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

What is striking about Judaism is not just its emphasis on responsibility but its insistence on elaborate support structures.

laws – rules of right and wrong – are essential because of the differences between human beings and their need to cooperate if they are to form communities. Law, though not part of nature, ‘enters into what is natural’.

The very words ‘ethics’ and ‘religion’ are abstractions that date from European Enlightenment: the Hebrew Bible – which is certainly about both – has no word for either.

Freedom needs trust; trust needs people to keep their word; and keeping your word means treating words as holy, vows and oaths as sacrosanct.

To give and not receive, to act rather than be acted on, to be free and not dependent on other human beings, to be dependent on God alone: these are what give Judaism its distinctive tone of voice.

Judaism is God’s perennial question-mark against the condition of the world.