Religion & Beliefs
Do Jewish Values Even Exist?
By Tamar Fox / July 31, 2007
Yesterday in the comments to my post about virginity and the fifteenth of Av someone calling themselves Soccer suggested that I “leave HAdar and go study at a yeshiva with Jewish values!” 
I don’t know anything about Soccer, and I don’t actually care. I wouldn’t have graced his/her hater comment with a link except that it amused me that Hadar was being called out for Jewish values. One might have a problem with Hadar halachically, but the truth is that Hadar does in fact consider itself obligated by halacha, it simply chooses to interpret halacha in a way somewhat different from how Rav Ovadia Yosef, for instance, might poskin. The core value is the same, though, right? But Jewish law can’t be the only Jewish value, and I bet there are plenty of people who would argue that Jewish laws are completely irrelevant to Jewish values, so where do we go for more ethical direction? Is it a Jewish value to be Zionist? What do Jewish values say about abortion? Ecology? Women’s rights? Slavery? War? Genocide? If you were under the impression that any of those are questions answered simply, I think you’re way off base. As far as I know there are conflicting understandings and opinions regarding all of these issues, with people weighing in from around the world and throughout time. Luckily or unluckily the Torah doesn’t say anything that definitely requires you to recycle, or forbids a man from beating his wife. We take a few comments that may or may not seem relevant and extrapolate from them grand and impressive doctrines on, say, slavery and halacha, and how the Torah views slavery as repugnant and an insult to human dignity. But then we’re stuck with the fact that according to the Torah, it’s perfectly acceptable for a Jewish man to own slaves. Even Jewish slaves are allowed, though not encouraged. But today, if you wanted to go to Thailand and buy some girl to be your housemaid, I doubt your rabbi would be on board with the proposal. He’d likely say something about how it doesn’t jive with Jewish values and then lecture you on the mitzvah to rescue the captives. Today, morality has been pretty much codified by humanistic terms, and most Jews, even Orthodox Jews, live according to a lot of rules and ethical guidelines that are never or rarely explicit in any Jewish texts. Technically, for instance, halacha allows a person to cheat a non-Jew out of money, but I don’t see many contemporary responsa urging Jews to pad their pockets with money they didn’t get fairly, and I can’t imagine any rabbi I know advising someone in business to go through with a shady deal just to make a mint at the expense of a Baptist coworker. I guess my point here is the same as it was when I wrote about Jewish delis the other day. I wish people would be more specific when they used the word Jewish. It’s becoming something we just clip to whatever’s convenient, never considering whether it will be a good idea to call something with little or no connection to Judaism ‘Jewish.’
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A thought, and it may be insightful ro banal, but here goes:
There are no “Jewish” values, but a number of constellations of values that either are practiced by or espoused by sectors of Jewish communities, that are called “Jewish values” because they are based on unique Jewish texts or statements of Jewish thinkers, whether theologians or writers or ideologists … they may also be either based on or decribed as “Jewish values” because sectors of Jewish communities generally refer to these values in the context of either historic events or Jewish religious text[s].
These values are shared by diverse faiths, cultures, individuals, governments, societies. How each faith, culture, indivual or society creates a matrix into which these values are supposed to hang together or make sense determines whether in any way it makes sense to call values “Jewish values.”
Family? Respect for education? The elderly? Workers’ rights? the Environment?
I wonder if the phrase and ill-defined concept both derive from the collapsed distinction between the various Jewish ethnicities and cultural traditions and the theological inheritance, which were were for much of history inextricable. You make a good point about the advent of humanistic values: the concept of the distinctly ethical (as opposed to the moral) is very important, because the vast majority of Jews, along with a majority of people generally in the West, agree on certain premises about human interaction that are essentially secular, and in some many cases would have been opposed by the Rabbis and pretty much everyone else in the premodern world. I tend to think that "Jewish" as a serious label of an intellectual position should relate to the religion of Judaism in some way, because otherwise it becomes a meaningless generalization. As someone whose studied Sephardic and Italian Jews, I've been struck by the number of imprecise authors who write of "Jewish values" and "Jewish customs" when they really mean the customs of their Ashkenazic ancestors who emigrated to the English-speaking world. Without the context of Judaism as a religion (and often even within that context) the label of Jewish is more rhetorical than adjectival…
Jewish values cannot be codified as they are as diverse and paradoxical as the communities that adhere to them. What may seem ethical to adherents of Humanistic Judaism, could be morally repugnant to those within Hasidic communities. Jews who identify themselves as secular and progressive might be horrified by the patriarchal practices within the Orthodox community.
The difficulty in determining, exactly, what Jewish values are, is directly related to juxtaposition of Judaism as a people, or a religion. Americans have certain common values, as do Catholics. However, Catholic Americans do not share all of the common values of Catholic Spaniards. Nor do American Hindus share all of the common values of their American Catholic counterparts. Values are influenced by
all of the groups to which one belongs and are sometimes compromised by the needs of the whole.
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