenazim usually recite three verses beginning with tzidkatekha after the Amidah. Once again, Sephardim recite these verses in their order of appearance in Psalms (36:7; 71:19; 119:142). Ashkenazim reverse the order, requiring explanation. Perishah (on Tur Orah Hayyim 292:6) suggests that God’s Name does not appear in 119:142; Elokim appears twice in 71:19; and God’s Name (Y-H-V-H) appears in 36:7. Therefore, Ashkenazim read the verses in an ascending order of holiness. Others suggest that Ashkenazim arranged the verses so that God’s Name is the last word preceding the Kaddish.[3]

            The Talmud (Berakhot 11b) debates the proper opening to the second blessing prior to the Shema in Shaharit, whether it should be ahavah rabbah or ahavat olam (Sephardim and Ashkenazim both say ahavat olam in the blessing of Arvit). Ashkenazim chose ahavah rabbah, and Sephardim chose ahavat olam. Mishnah Berurah (60:2) explains that Ashkenazim selected ahavah rabbah to parallel Lamentations (3:23): “They are renewed every morning—ample is Your grace! (rabbah emunatekha).” In contrast, Rif and Rambam explain that Sephardim preferred ahavat olam since that formula is biblical: “Eternal love (ahavat olam) I conceived for you then; therefore I continue My grace to you” (Jeremiah 31:2).[4]

            Piyyut (religious poetry used as prayer) is an area where the prayer services of Sephardim and Ashkenazim diverge significantly, since these poems were composed during the medieval period. Sephardim generally incorporated the piyyutim of Sephardic poets, and Ashkenazim generally incorporated the piyyutim of Ashkenazic poets. True to his Tanakh-centered approach, Ibn Ezra on Kohelet 5:1 levels criticisms against several Ashkenazic poets, including the venerated Rabbi Eliezer HaKalir, whose piyyutim are used widely in Ashkenazic liturgy: (1) Rabbi Eliezer HaKalir speaks in riddles and allusions, whereas prayers should be comprehensible to all. (2) He uses many talmudic Aramaisms, whereas we should pray in Hebrew, our Sacred Tongue. (3) There are many grammatical errors in Rabbi Eliezer HaKalir’s poetry. (4) He uses derashot that are far from peshat, and we need to pray in peshat. Ibn Ezra concludes that it is preferable not to use faulty piyyutim at all. In contrast, he idealizes Rabbi Saadiah Gaon as the model religious poet.

Kaddish and Kedushah[5]

Sometimes, minor text variations reflect deeper concepts. For example, Rabbi Marvin Luban notes a distinction between the Kaddish and the Kedushah.[6] In the Kedushah, we sanctify God’s Name in tandem with the angels. In the Kaddish, we lament the absence of God’s overt presence in the world.

Tosafot on Sanhedrin 37b refer to an early Geonic custom where Kedushah was recited only on Shabbat. Although we do not follow this practice (we recite both Kaddish and Kedushah on weekdays and Shabbat), it makes excellent conceptual sense. Kedushah conveys a sense of serenity, setting a perfect tone for Shabbat. In contrast, Kaddish reflects distress over the exile, which is better suited for weekdays.

A relic of this practice distinguishes the Kedushah read by Sephardim and Ashkenazim for Shaharit on Shabbat. Ashkenazim incorporate the language of Kaddish into the Kedushah by inserting the following paragraph:

Reveal Yourself from Your place, O our King, and reign over us, for we are waiting for You. When will You reign in Zion? May it be soon in our days, and may You dwell there for ever and all time. May You be exalted and sanctified  (titgaddal ve-titkaddash) in the midst of Jerusalem, Your city, from generation to generation for evermore. May our eyes see Your kingdom, as is said in the songs of Your splendor, written by David your righteous and anointed one.  (Koren translation)

In contrast, Sephardim keep the Kaddish and the Kedushah separate. They insist that there is a time and a place for each type of prayer, and do not recite this paragraph.

Haftarot[7]

Although the Sages of the Talmud codified the prophetic passages to be read as Haftarot for holidays, they left the choice of regular Shabbat Haftarot to the discretion of individual communities (Rabbi Joseph Karo, Kesef Mishneh on Rambam, Laws of Prayer, 12:12). Consequently, several Haftarah reading traditions have arisen.

Vayera

Generally, when Sephardim and Ashkenazim read from same passage, Sephardim are more likely to have a shorter Haftarah. In Beshallah, for example, Sephardim read Deborah’s song in Judges chapter 5, whereas Ashkenazim read the chapter of narrative beforehand as well.

A striking example of this phenomenon is the Haftarah of Vayera. II Kings, chapter 4 relates the story of the prophet Elisha and a woman who offered him hospitality. Elisha prophesied that this woman would give birth to a son, and indeed she did. These themes directly parallel elements of the Parashah: Angelic guests visit Abraham and Sarah; Abraham and Sarah offer their guests hospitality; the angels promise them the birth of Isaac; and Isaac is born.

After these initial parallels to the Parashah, the story in the Haftarah takes a tragic turn in verses 18–23. The son dies, and the woman goes to find Elisha. As she leaves home, the woman’s husband asks why she was going out if it was not a special occasion, and she replies, “Shalom.” This is where Sephardim end the Haftarah. Ashkenazim read the continuation of the narrative in verses 24–37, in which the woman finds Elisha who rushes back to her house and God miraculously revives the child. It appears jarring that Sephardim would conclude the Haftarah at a point where the child still is lifeless rather than proceeding to the happy and miraculous ending of the story.

Rabbi Elhanan Samet explains the surprising discrepancy by noting that the entire story is inordinately long for a congregational setting (37 verses). Sephardim therefore abridged the Haftarah to 23 verses at the expense of reading to its happy ending. They conclude with the word “Shalom” to strike at least some positive note.[8] In contrast, Ashkenazim favored completing the story even though that meant reading a lengthy Haftarah.

Shemot

            Parashat Shemot is an example where Sephardim, Ashkenazim, and Yemenites adopted passages from different prophetic books to highlight different themes from the Parashah.

Sephardim read the beginning of the Book of Jeremiah (1:1–2:3). In this passage, God selects Jeremiah as a prophet. Jeremiah expresses reluctance only to be rebuffed by God:

I replied: Ah, Lord God! I don’t know how to speak, for I am still a boy. And the Lord said to me: Do not say, I am still a boy, but go wherever I send you and speak whatever I command you. (Jeremiah 1:6–7)

This choice of Haftarah focuses on the parallels between Jeremiah’s initiation and ensuing reluctance, and Moses’ hesitations in accepting his prophetic mission in the Parashah.

Ashkenazim read from the Book of Isaiah, focusing primarily on the theme of national redemption:

[In days] to come Jacob shall strike root, Israel shall sprout and blossom, and the face of the world shall be covered with fruit. (Isaiah 27:6)

For when he—that is, his children—behold what My hands have wrought in his midst, they will hallow My name. Men will hallow the Holy One of Jacob and stand in awe of the God of Israel. (Isaiah 29:23)

Although there is rebuke in the middle of the Haftarah, the passage begins and ends with consolation and redemption.

Yemenites read one of Ezekiel’s harsh diatribes against Israel for their infidelity to God. The prophet compares them to an unfaithful woman who has cheated on God by turning to idolatry and the allures of pagan nations: “O mortal, proclaim Jerusalem’s abominations to her” (Ezekiel 16:2).

Ashkenazim highlight the link between the national exile and redemption. Yemenites selected Ezekiel’s caustic condemnation of the Israelites, implying that the Israelites deserved slavery as a punishment for having assimilated in Egypt. It likely was used as an exhortation to contemporary Jews to remain faithful to the Torah. Sephardim chose to highlight the development of the outstanding individual figure of the Parashah—Moses.

Music and Mood During the High Holy Days

One notable practice in many Sephardic communities is to sing several melodies during the High Holy Day season that are lively, exciting, and even joyous. One of the most dramatic examples is the refrain in the Selihot (penitential prayers), Hattanu lefanekha rahem alenu, we have sinned before You; have mercy on us! Amidst our confession of sinning, this tune is rousing and upbeat. If an Ashkenazic Jew heard some of these Sephardic tunes, he or she might intuitively feel that the happiness of the music was inappropriate for Yom Kippur. If a Sephardic Jew heard some of the solemn Ashkenazic tunes, he or she might wonder why the music lacks this happiness. Yet, both sets of tunes are consistent with different aspects of the day.

Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef discusses whether one should use joyous or awe-inspiring tunes on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur (Yehavveh Da’at II:69). Among many authorities, he quotes Rabbi Hayyim Vital, who stated that his teacher, Rabbi Isaac Luria (Ari), used to cry while praying on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. Rabbi Yosef quotes Rabbi Elijah of Vilna (Gra), who ruled that people should not cry but rather should use festive holiday melodies. Rabbi Yosef concludes that if one is overcome with emotion, one certainly may cry. However, one otherwise should try to be in a festive, happy mood.[9]

            Not only do melodic differences elicit different emotions, but the words do, as well. To take one prominent example, a central prayer of the Ashkenazic High Holy Day liturgy is the “U-Netaneh Tokef,” during which the congregation contemplates the gravity of being judged. Yet, this prayer—composed during the medieval period—is not part of the liturgy in most Sephardic communities.

            Rabbi Simhah bar Yehoshua, an Ashkenazic rabbi, traveled on a ship with Sephardim to the Land of Israel. He wrote,

On the entire voyage we prayed with the Sephardim. The Sephardim awoke prior to daybreak to say Selihot with a quorum as is their custom in the month of Elul. During the day they eat and rejoice and are happy of heart. Some of them spend their entire days in study. (in J. D. Eisenstein, Otzar ha-Masa’ot, 1969, p. 241)

When Jews of different backgrounds live together, they have the opportunity to learn from the practices of one another, thereby appreciating other aspects of our rich tradition.

The Censored Verse in Alenu

The Alenu prayer is ancient, and initially was recited only during the High Holy Days. It appears to have entered the daily prayers around the year 1300 ce. In the original text, we contrast ourselves with pagans, “For they worship vanity and emptiness, and pray to a god who cannot save, she-hem mishtahavim la-hevel va-rik, u-mitpallelim el el lo yoshia.” This line derives from two verses in the Book of Isaiah:

For the help of Egypt shall be vain and empty (hevel va-rik). (Isaiah 30:7)

No foreknowledge had they who carry their wooden images and pray to a god who cannot give success (u-mitpallelim el el lo yoshia). (Isaiah 45:20)

Around 1400, an apostate claimed that this line in Alenu was intended to slur Christianity. He observed that the numerical value (gematria) of va-rik is 316, the same as Yeshu, the Hebrew name of the Christian savior. This accusation led to the Christian censor striking this line from the Alenu in France and Germany. In 1703, the Prussian government even placed guards in synagogues to ensure that Jews would not recite that line.

In their attempts to defend the original prayer, rabbis protested that the line is anti-pagan, and cannot be anti-Christian. Among other arguments, they noted that the verses are from Isaiah (eighth century bce), who long pre-dates Christianity. Nevertheless, the censor required Ashkenazic Jews to remove that line, whereas Sephardim retained the original text.[10] Today, several Ashkenazic communities have restored that line to their prayer books.[11]

Conclusion

            Most aspects of the Sephardic and Ashkenazic liturgy are strikingly similar. The biblical passages, ancient rabbinic prayers, and the structure of the service, are largely the same with minor variations.

In those areas where there were choices left to later generations, such as ordering of the psalms, choosing between rabbinic interpretations, medieval piyyutim, Shabbat Haftarot, and music, we can appreciate the choices different communities made to shape their prayer experience.

More broadly, Jewish schools, synagogues, and adult education programs must teach the full range of Jewish thought, interpretation, history, liturgy, and many other elements from the Sephardic and Ashkenazic experience. In this manner, we become stronger and become more united as a people, even as we retain our diverse customs and traditions.[12]

A commercial house has collapsed; a savings fund has sunk; a me­chanics' bank has burst, a life insurance company has become in­solvent.... Men noted for their self possession appear bewildered. You asked for the reason of so painful a change, and the invariable answer was: "The stringency of the money market, brought about by unforeseen failures among us and abroad. That is enough to upset people's minds."

But for the Victorian language, this might have been written in 2008. In fact, it was declaimed in the Fall of 1893, and is the beginning of a sermon by Sabato Morais, minister of the Por­tuguese Jewish congregation Mikveh Israel in the city of Philadelphia. Morais is mainly remembered today as the Founder and first President of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, but his place in American life has been somewhat neglected. The reason for this may be the fact that he cannot quite fit the role of hero of any of the major branches of American Jewish life today, Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform. Orthodox as he was in practice, he does not fulfill the role model of the talmudic sage, and has about him a somewhat assimilated air at which the strictly Orthodox might well look askance. For the Conservative, he is insufficiently innovative, too unwilling to take religious risks. And of Reform he was a lifelong opponent. Max Nussenbaum justly called him a “champion of Orthodox Judaism” in his 1964 doctoral dissertation at Yeshiva University.

Morais was born in Leghorn, Italy in 1823 to a family of Sephardic Port­uguese-Jewish descent, the third of nine children and the oldest son. His native language was Italian, and he acquired also a good knowledge of Spanish and French early in life; a great many of the two thousand extant letters addressed to him are in Italian. He was a favorite pupil of Abraham Baruch Piperno, one of the Jewish sages of Leghorn, and at the age of twenty-two was an applicant for the post of Hazzan, or cantor to the Sephardic congregation of London. The Hazzan among the Portuguese Jews was not required to have the quasi-operatic voice favored by the Ashkenazic German and Polish Jews. A sweet voice sufficed, but he was expected to have an intimate knowledge of the complex Jewish liturgy of which every word was individually chanted, and in particular to learn the tradition of his congregation so that he did not deviate from it in the slightest degree. He also had to have a high degree of expertise in the reading of the sacred scrolls. Such memorization normally took years of devoted effort, and few individuals had the skill and patience demanded. The young Morais was unsuccessful, since his lack of English told against him, but he made a great impression even so. The following is an excerpt from a letter sent by the authorities of the English congregation under date of November 18, 1845 to his Italian mentors, couched in the typical Victorian epistolary style:

The departure of Mr. S. Morais demands from us our best acknowl­edgment to you for having recommended to our notice so worthy, deserving an individual, for although he has not been the suc­cessful candidate for the office to which he aspired Justice claims of us that we should bear testimony to the very great satisfaction he af­forded the congregation on the occasion of his public trial, and that he has from his general conduct and unassuming manners whilst here entitled himself not only to the regard of those who were interested in his favor but of all without exception.... he would do credit to any appointment which could be conferred upon him.

The London community did not forget him. A year later, a position opened for a teacher in their orphan school and they invited the young Italian to fill the post. He did so. In London he got to know and admire the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, and when the latter wished to travel to Europe in 1847, Morais lent him his passport so that Mazzini might avoid detection by the continental police. Of course, there were no photographs in those days. He soon developed a full command of the English language, and was prepared when a call came from the Philadelphia congregation in 1850. The following year, Morais went to Philadelphia, where he served congregation Mikveh Israel for forty-seven years until his death in 1898. He became a much loved figure, and was in the habit of instructing young people without charge in Hebrew language and literature, as he had been instructed himself. Three of his pupils, Solomon Solis-Cohen, Cyrus Sulzberger and Cyrus Adler became prominent community leaders. All wrote to him and of him with warm affection.

Adler, who was a founder of the Jewish Publication Society, the American Jewish Historical Society, and the American Jewish Committee, and who served simultaneously as President of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and Dropsie College in Philadelphia, wrote to him in 1887:

The more the boys [of JTS] know you, the better for them ... I will receive a Ph.D. degree next Tuesday, an end impossible but for the help which you have given me from boyhood and which I never think of but with gratitude.

Solis-Cohen addressed him: "Dear friend and teacher" and signs: "affection­ately your pupil." A San Francisco admirer sent his "respect and affection" to "my earliest friend in this country."

In everything he writes and does, Morais comes across as a warm, loving, emi­nently humane individual with self respect, yet remarkably free of egotism for a man in public life who was the recipient of much honor, including an honorary degree from the University of Pennsylvania. At no time does he bask in his Sephardic ancestry, as some of his brethren were wont to do, nor does he lay stress on Sephardic tradition in his addresses. Morais looked upon him­self as a Jew without qualifiers, one who revered and loved the Jewish tradition and desired greatly to perpetuate it.

Clearly he came from a close, loving family, and its impress stayed with him all his life. Among a vast family correspondence, an extant letter from his father in Italian, written shortly before his death reads: "If I do not write to you it is not of my volition, but I suffer from irregularity of the pulse ... I send you all my paternal benediction."

Morais’ considerateness is attested to by his finding time to send some stamps for the collection of a little great-niece, who responds with a charming letter in French. All sorts of unfortunates direct their appeals to him: a tu­bercular youth in the state penitentiary, a Corfiot woman seeking the vanished son of a friend, an Italian transient in the Pennsylvania hospital suffering from "a small mental aberration." Morais threw nothing away. Referring to this epistolary flood he writes in 1894:

To acknowledge numerous letters is also a task not infrequently irksome. Still, in order not to appear rude, I have imposed upon myself the obligation of invariably answering them all, either verbally or in writing.

Morais was conscious of walking a tightrope vis-a-vis the public.

If he [the minister] is modest and reserved, he is styled unsociable; if he is accessible and easy, he is charged with too great a familiarity. If he is sincere and open, he is taxed with imprudence. If he denounces public transgressions he is too austere; if he deems it expedient to barely hint at them he is pusillanimous ... however elevated may be the character of the minister of religion, it is shapen in a human mould.

On a number of his addresses he writes self-deprecatory notes, for example, "Like all my early lectures it is faulty in diction and ideas." On another address he writes in Hebrew "I regret having composed it." Not infrequently he recycles old material; thus one is marked "altered, abridged, and corrected from an old lec­ture delivered twenty years before." Morais was also aware that his lectures, eloquent though they were, did not give universal satisfaction.

During nine months of the year, I give weekly instruction from this pulpit ... When the summer season begins, I generally cease speak­ing in the vernacular, and confine myself to the reading of the estab­lished ritual. That some would prefer my following the last named course at all times, I have reason to believe.

Despite Morais' polish and discretion, not too many years passed before he got into hot water in Philadelphia. In 1858 the Jewish world was shocked by the news that an Italian Jewish child, surreptitiously baptized by his nurse, had been kidnapped and taken off to be raised as a Christian. Appeals to the Pope met with the response: Non possumus, We can do nothing. The baptismal waters could not be wiped away, and Edoardo Mortara must be raised as a Christian despite his parents' pleas. Appeals were then made to the President of the United States to intervene and use his influence. The President refused, on the ground that this was an internal matter of a foreign power, involving foreign nationals. On the next Sabbath, when the point in the service was reached when the traditional prayer was recited for the President and the U.S. government, Morais pointedly omitted it. Apparently he felt that a President who would not stand up for civil rights was not worth praying for. The congregation was scandalized. The adjunta, as the governing body of the synagogue is still called, met the very next day and demanded that he restore the prayer for the government, whether he agreed with their actions or not. On December 2, 1858, A. Finzi wrote him a letter marked "strictly private" alluding to "your refusal to recite the prayer for the members of the Government as you have hitherto done." He demonstrates rather tediously that the U.S. government is not dependent for its welfare on Morais' prayers and having exhausted that argument, turns nasty:

You are aware that the Adjunta can suspend you from office, which would only be a step to discharge ... You know that the Board can command a majority to any measure their wisdom may induce them to think correct ... are you prepared to be hurled from a position of pecuniary independence ... to one of unrequited labor in which you might find it difficult to earn a pittance?

After this affair blew over, and the President again got his prayerful due, Morais' penchant for expressing himself on civil rights again got him into trou­ble. On Thanksgiving, 1864, he gave an address in which he referred critically to the institution of slavery. I was unable to find his precise wording, but it seems that he expressed satisfaction at the absence of threats of sedition and secession in the North. Morais was clearly amazed at the violence of the reaction. The synagogue adjunta would brook no reference to this issue which had the country bitterly divided, and decreed that "henceforth all English lectures or discourses be dispensed with, except by particular agreement of the Parnas [President] made in writing." Despite Morais' protests, the gag rule held for about two months. Then some members petitioned the board, and on February 5, 1865, the board voted that the Revd. S. Morais deliver a religious discourse (the word religious is underlined!) on one Sabbath of each month, and any holiday. Immedi­ately before the Passover that year Morais wrote: "I would now respectfully ask that you allow me to address the Congregation whenever I deem it fit." Morais never again indulged in grand gestures as in the Mortara case, but he did estab­lish his freedom to speak on social justice in the pulpit, and he did so frequently. Morais was addressing the most influential Jews in a major American city, and he extended that forum through reports of his addresses which were frequently published, and, as we shall see, he involved himself directly in other ways too. Morais' stand on slavery was rewarded by an honorary membership in the Union League of Philadelphia.

Two major areas of social justice concerned him deeply. One was the issue of religious and racial prejudice and its natural follower, oppression. This included both crass discrimination, and the subtler pressures involved in the movement to make America a Christian country not only notionally, but as a matter of law. Paradoxically, Morais sometimes took a stronger stand on discrimination against non-Jewish groups than Jewish. Why this was may be seen in the notorious Hilton-Seligman affair of 1877. On May 31, 1877, the wealthy Jewish banker, Joseph Seligman went to the Grand Union Hotel at Saratoga for the tenth consecutive year. On requesting his room he was told: "Mr. Seligman, I am required to inform you that Mr. Hilton has given instructions that no Israelites shall be permitted to stop at this hotel." Seligman wrote a stinging letter to Hilton advising him to get out of the hotel business, since he was losing money, not because Jews were staying in his hotels, but because he did not know how to run them. A loud clamor broke out in the press. Morais was asked to speak up, but in this instance he was ambivalent. Yes, discrimination was bad. But the eastern watering places were full of ostentation and display, not to mention the infraction of the Jewish Sabbath and dietary laws that accompanied these unbecoming qualities. Moreover, Seligman had had associations with the Ethical Culture movement which made his Jewish affiliation questionable. Morais was not alone in his feelings. I. M. Wise's mouthpiece in Cincinnati, the American Israelite declared:

If he wants no Jews, let him have none ... keep away from Saratoga, keep away from Long Beach ... they cannot imagine in Europe that the watering places here are the elysium of empty heads and shattered brains, and hearing of the intolerance and stupidity they must be led to think we are a nation of fools and madmen. Stay away from those places, save with your honor also the honor of the American republic.

For once, the arch-reformer Wise and the traditionalist Morais saw eye-to-eye. Quite different and unequivocal was Morais' reaction to the Chinese ques­tion. Morais, gentle soul, observed that the Mosaic law prohibited muzzling an ox while it worked to avoid causing it pain. How then, he wondered, can human beings inflict deliberate suffering on one another? The address that Morais gave on this subject is extant among his papers, but it has some pages missing and it is best to quote it as it was reported in the press. The report conveys well the passion of this remarkable statement:

He animadverted upon the conduct of the lawless towards the un­fortunate aliens of the Mongolian race on the Pacific coast. He termed that demeanor atrocious and the conniving of local offi­cials infamous. He saw in every drop of blood of the Chinese spilt by ruffians a blot of the escutcheon of Liberty. In his mind a racial persecution in this country was a deep humiliation and an insult to the great of old who labored and fought to establish a government broad enough to cover every human being that seeks its protection. Mr. Morais alluded to the Restrictive act limiting the admission of Chinese. He considered it an outrage against a nation of three hun­dred millions with whom we are at peace, and the bill now said to be in course of preparation to forbid the Unites States to Chinese altogether he stigmatized as an indignity revolting to every right thinking man. He held that if even all the inhabitants of Central Asia who come to our shores ... were as depraved as their enemies describe them, no justification could be found for the barbarities to which they are subjected ... he knew that the writings of [China's] philosophers and moralists do not suffer in comparison with those of nations which claim to be the sole representatives of civilization.

In the original sermon Morais censures by name President Chester Arthur for sanc­tioning prejudice in yielding to pressure from unscrupulous politicians. The newspaper report doubtless deemed it discreet to omit this. There is no doubt that Morais had established his right to speak out. It is clear moreover that Reform Judaism did not have a corner on the issue of social justice, despite the grandiloquence of the "Pittsburgh Platform," which laid great stress on this matter and was promulgated at this time. Morais spoke too on the sufferings of the Armenians. After pointing out that there were conflicting reports as to what had happened, he continues:

We cannot too strongly condemn a barbarity that pushes a people into the Mosque at the point of the bayonet. I have read protests from Christendom. I have noticed likewise that in Chicago Rabbis have made their voices swell the sound of these protests against the ruthlessness of the Turks. Nothing new. Jews will always side with the persecuted, and not only side with them, but try speedily to come to their deliverance.

He goes on to cite Moses Montefiore's help for the Maronites in 1860, and Baron de Hirsch's help for both sides in the Russo-Turkish war of 1878. He then protests reports that President Cleveland's intervention was because America is a Christian country. America should support all the oppressed. He continues:

Much as I wish to wipe off from memory words that pierced like a pointed steel, I cannot forget that on a day when by invitation, I pleaded before the members of the Episcopal brotherhood the cause of my oppressed brethren in Russia, I received a most cutting rebuff. I was relating how a Jewish lad had his face and hands burnt with hot irons for having stolen an apple, when the Reverend Dr. McConnel ... most uncharitably remarked that in a Christian country, a minority that keeps aloof from the majority must expect perse­cution. What a companionable guest at the table of Ximenes and Torquemada that Episcopal clergyman would make! How palatable the repast seasoned with invectives against those stiffnecked Jews who need the thumb screw and the hot iron to bring them to the foot of the cross!

Ah, my brethren, I say it again. Take care of your own. For prejudice is stalking abroad and would tread on us ... Still be on the alert by reason of ineradicable prejudice. Take care of your own, my brethren!

The attitude of the Reverend Dr. McConnel was not at all uncommon. As the author of Black Like Me declared: "The first rule of racism is to blame the victim."

Morais concerned himself actively with the weal of Jews in foreign lands. A letter to Charles Emory Smith, minister to Russia from 1890 to 1892, elicited a courteous reply assuring him that the imperial government intended no new repressive measures against the Jews. He declared that Morais' representations were on "a subject in which no representative of the United States could fail to feel a deep interest." He concludes: "I recall our personal meetings with great pleasure and well remember your high standing among your people."

Morais was also in touch with Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, a New York Sephardic Jew, who was appointed U.S. consul in Bucharest in 1870 and at­tempted to further the emancipation which had been promised to Rumanian Jews by the 1856 Treaty of Paris. On January 27, 1874, he wrote to Morais:

I am happy to tell you that my heavy task appears to be in a more promising prospect than ever, and that I cherish the firm belief before very long of accomplishing the emancipation of our long suffering brethren.

Peixotto left Bucharest two years later, his firm belief still unfulfilled.

Another aspect of religious problems was the desire on the part of many believing Christians to emphasize the Christian character of the United States, despite the efforts of the founding fathers to separate Church and State. Jacob Ezekiel, a friend of Morais who later moved to Cincinnati and served as secretary of the Hebrew Union College, took President John Tyler to task in 1841 for using the phrase "Christian people" in a proclamation on the death of President Harrison. Tyler sent him a courteous reply in which he disavowed any intention to offend, and told Ezekiel that "your voice and the voices of all your brethren will ascend to our common father."

Morais was seriously disturbed by efforts to have Sunday recognized in the Constitution as a day of rest, as well he might be, since the provisions of the proposed amendment, which he quotes, were very severe. This decreed that "no person or corporation shall perform any secular labor, nor ... engage in any play, game, amusement or recreation on that day." All assemblies, except for religious worship, were to be forbidden. Penalties were to range up to one thousand dollars, and if one allows for a century of inflation, it appears that the penalty was stiff indeed. Morais condemned the attempt to "chain the State to the clogging wheels of the Church." He declared that the Constitution "will cover beneath her ample folds all that seek protection from the abuse of power, but never will she dictate tyrannical terms to those whom she has promised shelter ... Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

The republican sentiments that were his in his youth came flooding back when he heard statements such as: "official positions and public trusts should be restricted by constitutional enactment to persons in sympathy with the high moral aims of the government." Such thinking, in his view could make "America a scourge in the hands of the crafty to tear the lives of the powerless, whether they be Jews or Christians."

Morais was greatly incensed also by attempts to convert Jewish children to Christianity by deception. This became a particular problem when large numbers of Russian and Polish Jews arrived in Philadelphia in the 1880s and subsequently, in the wake of deteriorating conditions in Eastern Europe, settling in the southern part of the city. Missionaries saw the possibility of evangelizing among these poor, Yiddish-speaking Jews, sometimes using means that were less than totally honest. In one instance, a school was set up which purported to be a Jewish school in which Hebrew was taught, and the children were offered rewards for attendance. While there, unknown to their parents who did not speak English, the children were indoctrinated in the tenets of Christianity. Morais decided to investigate. Accompanied by a friend who knew his way around, Morais slipped into the school and observed what was occurring. The principal of the school became aware of his presence and was furious. She termed it an intolerable intrusion, and threatened to call the police. Morais withdrew. "I did not put her to the test," he comments. "In that instance I considered discretion the better part of valor." Morais then took to waiting outside the school, asking the children their names, and alerting the parents to the fact that the school was not what they thought it was. This avoidance of confrontation was typical of Morais, and stood in the mainstream of a long tradition of Jewish quietism. He was ready to persuade and to cajole, but always wanted to avoid violence, or what he termed "scandal."

The Russian immigrants brought other problems in their train. Although Philadelphia prided itself on being the "city of homes" and did not have the tenements typical of New York City, sweated labor became commonplace in Philadelphia too. Morais declared:

Iniquity alone could have conceived the sweating system, so prolific of evils—a system stunting the growth of children employed under it, bending with premature old age men and women in the prime of life, tainting the atmosphere with foul vapors ... Families vegetating in holes, poisoned with pestilential air, stitching and stitching and stitching, twelve or fourteen hours a day to receive what does not suffice to procure a scanty meal.

Morais' solution for these severe social problems was, it must be confessed, simplistic. The worker should give a fair day's labor and the employer should pay a reasonable wage. Morais was convinced of the ennobling character of labor, and horrified at the thought of the socialist and anarchist tendencies, all too patently linked to atheism, which were unseen riders on the immigrant ships. "Communism!" he cries out at one point. "Horror of horrors! Communism!" Morais' attitude to work was demonstrated by his strong support of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, founded by French Jews in 1860, one of the main aims of which was to give useful work training to young Jews in backward countries. In an unusual outburst, Morais condemns bitterly the action of the Rebbe of the Belz sect of the Hasidim ("miscalled" according to Morais) for making a special trip to Vienna to ask the authorities to keep out these secular schools:

Such is the profanation of the name of God brought about by a pretentious sect that assumes the appellation of "pious" and gives their chief the title of "righteous." A piety which hugs the chains of ignorance, a righteousness which invites persecution.

From our standpoint we can see that the Rebbe of Belz knew very well what he was about. Schools of this type brought with them the French language and secular culture. In North Africa they brought about a rapid destruction of the traditional religious orientation of the community, and this was precisely what the Rebbe wanted to avoid. It is interesting to observe too, that in his fervor Morais slipped into a kind of thinking not unlike the Episcopalian reverend gentleman he condemned. "A righteousness which invites persecution" comes perilously close to condemning the victim who wanted above all to preserve his culture intact.

Arguments over the merits of secular and trade schools were purely academic for the immigrant workers of South Philadelphia. Ankle deep in half-sewn pan­taloons they wanted only to improve their miserable lot. In 1886 there was a strike widespread in the United States in an attempt to secure an eight-hour workday. Two years later a Jewish Tailors' and Operators' Association was organized in Philadelphia and painful events followed. Their first strike was a fiasco, col­lapsing in two days. Before the strikers were permitted to return to work, they were required to take an oath on the Bible that they would never again strike. Morais became deeply involved in efforts to act as an honest broker in subse­quent strike action. Morais' son, Henry S. Morais, asserts that his father settled the 1890 strike with the help of George Randorf, a young man who had useful language skills. Henry Morais hints darkly at the doctrinaire background of the strike:

The cause of the unfortunate workers has, invariably, been injured by the domination of labor agitators, some of whom are rabid An­archists, and would instil poisonous views into the minds of the un­tutored.

Max Whiteman, the historian of Philadelphia Jewry, gives a very positive assessment of Morais' beneficent influence on the strike. Able to bridge the gap between manufacturer and worker, he

disarmed the anarchists with compassion and thereby gained so much support among the Jewish workers that the anarchists were re­luctant to outrage Jewish sensibilities further by irreligious activities such as a projected pork feast at a Yom Kippur Ball.

Morais saw little help for the oppression of Jews in the incipient Zionist movement. He does indeed defend Theodor Herzl, the father of Political Zion­ism, who, he says, is neither a Utopian nor a fanatic. One can see the struggles he had with Herzl's plan to obtain land in Palestine by the changes he made in his text. First he wrote as follows:

to go in search of means to facilitate the acquisition of a spot where the systematically degraded of Abraham's progeny may breathe free­ly is a philanthropic design.

Apparently he was unhappy with the choice of the word "acquisition" because, I suggest, it might militate against his idea, firmly rooted in tradition, that Israel was to wait for the Messiah, and not hasten the end. So he toned down "acquisition" to "securing." But this was still too strong, implying perhaps (God forbid!) some kind of violent action, and so he substituted "recognized purchase." But then, he must have asked himself, can Jews be safe with a recog­nized purchase? And so he settled on "guaranteed purchase," which apparently fulfilled his criteria of security and non-violence. Morais normally did not make fair copies of his addresses, and when he gets into sensitive areas, it is possible to see him painfully arriving at a position in his erasures and alterations. Whether one regards this as an honest striving for a consistent viewpoint, or a difficulty in making up his mind, is a question. It seems that Morais' ultimate conclusion was that Zionism was a pipe dream. In response to a Zionist lecture delivered by Dr. Friedenwald of Baltimore to the Mikveh Israel Association in Philadelphia he declares: "We still believe that the renationalization of our people is still in the remote future."

In contrast to his modern viewpoint on racial discrimination, Morais is very traditional in his attitude to women. He explains the Orthodox separation of men and women in the synagogue as "solely and simply an endeavor to allow the mind to be centered on the worship, and prevent, as far as possible, its being directed to human objects mutually attractive." It is interesting that Morais stresses the mutual nature of the attraction, since it raises the question why women should not officiate and men be the onlookers, but perhaps it is too much to expect him even to entertain such a radical idea. In another address he comments that

Woman occupies a station, which, unless she forfeits it by urging it to extremes, will ever, as at present, enable her to carry into practice the distinguishing traits of her character, scattering around the path she treads the seeds of knowledge and charity.

He here utters a clear warning that woman should not exceed the bounds that nature has laid down.

Morais tried throughout his life to follow his principles of adherence to hu­manity, justice, and true religion as he saw it. Yet, as he felt death draw near, he was not happy. Just ten months before he died, he declares in a letter, "Life has never been to me a delightful gift from my parents, and that for reasons which it were idle and foolish to relate." On the face of it Morais' unhappiness may appear strange. One might say his life had been rather successful. He was widely respected, honored, and loved. He had children who looked up to him, the fruit of a seemingly happy marriage. He retained his mental faculties unimpaired until he had a stroke which took him with merciful speed. I should like to offer some tentative reasons for his depression, recognizing that there can be no guarantee of their accuracy.

I must preface my suggestions by outlining what seems to me to have been the Jewish recipe for survival during the long night of the Diaspora. Jewish militarism died in Masada, destroyed by the superior might of Rome. It was replaced, it seems to me, by a threefold strategy. The first was a devotion to a literary legacy including especially, but not exclusively, the Talmud, which buoyed the spirits of the Jew under next to impossible circumstances, and which assured him of his special relationship with God, interrupted, but not ended, and ensured him a glorious restoration at some imminent date. This was the theoretical underpinning of Jewish survival. The Jew might be spat upon in the street, but he had a secret which kept his ego intact and his will unbent, and which he daily mulled over in his books. Despite all appearances to the contrary he could declare with the Bible of Israel:

Who is like unto thee?

A people saved of the Lord

Who is thy helpful shield

And glorious sword.

Though thine enemies are deceitful to thee,

Thou shalt tread on their high places. (Deuteronomy 33:29)

Second, the Jew maintained a low profile. The stooping gait which is charac­teristic of the Jewish stereotype was not because of a burden of care or worn out observances, but rather to avoid any missiles that might be whizzing over­head. Third, the Jew learned to make himself useful, if not indispensable, by honing skills in language, communications and commerce which permitted his oppressor to hate him as much as he pleased, but tolerate him because he had to. As we well know, this threefold strategy did not always work—the long list of massacres of Jews is testimony to that—but it was the best that could be done under the circumstances.

Now Morais was no innovator; he hewed faithfully to these principles. He evinced and tried to inculcate in others a deep love of Jewish sacred literature and espoused the life style which it displayed as a model. He avoided scandal and confrontation and tried, like Moses Montefiore, whom he greatly admired, to improve the lot of his fellows by persuasion and cajoling. He believed firmly that the Jew should be a useful, productive citizen and supported efforts to train young Jews in appropriate skills.

During his life in Philadelphia, Morais witnessed the total breakdown of this millennial strategy for Jewish survival. He saw the loved Talmud burned, not literally by non-Jews as had so often happened in the past ineffectually, but metaphorically by Jews. The Reform movement in Judaism which he had always opposed, without scandal of course, was riding high, destroying the first pillar of the survival strategy I have delineated. He cries out:

Forty-one years I have labored to raise a generation of consistent Israelites, but now that I have seen the departure from earth of nearly all whom I first met in March of 1851, I hear their succes­sors call Moses antiquated, and the rabbis besotted ... Alas for the ears doomed to listen to profanity ... Oh for a reaction, oh for a reawakening of the Jewish spirit.

It pained him deeply that a Jewish convention held in Milwaukee flouted di­etary laws, and he expressed satisfaction that such things did not happen in Philadelphia.

Moreover the pillars of low profile and usefulness were not functioning any more either. With the sharp decline in religious clout under the onslaught of Darwinism and new scientific discoveries, which seemed to attack the very foundations of religion, the charter of anti-Jewish feelings was rewritten. The writings of such racist theoreticians as Wilhelm Marr and Houston Stewart Chamberlain diverted these feelings from their religious context, and took away from the Jew the escape route through conversion that he had previously had. Judaism could no longer be shaken off. It was as undeniable as the color of one's skin. It was a racial characteristic. The Dreyfus trial, which was an active issue in the last years of Morais' life, symbolized the crumbling of these two pillars of Jewish survival. Here was a Jew of modest attainments and even more modest ambitions, who wanted nothing more than to be a useful, docile servant of the French Republic. Despite that, he was broken simply because he was a Jew, and all who rose in his defense, including Emile Zola, were mercilessly disposed of. One must, I think, read some of the anti-Semitic French writing of that period to comprehend the degree to which human beings are capable of detesting other human beings whom they do not even know. Only in this context can we understand the logical outcomes of these events, the Nazi Holocaust of the 1940s on the one hand, and the new kind of Jewish activism and intransigence which have so shocked a world still used to the type of Jewish quietism that Morais symbolizes.

I would speculate, then, that Morais' bitterness of soul was due to his re­alization that the traditional paths to which he had devoted his life could be trodden no longer. The social justice for which he longed was not to be achieved by passionate but always gentlemanly admonitions, and waiting patiently for the Messiah. It was to be done through strikes and boycotts and flaming headlines screaming "J'accuse!" and through the "renationalization of our people," as he called it. These measures were to be coupled with grim confrontations with others who had their own claims to the Jewish patrimony.

Whether the patient, moderate voice of a Morais has any place in our own time is perhaps one of the major questions we face. Let me conclude with his comment on the biblical injunction to "let thy brother live with thee." He declares:

The common adage "Live and let live" ... may seem liberal enough to some, perhaps too liberal in this age of unscrupulous competi­tion, but it falls far below the mark when measured by the Jewish standard of righteousness ... When I am asked to "let my brother live with me" I understand that I may not push him aside, so that I may walk more at large, but that I must make room for him ... "

Morais understood that the bedrock of social justice is the brotherhood of mankind, and that this recognition carries with it the positive duty to make room actively for our fellow human beings. It is a message that has lost none of its freshness, and it speaks as much to our generation as to his.

How the Torah Broke with Ancient Political Thought[1]

by Joshua Berman

For some, the proposition that the Torah needs to be understood in its ancient context seems to diminish from the sacredness and divinity of the text. However, it is precisely through appreciating the Torah in its ancient context that we can arrive at a set of illuminating insights into how the Torah stands out from that context and reveals its divinity, particularly in its approach to political thought.

In ways that were astonishingly new and counterintuitive, and in ways that served the purposes of no known interest group, the political philosophy of the Torah rose like a phoenix out of the intellectual landscape of the ancient Near East. Throughout the ancient world the truth was self-evident: All men were not created equal. It is in the five books of the Torah that we find the birthplace of egalitarian thought. When seen against the backdrop of ancient norms, the social blueprint espoused by the Torah represents a series of quantum leaps in a sophisticated and interconnected matrix of theology, politics, and economics.

Equality: A Brief History

To appreciate the claim that the Torah represents the dawn of egalitarian thought, let us set the idea in historical perspective. It is only in the European revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that we find the rejection of the privileges of rank and nobility that resulted in the delegitimation of entrenched caste, feudal, and slave systems. Greece and Rome had known their respective reformers, yet nowhere in the classical world do we find a struggle to do away with class distinctions. Nor do we find this articulated as a desideratum by any of the ancient authors in their ideal systems. “From the hour of their birth,” wrote Aristotle, “some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.”[2] It was assumed that some would be rich and that many, many more would be poor—not simply because that was the way things were, but because that was the way things were actually supposed to be. Justice, for Aristotle, meant that equals would be treated as equals and unequals as unequals. The Greeks and Romans possessed an overwhelming belief in the harmony of various classes.

The medieval mindset, too, believed that an ordered society was one in which each socioeconomic class performed its tasks for the common good. Social stratification was likewise endemic to the empires and lands of the ancient Near East. Nowhere in the region is there articulated the ideal of a society without class divisions founded on the control of economic, military, and political power. It is not merely that the notion of social mobility was unknown to the ancient world; it would have been unthinkable. These cultures believed that the only way that a society could function was if everyone knew his or her station in life. The modern ideas of free choice and equal opportunity would have struck them as surefire recipes for anarchy and chaos. It is in the books of the Torah that we find the world’s first blueprint for a social and religious order that seeks to lessen stratification and hierarchy and to place an unprecedented emphasis on the well-being and status of the common person.

Religion and Class in the Ancient World

The Torah’s revolution of political thought begins with its theology. The attempt to treat things political as distinct from things religious is a thoroughly modern notion; in not a single culture in the ancient Near East is there a word for “religion” as distinct from “state.” To appreciate the ancient mindset and the conceptual default settings that it supplied, imagine that we are archaeologists digging up an ancient culture called “America.” Deciphering its religious texts, we discover that the paramount god of the pantheon bore the title “Commander in Chief,” resided in a heavenly palace called “White House,” and would traverse the heavens in his vehicle, “Chariot One.” We further discover that Commander in Chief had a consort known as “First Lady”—herself a goddess of apparently meager powers, yet assumed by some to be a barometer of desirable values and fashionable dress. In the heavens was another palace, this one domed and populated by 535 lesser, regional deities, who routinely schemed and coalesced into partisan groupings, and who were known, on occasion, to have been able to depose the Commander in Chief.

Put differently, what we would discover is that the institutional order “down below” manifests the divine order of the cosmos “up above.” This phenomenon, wherein the political structure of the heavens mirrored that of the earthly realm, was widespread in the ancient world, and it is easy to see why. Political regimes are, by definition, artificial, constructed, and therefore tenuous. Always implicit is the question: Why should he reign? The imposed institutional order can receive immeasurable legitimation, however, if the masses underfoot believe that it is rooted in ultimate reality and unchanging truth, that the significance of the political order is located in a cosmic and sacred frame of reference. Ancient religion is the self-interested distortion that masks the human construction and exercise of power.

For example, we find that Enlil, the chief god of the Mesopotamian pantheon, utterly resembles his earthly counterpart, the king. Enlil, like his earthly counterpart, rules by delegating responsibilities to lesser dignitaries and functionaries. Like his earthly counterpart, he presides over a large assembly. He resides in a palace with his wives, children, and extended “house.” Generally speaking, the gods struggled to achieve a carefree existence and enjoyed large banquets in their honor. Like kings, gods needed a palace, or what we would call a temple, where they, too, could reside in splendor in separation from the masses, with subjects caring for them in a host of earthly matters.

If a god wanted something—say a temple repaired, or the borders expanded—he communicated through various agents with the king, and the king was his focus. The gods never spoke to the masses, nor imparted instruction to them. Within ancient cosmologies, the masses served a single purpose: to toil and offer tribute. They were servants, at the lowest rung of the metaphysical hierarchy. The gods were interested in the masses to the extent that a baron or feudal lord would have interest in ensuring the well-being of the serfs that run the estate and supply its needs. Servants, no doubt, play a vital role in any monarchical order, but it is an instrumental role. From an existential perspective, it is a decidedly diminished and undignified role.

Religion and Class in the Torah

By contrast, the Torah’s central accounts—the Exodus and the Revelation at Sinai—preempt claims of election and immanent hierarchy within the Israelite nation. The Exodus story effectively meant that no member of the children of Israel could lay claim to elevated status. All emanate from the Exodus—a common, seminal, liberating, but most importantly equalizing event. Although we normally think of the Revelation at Sinai in religious terms, its political implications are no less dramatic, and constitute the bedrock of the Torah’s egalitarian theology. Elsewhere, the gods communicated only to the kings, and had no interest in the masses. But at Sinai, God spoke only to the masses, without delineating any role whatever for kings and their attendant hierarchies. The ancients had no problem believing that the gods could split the seas, or descend on a mountaintop in a storm of fire. Nevertheless, the stories of the Exodus and Sinai necessitated an enormous stretch of the imagination, because they required listeners to believe in political events that were without precedent and utterly improbable, even in mythological terms. Slaves had never been known to overthrow their masters. Gods had never been known to speak to an entire people.

The pact or covenant between God and Israel displays many common elements with what are known in biblical studies as ancient Near Eastern vassal treaties, which were formed between a great king and a weaker one. In these treaties, we typically find that the more powerful king acts on behalf of a weaker, neighboring king; sensing an opportunity to foster a loyal ally, he may send food during a famine, or soldiers to break a siege. In return, the lesser king demonstrates his appreciation to the powerful one by agreeing to a series of steps that express his gratitude and fealty. In these treaties the vassal king retains his autonomy and is treated like royalty when he visits the palace of the powerful king. Having been saved from Egypt by God, the children of Israel sign on at Sinai to a vassal treaty as sign of fealty, becoming junior partners to the sovereign king, God. The theological breakthrough of the Torah was the transformation of the metaphysical status of the masses, of the common person, to a new height, and the vitiation of nobles, royalty, and the like. The common man, in short, received an upgrade from king’s servant to servant king.

Yet no less significant is the Torah’s call that these stories should be promulgated among the people as their history. The point requires a note of context for us as moderns. Although there are over one million inscriptions in our possession from the ancient Near East, there is nowhere evidence of a national narrative that a people tells itself about its collective, national life, of moments of achievement or of despair, recorded for posterity. Stories abound in the ancient Near East—but they revolve around the exploits of individual gods, kings, and nobles. The most important audience of these materials was the gods themselves—as witnessed by the fact that these texts were often discovered in temple libraries, buried, or in other inaccessible locations. Myths were recited to remind the gods of their responsibilities. Details of a king’s achievements on the battlefield were to constitute a report to a deity about the king’s activities on his or her behalf; they were not composed for the masses. The Kadesh Inscriptions of Rameses II were the exception that proves the rule: Those inscriptions were not only textual, but pictorial; and they were not only carved on stone, but copied and disseminated via papyri. However, most inscriptions of royal activity in ancient times were limited to monumental structures in writing that was inaccessible to the common person.

We may take a page from the history of technology of communication to understand the implication of the Torah’s call to promulgate the accounts of Israel’s early history. The distribution of printed texts in the early modern period is said to have occasioned the birth of modern citizenship within the nation-state. The vernacular languages that were now fashioned and standardized led to the creation of newspapers and novels designed for a mass readership comprised of people who were in disparate locales but could now envision themselves as a public sharing a common heritage, destiny, and range of interests—religious, social, and political. People could now imagine themselves as a political collective, and thus was born the political “we.”

It is in the Torah that we see for the first time the realization that the identity of a people may be formed around an awareness of its past. Indeed, the Hebrew Bible is the first work of literature before the Hellenistic period that may be termed a national history. Moreover, the Torah displays an attitude toward the dissemination of texts among the populace that is in sharp contrast to the relationship between texts and society that we find elsewhere in the ancient Near East. It is a contrast, further, that is a reflection of the egalitarian agenda that the Torah seeks to pursue, over against the entrenchment of class distinctions. In an age and place such as our own, where literacy is nearly ubiquitous, access to texts of many kinds and the knowledge they bear is unfettered and, in theory, available to all. But in the ancient world physical access to written texts and the skills necessary to read them were everywhere highly restricted. Indeed, in the cultures of the ancient Near East as well as of ancient Greece, the production and use of texts was inextricably bound up with the formation of class distinctions: Those who possessed the capacity to read and write were members of a trained scribal class who worked in the service of the ruling order.

Writing in the ancient Near East was originally a component of bureaucratic activity. Systems of writing were essential for the administration of large states. Indeed, the elite in these cultures had a vested interest in the status quo, which prevented others from gaining control of an important means of communication. Far from being interested in its simplification, scribes often chose to proliferate signs and values. The texts produced in Mesopotamia were composed exclusively by scribes and exclusively for scribal use—administrative or cultic—or for the training of yet other scribes.

The Cambridge anthropologist Jack Goody notes that a culture’s willingness to disseminate its religious literature inevitably reflects an emphasis on the individual within that culture.[3] The comment sheds light on the Torah’s agenda to establish an ennobled egalitarian citizenry, as we are witness to an impetus within the biblical vision to share the divine word with the people of Israel. Moses reads the divine word to the people at Sinai (Ex. 24:1–8). Periodically, the people are to gather at the Temple and hear public readings of the Torah (Deut. 31:10–13). It is telling that the Tanakh never depicts kohanim or scribes as jealous or protective of their writing skills, as is found in neighboring cultures.

In sum, we have seen something remarkable about the most basic, familiar aspects of the Torah. The idea of covenant; the story of the Exodus; the fact that the Torah is a written, publicized text—these are as significant politically as they are religiously. They each point to the equal and high standing of the common person in Israel.

The Torah’s Radical Conception of Political Office

Turning from theology, we see that the Torah radically revamped regnant notions of political office and the exercise of power. What is most striking about the Torah’s statements on political office are two radical ideas about how these offices are to be governed. First, we are witness here to the transition from the law of rule to the rule of law. Elsewhere in the ancient world, the kings composed and promulgated law, but were above it, not subject to it. Before the thinkers of Athens came along, the Torah arrived at the notion of equality before the law. All public institutions in the Torah—the judiciary, the priesthood, the monarchy, the institution of prophecy—are subordinated to the law. Moreover, the law is a public text whose dictates are meant to be widely known, thus making abuse of power more obvious and safeguarding the common citizenry.

Second, we may see that the most important body of authority in the polity envisioned by the Torah is none other than the people themselves. The Torah addresses the fraternal and egalitarian citizenry in the second person, “you,” and charges them with appointing a king—if they desire one—and appointing judges. Put differently, the Torah specifies no nominating body for appointing leaders or representatives. Rather, the collective “you”—the common citizenry—bears ultimate responsibility to choose a king and to appoint judges. From American history we know how unthinkable it was only a few generations ago for many to contemplate the notion that persons of color or women should play a role in choosing who rules. For the royal monarchies of the ancient Near East, the notion that the masses—who elsewhere were serfs and servants—would hold any sway over those that ruled them was equally unfathomable.

If the people did elect to have a king, the Torah was determined that he should be but a shadow of what a king was elsewhere. Elsewhere kings played central roles in the cult. In the Torah he plays none. Elsewhere, the king aims to build a strong army. The Torah calls for him to have a limited treasury and to forgo a cavalry (Deut. 17:16–17), limitations that would leave him commanding only a small army. Moreover, were a royal chariot force to serve as the backbone of the nation’s defense, it would inevitably emerge as an elite military class. The great jurist of Athens, Solon, extended preferred status to the members of the cavalry over other citizens. But what confers status in the Torah is citizenship in the covenantal community, and this is shared by all. Elsewhere, the king would consolidate his power through a network of political marriages. The Torah forbids the king from taking a large number of wives (Deut. 17:17).

Finally, we see in the Torah a page in the history of constitutional thought, one that would not be written again until the American founding. It pertains to a highly advanced notion of the separation of powers. Classical Greek political thought had already understood that in the absence of a strong center in the figure of a monarch or a tyrant, factionalism threatened the stability of the polity. It was inevitable that the population would contain rich and poor, nobles and commoners. The absence of homogeneity led classical theorists to balance power by ensuring that each faction within society would receive a share of the rule. Yet, the balance of power was not a balance of institutions of government, as we are accustomed to today. Rather, the balance was achieved by allowing each of the socioeconomic factions a functioning role within each seat of government. Thus, in Roman jurist Polybius’ conception, the legislative branch of government in the republic was to consist of two bodies—the senate for the nobles and the assembly for the commoners—with each institution permanently enshrined in law.

The notion that the effective division of power was predicated upon its distribution across preexisting societal seats of power was one that would hold sway throughout most of the history of republican thought, from Roman theorists through early modern thinkers. It is central even to the thinking of Montesquieu, the father of modern constitutional theory, who is credited with proposing the separation of powers into three branches—executive, legislative, and judiciary—in his 1748 work, The Spirit of the Laws. Looking at the English model of his day, Montesquieu held that the legislative power should consist of a body of hereditary nobles and of a body of commoners. He saw hereditary nobility not as a necessary evil, nor even as an immutable fact of life, but rather as a boon to effective government. The nobility, with its inherent wealth and power, would serve as a moderating force within government against the abuses of the monarch. Moreover, the fact that the nobility’s strength was derived from its own resources would endow its members with a sense of independence. This, together with developed education and time for reflection, would enable the nobles to contribute to effective government in a way that members of the lower classes could not. Montesquieu could not conceive of a classless society and a regime in which the division of powers was purely institutional and instrumental, where the eligibility to hold office was independent of class.

Here the Torah stands distinct. For the first time in history we see the articulation of a division of at least some powers along lines of institution and instrument rather than of class and kinship, where office legitimizes preexisting societal seats of power. Anyone who is “among your brethren” (Deut. 17:15) is eligible to be appointed king. Moreover, the king is appointed by the collective “you” that we mentioned before. How that selection occurs, apparently, is an issue that the Torah deliberately left open so as to imply that there is no body that a priori has a greater divine imprimatur than any other. In this sense, the Torah’s notion of offices that are entirely institutional and instrumental is an idea that would again appear only with the American Founding Fathers.

The same is true with regard to the judiciary, as outlined in the book of Deuteronomy. Anyone may be appointed judge, and no less importantly, anyone, in theory, is eligible to participate in the process of appointing judges (Deut. 16:17). One could have thought of any number of bodies that could have been charged with appointing judges: the king, the prophets, the kohanim, or other judges. But the Torah insists: “Judges and officers you shall appoint for yourself” (16:18). The appointment of judges is mandated with the sole purpose of achieving the execution of justice, rather than the assignment of office to perpetuate the standing of a noble class. As Montesquieu noted in the eighteenth century, it is critical that the people appoint judges, so that they have faith in the justice that is meted out. The only source prior to Montesquieu to arrive at this insight was the Torah.

God the Economist

The Torah understood that in order to create an egalitarian order, it would also need to re-envision the economic structure of society, for without equity, there is no equality. What the Torah proposes is the Western tradition’s first prescription for an economic order that seeks to minimize the distinctions of class based on wealth, and instead to ensure the economic benefit of the common citizen.

A ubiquitous feature of the socioeconomic landscape of the ancient Near East was the threat faced by the common person of falling into irreversible insolvency. Social stratification would emerge as the common people would have to sell off their farm animals, their land, and even their own freedom to repay debts. Famine, drought, or war could lead to precisely the kind of economic landscape we witness in the account of Egypt under Joseph, in Genesis 47. The Torah sought to remedy this through radical legislation on several fronts. Elsewhere, the norm was that land was owned by the palace and by the temple. The Torah, in contrast, knows of no land holding for either king or cult. Instead, nearly the entire land is given to the people themselves, in an association of free farmers and herdsmen, subsumed within a single social class. The idea that wide tracts of available land should be divided among the commoners was unprecedented. Perhaps the most famous example of such an initiative from modern times is the American Homestead Act of 1862. With the Great Plains open to mass settlement, nearly any person 21 years of age or older could acquire, at virtually no cost, a tract of 160 acres that would become his after five years of residence and farming. For millions of new arrivals and other landless Americans, the Homestead Act was an opportunity to acquire assets and to bring equality of economic standing in line with equality before the law.

The Torah also took specific aim at the institution of taxation. Elsewhere, taxes to the state and to the cult were deeply integrated. In the Torah, no taxes are specified for the state. Of course, no regime would be able to function without taxing its populace—but the Torah apparently envisioned that taxes would be levied without sacral sanction, as was so prevalent elsewhere. God would not be invoked as the tax collector. Moreover, far less surplus is demanded from the people of Israel for the Temple than was customary in the imperial cults of the ancient Near East.

Whereas elsewhere cultic personnel controlled vast tracts of land, the Torah balances the status that these groups maintain in the cult by denying them arable lands of their own. They are dependent upon the people they represent for their subsistence, and in some passages are even grouped together with other categories of the underprivileged. The Torah further legislates that one type of tax—the ma’aser ani—should not be paid to the Temple at all, but rather distributed to the needy—the first known program of taxation legislated for a social purpose (Deut. 14:28–29).

What is most remarkable about the Torah’s economic reforms is the manner in which the new economy is incorporated into a new measure of time. Elsewhere in the ancient Near East, the calendar was based upon readily perceptible astronomical rhythms: The counting of days stems from observing the rising and setting of the sun; of months, from observations of the waxing and waning of the moon; of years, from observing the seasons and position of the sun. The ancient Near East, however, knows no calendar that incorporates the notion of a week. The week is the invention of the Torah, and is rooted, of course, in the Torah’s account of Creation, in which God worked for six days and rested on the seventh. The result is that throughout the Torah the Shabbat principle determines the schedule of the laws of social welfare, and serves as a great equalizing force between haves and have-nots. Shabbat day is a day of rest for all. In the seventh year—the Sabbatical year—the field lies fallow and is available for all to enjoy, and debt release is enacted. Time itself is marshaled in the establishment of the egalitarian agenda.

A Revolutionary Document

What power interest could have been served by this program? We have already seen that it was a program that favored neither the king, nor the rich, nor the priesthood. Prophets are hardly mentioned in the Torah, and the criteria set out for validating an individual as a prophet are exacting in the extreme. Sages or philosophers are nowhere mentioned at all. No immediate candidate jumps out of the pages of the Torah as the interested party in the formulation of this new egalitarian order.

Throughout the ancient world, the truth was self-evident: All men were not created equal. They saw the world they had created and, behold, it was good. It was good, they deemed, because it was ordered around a rigid hierarchy, where everyone knew his station in life, each according to his class. For the first time in history, the Torah presented a vision to the masses in which the gods were something other than their own selves writ large, a vision with a radically different understanding of God and humanity. It introduced new understandings of the law, of political office, of military power, of taxation, of social welfare. It conceived in radically new ways the importance of national narrative, of technologies of communication, and of a culture’s calibration of time. What we find in the Torah is a platform for social order marked with the imprint of divinity. Within the annals of political thought it is difficult to think of another document that revolutionized so much in such anonymity, and with so little precedent to inspire it.

Of course, these notions of equality are but early precursors of our more developed notions of equality today. Yet, the Torah instructs us with the implicit understanding that society changes, and with it, the form in which we fulfill God’s will. We can marvel at how utterly removed the Torah’s political thought was from the prevailing spirit about such things in ancient times. And, at the same time, we can appreciate that without believing that we are limited to the notion of equality as it had been expressed in those ancient times. Rather, the Torah serves as an inspiration for the further elaboration of those ideas as times change and events warrant so doing.