Strengthening Reform 16: Ethical and Ritual Mitzvot
October 6, 2008
Defining Reform | Ethics | Jewish Living
(5 comments)
By William Berkson
In the previous post in this series, I sketched the history of Reform treatment of Mitzvot, concluding with Rabbi Richard Levy's A Vision of Holiness: The Future of Reform Judaism (URJ, 2005). In this book Rabbi Levy, who led the 1999 "Pittsburgh Principles" effort, rejects the traditional Reform distinction in the status of ethical and ritual mitzvot.
As I wrote, I think the abolition of this distinction is a spectacularly bad idea.
Ethical mitzvot even traditionally have priority over ritual practices, in my view and I believe in the view of many past Reform thinkers. However, traditionally ritual practices are indeed also mitzvot, commanded by God to the Jewish people. Classical Reform denied this 'commanded' status of ritual commitments, and said that rituals were to be chosen on the basis of whether they are spiritually elevating. Rituals were to be judged how well they serve us, rather than being seen as the way God demanded at Sinai to be served by us in return for his special protection of us.
To understand Rabbi Levy's new Reform view of mitzvot, it is important to recognize that he doesn't regard them as having the same force as either in Jewish tradition or in Classical Reform. In both, ethical mitzvot are unequivocal commandments from God about how we should behave. Rabbi Levy suggests that we instead we understand a mitzvah not as "'I command you,' but 'this is something very important to Me that you do.' The wisdom of this formulation is that reflects the covenantal aspect of the relationship between God and the Jewish people, rather than an authoritarian one." (p. 50)
But even in traditional Judaism ethical mitzvot are not simply products of the covenant between God and only the Jewish people. The Rabbis explored the Noahide laws, which are primarily ethical commandments, and which apply to non-Jews and Jews alike. And in medieval Jewish philosophy leading thinkers argued that ethical mitzvot are derivable from reason, and applicable to everyone. Only the 'revealed' mitzvot, religious practices, are commanded specifically to the Jewish people, and are binding on us because of our special covenant with God at Sinai, and not binding upon non-Jews.
It is important to understand that from its beginning Reform Judaism put all mitzvot on a different basis than Classical Judaism. For Classical Judaism the basis of the mitzvot is God's word as revealed in the text of the Torah and Talmud. Additional reasons for the mitzvot, ta'amei hamitzvot, were interesting supplementary insights, but the authority lay in the sacred text.
In contrast, Reform has not regarded the text as authoritative, and has looked as well to outside standards of truth: reason and empirical evidence. Philosophically, Reform made a fundamental change. We henceforth would judge religious issues not only by sacred texts but also by the sources of truth raised up by the Enlightenment. And scientific study as a new standard extended even to challenging the sacred texts, using "the science of Judaism"--Wissenschaft des Judentums. Thus, the reasons for the mitzvot, which traditionally were a topic of discussion and not a source of authority, in Reform moved to a central place fundamental sources of authority, along side the text, and sometimes above it.
Now the Reform leaders, through Herman Cohen (1842-1918), felt secure backed up by Kant's philosophy. Kant had seen science as based in "pure reason" and ethics as based in "practical reason", and had famously said, "Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." Further, he argued that "God as a guarantor of morality" is a necessary postulate of "practical reason".
With this Kantian backing of "ethical monotheism", I think the leaders of Classical Reform were completely comfortable with the idea of God as the commander of morality to all humanity. But because of their universalist orientation, also following the Enlightenment, they were not comfortable with the idea that the particularistic customs of Judaism were commanded by God. So they looked instead to 'spiritual elevation' as the reason for the ritual customs, now no longer considered as mitzvot.
In reality, Kant's ethics don't in fact hold up under scrutiny; and community has proven to be more important than recognized by the European Enlightenment. The various 'platforms' of Reform during the 20th century have, I think, been an effort to go beyond the Kantian Classical Reform view, and to supply a new basis and vision for Reform. But it is evident to me that the culmination in the 1999 Principles, and especially in Rabbi Levy's book, that is a serious confusion, and not, contrary to the title of his book, a coherent "Vision".
Because for Levy all mitzvot are particularistic (part of the Jewish covenant with God), and we 'try them on' to see if we like them, the obligatory character of ethics is completely drained of any content. We can pray with tefillin on Tuesday, and not on Thursday, seeing whether the mitzvah of tefillin moves us as part of our "dialogue" with God. Even though I'm sure this is not Rabbi Levy's intention, the logical consequence of his view that ethical mitzvot are on the same (weak) basis is that this follows: it is OK for us on Tuesday to murder someone, and on Thursday to refrain from murder, and then see whether to follow that mitzvah or not.
A similar rebuttal of Rabbi Levy's view was given by David Wilenski here, in response to my previous post. And indeed Rabbi Levy quotes Rabbis Lance Sussman and Robert Seltzer as severely criticizing the 1999 Principles, by saying "the priority of ethics is disastrously weakened." And I see that the article by Sussman and Seltzer is part of a Winter 2000 edition of the CCAR Journal commenting, evidently some quite critically, on the "Principles." Thus I think it fair to say that the issue of the status of 'mitzvot' in Reform is far from arriving at any consensus view that either Reform clergy or laity are happy with. Indeed, that is shown in the title of Sussman and Seltzer's article: "Pittsburgh II and the Crisis of Confidence in the Reform Rabbinate."
My inquiry so far into the state of Reform Judaism--and I have yet to get hold of the key issue of the CCAR Journal--leads me to this conclusion: the key issue facing Reform now is, "By what standards are we to judge ethical and ritual mitzvot?" From the answer to this will flow whether and when to adhere to traditional mitzvot, or to modify them and even introduce new ones. That topic I will take up in my next post.
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Before we make any claims about the binding nature of ethical mitzvot, we've got to take a step back and wonder the following: If we find ethical mitzvot to be binding, why are most of us not contributing 10% of our income to the poor?
And if we are going to donate that 10%, and if we're going to be true adherents of the mitzvot bein adam l'chaveiro, we have to wonder the following: Why did it take an Orthodox rabbi to come up with this (http://rabbi.bendory.com/docs/maaser.php). It should be everyday stuff for Reform rabbis to write pieces like that.