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  • Conscience: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey
  • Joseph Wolf (bio)
Conscience: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey, by Harold Schulweis. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2008.

To say that Harold Schulweis has been a groundbreaker in the pulpit over the past thirty years would not be overstating facts. In his Conscience: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey, Schulweis reexamines a touchstone of his work. He makes the case for the “sacred duty to disobey” the dominant culture when it tramples human life, finding support in the grim scenario described in BT Avodah Zarah 18b. Therein human beings killed one another for sport, and yet Jews, like today, sat in the stands at public events. What were they expected to do, as spectators? How could they express outrage? Although the Roman arena elicited a defiant rabbinic response, the author is well aware that today a gladiator civilization continues to foster genocidal battles, while the world watches. How are we to imagine Jews sitting in attendance, while wholesale carnage persists? Once again, Schulweis considers the experiences of the altruists who saved lives at great peril to themselves during the Shoah. Amidst the stench of death, as in Samson’s riddle, they performed sweet deeds against all odds.

Harold Schulweis has shined a light on the inspiring role played by ḥasidei ummot olam. And especially given how Samantha Power and a host of human rights thinkers have made it a cause to end genocidal indifference in the twenty-first century, why would we [End Page 91] suggest that this book is anything but timely? Well, for one thing, it was several decades ago that Rabbis Albert Axelrad, Arnold Jacob Wolf, and Arthur Waskow (among others) wrote passionately on the subjects of conscientious objection during the Vietnam War and nascent concern for the Palestinians. They commented astutely back then on the tension that exists between defending Jewish survival and the overarching, if at times vague, commitment to the right every people/nation has to self-determination, liberation, and continuity. And during the turbulence of the post-civil rights era, they—among others—made conscience a paramount issue when Jews in high positions were more predisposed to toe the company line. Conscience: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey is a reprise of some of these themes in a period of new religious challenges. Still, if the author seems to be applying his final brushstrokes to the canvas, it’s worthy reading— if only to consider a Jewish basis for self-discovery.

It is in the refiner’s fire, he writes, that individuals may discern their own internal voices as distinct from the persistent drumbeat of hegemony. And it is that experience exactly from which can come a vibrant religious discourse about moral issues. Too often, says Shulweis, religious people (in general, and Jews in particular) put a premium on blind obedience, when they would be more correct to recognize the crucial role played by authorities who take exception to the rule. We have biblical models of faith who, when confronted with new information or changing circumstances, threw up their hands in protest. What a shame it is, suggests the author, that Jews see other religious systems operating within an authoritarian model, and draw the erroneous conclusion that their own is little different. Were they sufficiently adept at navigating the literature, then they would see firsthand the animated interplay of emotions and erudite argumentation between human beings and God.

Schulweis imputes godliness to the moment when one resists doing what’s wrong, but the “cult of ‘commandedness’” fails routinely. In this sense, it is David’s conscience that distinguishes between orders for the day, within his sovereign prerogatives, and ones that he will think twice about. “Attah ha-ish,” says his rebuker Nathan, and David is forced to orient himself within a moral universe. Schulweis cites Rabbi Yoḥanan in BT Bava Metzia 30b, who said that Jerusalem was destroyed because the sages of that period “based their judgments strictly upon biblical law, and did not go beyond the requirement of the law.” Legal conventions still allow the killing to go...

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