St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology (Jul 2024)
Jewish Ethics
Abstract
Before modern times, there was no systematic account of Jewish ethics. This can be attributed to the fact that Jewish tradition never considered ethics an autonomous subject matter or mode of inquiry. There is no indigenous Hebrew word for ethics, describing what ancient Greek thinkers used to denote the subjects of human character development, social responsibilities, and personal duties, yet there are numerous classical and premodern Jewish texts describing character virtues and development, social responsibilities, and personal obligations. Ethical concerns form part of the core of Judaism and Jewish culture, but they are embedded in Jewish Law (Halakhah), theology, and textual commentaries, and only modern thinkers would see Jewish ethics as an isolated and independent inquiry. Examples of this phenomenon are the minor tractate Avot (‘Fathers’) of the Mishna, Maimonides’ essay known as ‘Eight Chapters’, and his compilation of ‘Laws of Character Traits’. The first is a second- and third-century corpus of unsystematically collected aphorisms tracing the generations of early Rabbinic authorities, the second appears in the context of Maimonides’ medieval commentary on the Mishnah Avot, while the third is a section of Maimonides legal code, Mishneh Torah (MT). Systematizing Jewish ethics is also difficult because both Jewish ethics and law are strongly pluralistic, and hence cannot be formulated as an apodictic system similar to logic or mathematics, the way Benedict Spinoza and some modern ethical philosophers have attempted to do. A systematic treatment of Jewish ethics is therefore necessarily a ‘rational reconstruction’, i.e. a logical tapestry woven from many different strands of Jewish literature, law, liturgy, and theology.
