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Are All Golden Rules the Same?
Every “ethical” society seems to have a Golden Rule, some variation on Luke and Matthew’s “Do to others what you would want them to do to you.” Confucius stated it as a negative: “What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others,” which is functionally identical to Hillel’s, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.”
And yet there is a gaping chasm between all of these forms (the Wiki link contains dozens of other examples), and the formulation which is the middle topic of the middlemost text (Leviticus) of the Torah (Lev. 19:18). In other words, the Torah formulation makes the Jewish version of the Golden Rule at the heart of the text. And it is, upon reflection, very different from the Golden Rule of Confucius and Luke and Matthew and Hillel. The Torah says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
How is this different? Consider firstly that the negative construction of Confucious and Hillel do not require any engagement – you can fulfill the Golden Rule by simply leaving other people alone. No relationship is required or even encouraged; people who separate from each other have followed the rule. Which is fine, as far as it goes. But this version of the Golden Rule does nothing to build relationships, to build families and communities and societies. It enables and condones solitude and isolation.
The positive constructions are better, in that one should treat others as you wish to be treated. But that in itself does not necessarily entail a relationship. Instead, it suggests a quid pro quo, doing to others as you want them to do to you. If you want to be left alone, then you can fulfill this rule merely by leaving others alone as well!
Perhaps most importantly, the distinction of “loving others” is that love is an ongoing investment, not a mere thing or product. To truly love others means that one needs to empathize with them, to care about them in ways that are not readily measured by keeping score of who was nice to whom. Love is a lifelong, ongoing and neverending process, not just the sharing of rations or the kind of polite courtesy with which decent people greet one another on the street.
So while people all-too-often “keep score” in their lives about whether they have received their due share, whether they have given more than they have received, etc., loving them as you love yourself means caring about someone else, about learning to see through their eyes, hear through the ears, and feel as they feel.
In this sense, then, the Torah is quite distinct from other ancient documents and texts. The existence of the non-Torah Golden Rule can readily be used as a defense of a godless moral society– after all, the Golden Rule surely suggests that civil societies can logically deduce an ethical social structure and body politic.
But for Judaism, the idea of loving someone else like yourself is much richer in religious overtones. Each person, we are told by the ensoulment of Adam, contains the very spirit of G-d within them. So when we love other people, truly love them, then we are drawing closer to G-d, by connecting with and empathizing with His spirit as it is found in each person. This is a positive commandment: we cannot fulfill it by leaving them alone as we want to be left alone or even by treating them as we want to be treated. In order to be holy, we have to connect with others in love, to try to see things their way, and seek to make them feel the love that we, in turn, want to enjoy ourselves.
Golden Rules are necessary for any ethical society. “Do/Don’t do unto others” represents a baseline in human rights. But “Love your neighbor as yourself” is one step up: love is a prerequisite for holiness.
For Judaism, this Golden Rule cannot be separated from religious faith. Loving other people is a way to love G-d.
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Sure; most or all languages have this phenomenon to some extent or other.
No one said they were contradictory. But your view is based in part on its being one of the two, and you’ve not yet told me why it must be one when it could well be the other.
Are you saying that it must be both? It must mean “dwell” as well as “strive” or “judge?”
Then your interpretation collapses altogether. Your view is precisely that Gen. 6:3 teaches about how man is made.
Oh really? Then you need to explain yourself in # 13:
There is a traditional primary meaning to the text (I’m not talking here about words which really are obscure.) When an explicit positive (thou shalt) or negative (thou shalt not) commandment is involved, if a significant word can carry multiple meanings, only one of them is germane to the performance of that commandment. But those other meanings are definitely available for homiletic use… as in some cases are homophones, spelling variants and so on… and are also considered to be valid meanings.
Also, there are some who read five levels of the soul into the multiple terms that are used in various verses in Tanakh that connote some aspect of our non-material nature. One such level all animals have, the “higher” or “deeper” levels may [update: all but one] be [update: humanly] accessible with significant effort and risk.
Some people find this sort of thing delightful and motivating, other people tend to abstain from such intoxicating speculation. I sometimes wonder where any specific person falls on this spectrum is genetically determined.
No, I am not. He created a world in which Hitler is possible. WE chose Hitler, either passively or actively. The task of combating evil in this world falls to us. Great power, great responsibility…
If Hitler were not possible we would have no capacity for free will:
Well, yes. We agree on that.
Well, good for you. But you’ve refuted your own theory affirmed in # 13.
If the human soul really is literally G-d’s extended self then every wrong choice and every human sin is literally made and done by G-d—from my sins and your sins to Hitler’s sins. G-d did not choose the sins of Hitler. So the human soul is not G-d’s extended self.
If a person can change their mind, then they can change. Which makes them, at least for these purposes, not an ever-constant being. That our decisions make G-d change his mind means that we can change G-d. Now that is a radical idea, but one that is, I think, entirely supported by the text. We can change G-d in every way that we can sense, including how He treats us and how mankind perceives Him.
So what? Even if this were granted, it doesn’t provide any evidence that the sort of changes of which G-d is capable are mistakes, which would also not amount to G-d sinning, which would still not amount to G-d committing all sins committed by human souls, which is entailed by your theory that human souls are G-d.
My personal preference is that yes – the very idea of G-d’s spirit in man necessarily results in strife. How could it be otherwise?
That said: we have a principle that the Torah has seventy “faces”. Both interpretations can be true, without contradiction. Different ways of looking at the same elephant.
Boy, you really dig this stuff, doncha Auggie? So let me ask: What about hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, typhoons, volcanoes, and tornadoes? They’re not sins, since there is no human agency involved. But they are terrible, nonetheless, and it is hard to imagine that they happen without God’s assent. Do you find those to be quite a bullet to bite?
You’re talking in a circle. I am asking you why the verb in this verse must be taken to mean “dwell.” Your answer is that it means “dwell” because it means both “dwell” and “strive.” Then you say it means both “dwell” and “strive” because it means “dwell,” and dwelling entails striving.
Do you not see that fallacy?
Well, that’s fine. But we usually need a reason to go from can to is.
It would be, but I don’t bite it. I attribute all of those things to the agency of created beings. Human sin messes up creation in grand and earthwide ways. Angelic sin could easily do the same.
I wonder whether the tools we are each employing are simply incompatible – like Newtonian vs Einsteinian physics. We use different languages, and so we necessarily find that words of the other person do not mean what we think they mean.
You somehow refuse to read the words the way I think I am communicating them, which means we are not communicating.
I’ll try this yet again, though if we cannot get there, then I am OK with quitting while we are behind.
Mankind is made of TWO combating elements: body and soul. We are given free will. Though the soul contains a spark of the divine, it is only “there” to the extent we recognize it and embrace it. We are free to use the power we are given. The soul we have on loan from G-d is not omniscient and omnipotent – it is creative potential, the most powerful capability the Torah tells us that G-d has.
So YES: G-d gave us the power to do evil. But your reduction above suggests that if I give my kid the car keys and he crashes the car, then I crashed the car. I empowered him: he chose.
I use them the way I used them in # 13 of the current thread (and #s 62 and 65 of “Gratitude”), when you agreed with them. In everything else I say I change the meaning not at all. You seem unwilling or unable to follow the basic logic.
The reduction comes directly from theories you affirmed multiple times. Your soul can be said to have crashed the car if your soul and your kid’s soul are the same thing–as theories like the one you’ve touted in which the soul is G-d.
Continued:
Fair enough, I reckon.
Then you really should go back and correct my account in # 9 of your view.
St. A, I may mess this up, but say that G-d has a collection of diamonds; it is G-d’s collection, but he chooses to distribute one to each of us. So we all get to share in G-d’s collection of diamonds, and we each have our own, but we don’t own G-d’s collection. If that’s not a good analogy, @iwe will tell us.
It’s a good analogy, if I follow it. It fits my theology well enough. It fits Christian theology and everything I’ve ever thought I read in the Torah. The problem is that it doesn’t fit iWe’s views as far as I’ve been able to understand them.
Well, that seems to be a novel approach to the problem of suffering in the world. Do you have one particular angel in mind, or is this a more widespread problem?
Hardly. Augustine, Plantinga, and I don’t know how many in between.
But don’t get confused. I only mentioned angels as an extra possibility. The main relevant point of Christian theology is that human sin messes up creation.
I. Love. This. Thread.
As a Christian, who appreciates that his faith is rooted in Judaism, let me say “thanks” to all who have commented, but @iwe and @saintaugustine in particular, for the civil and sane responses.
Where else but Ricochet? Amiright?
¡Sí!
If I was talking to anyone else, I would conclude that you just claimed that human sin causes earthquakes and such. But since I’m talking to you, I will just concede that I have no idea what you’re saying.
All this is way beyond my pay grade.
I will simply say that the spark of God within a human being is what makes Hitler different from an earthquake. It is what makes Hitler a tragedy—a multi-dimensional, horrifying tragedy. And I don’t mean “tragedy” in the classic-drama sense, of something that is, or at least becomes, inevitable. I mean tragic in the ordinary sense—it didn’t have to be this way. There were other ways this could’ve played out, other responses possible and available within the circumstances that the actors faced.
Two tectonic plates rub up against each other and, at a certain point, the tension has to break and the earth has to shake because that’s just how it is. And if you happen to be standing by the fault when it opens, you’ll fall in and die. That’s just physics and biology.
The whole world could be nothing but physics and biology—it would still be an impressive place, intricate and beautiful even if God’s were the only eyes that were ever laid on it. But it isn’t. There is also love, and human beings to carry it about within us, human beings to behold and to respond to what is seen (actually or metaphorically).
There was a photograph of a scene from one of the concentration camps; a German officer sitting on a chair in the middle of a sort of courtyard surrounded by prisoners. The officer is uniformed, spit-and-polish. The prisoners are naked, skinny, dirty. I suppose survivors of an earthquake look the same; all I want to do is pluck them out of the picture and warm and clothe them and find them good things to eat.
“What the hell happened to you?” I want to ask the German officer. “How did you become this thing?” There is revulsion at the idea of even touching him, some primitive fear of contamination; whatever it is that degraded him, I don’t want it on me.
It’s the problem I encountered in this story, now that I think of it.
I translate it as “dwell” – but “strive” is equally valid, and consistent with itself and my argument. I see no fallacy.
Words are not mathematics, any more than poetry is a gearbox.
The souls are not destroyed. They grow and learn through it all. You used the right word, if not realizing the proper meaning: actors.
Let’s retreat from the word games.
You are hung up on whether the divine spark IS “literally” G-d. Clearly I led you down a logical cul de sac, and I did not mean to. G-d empowers us with His spirit. But no: our soul is not the same thing as G-d in every meaning of the word.
Yes. This is a distinction between Judaism and Christianity. Some Jews concur with the Christian view (in my view, erroneously). But the text itself does not say this.
Anyway, the German officer—if he was SS, as he probably was— was taught to deliberately ignore the Great Commandment, which was seen by Hitler as both effeminately weak and subversive of his project.
It is subversive of many projects—love, that is. And it is weak, in the sense that any of us might be persuaded to do an un-loving (less melodramatic than “evil”) thing or even become an un-loving person. Addiction to meth and crack facilitates the process (as the recent case in Maine demonstrates; Williams apparently began life as a reasonably intelligent, normal person)as do hunger and fear.
For all its apparent frailty, love is, however, remarkably resilient. It keeps popping back up, resurrecting you might say, in only in the form of grief, shame or regret.
I’m stealing that…for a poem.