Essays on Ethics: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible (Covenant & Conversation Book 7)

Justice in the Hebrew Bible is thus more than a matter of law. It restores a broken order.

For Judaism, morality is something else. It is covenantal, the result of a partnership—a marriage—between humanity and God.

One of Judaism’s most distinctive and challenging ideas is its ethics of responsibility, the idea that God invites us to become, in the rabbinic phrase, his ‘partners in the work of creation’. The God who created the world in love calls on us to create in love. The God who gave us the gift of freedom asks us to use it to honour and enhance the free

Freedom, choice, moral agency, accountability, merit, guilt, retributive justice, atonement and forgiveness are interlocking concepts that were born together, and have their genesis in the Hebrew Bible.

in the long term under such conditions. Morality is the history of humanity’s attempts to construct a common life on the basis of shared codes, conventions and convictions.