Judaism and Ethics ed. by Daniel Jeremy Silver (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 199 Judaism and Ethics. Ed. By DANIEL JERE~IY SILVER. New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1970. Pp. 338. $10.00. This is a collection of essays originally published in the CCAR Journal, the scholarly publication of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, representative of Reformed Judaism. Excellent in literary quality and nobility of ethical sensitivity, these essays range from the abstract to the concrete, but unfortunately the abstract predominates. In the following I will mention the topics that seem to be of special interest. Irwin M. Blank raises the question: "Is there a Common Judaeo· Christian Ethical Tradition", and concludes that after the third century there is none and that " where specific ethical responses coincide, they are coincidental." The principal reason he gives is as follows: Judaism and Christianity are making different and irreconcilable assertions about what it is possible to know about God. Therefore, their answer to the question what if anything can man do to being good in the universe will be m disagreement. For Christians the ultimately real is already the embodiment of the god. Therefore, man can only bring some good into the universe. For the Jew Torah expresses whatever can be known of the ultimate reality. Man can know and fulfill its requirements. Therefore, the "ought " is not to know God, which is impossible, because he is the Unique One, but to do His Torah. It must follow that where the sense of both the " ought" and the concept of the " good " do not correspond, the ethical system which flows from them will manifest this lack of correspondence. (p. 104 f.) This is not very convincing. On the one hand, Christian theology also emphasizes the mystery of God and the fact that he is known to us through his dealings (Torah is a Covenant) with us. On the other hand, it would be an impoverishment of the Jewish tradition to ignore its mystical side, the I-Thou encounter which Buber has made known to all of us. Nor can it be sustained that the faith of the Jew is in Someone, while the faith of the Christian is in something (death and resurrection of Jesus) as Blank (relying this time on Buber) asserts. (p. 102) As the Jew believes in the God of the Exodus, so the Christian believes in the God who sent his Son to die and rise for us. In both cases our faith is first of all in God, but we know him through his acts in history. It would seem that Rabbi Blank is too anxious to establish Jewish identity by finding some unique Jewish teaching that non-Jewish cannot accept. He bolsters his case by an excessive reliance on nco-orthodox Protestant theologians who in their eagerness to be followers of Paul have a way of minimizing the Jewish elements in the Christian tradition. D. H. Silver, Eugene Lipman and Arthur Gilbert are on sounder grounds when they emphasize that the unique Jewish witness is not to be found in the exclusive possession of truths inaccessible to others but rather in the 200 BOOK REVIEWS vitality of a People, a living community which by its suffering, courage, restlessness, humor, and profound realism continually arouse the world to seek God in the fullness of his mystery and to carry out his will in the search for justice on earth. I was particularly impressed by the essay of Steven S. Schwartzchild "On the Theology of Jewish Survival " for its profound faith in the destiny of this People and his repudiation of the idea that Jewish survival depends on military victories. He gives three reasons from Jewish tradition for saying that the Six-Day War should not be called a "miracle": (1) all miracles must be in accordance with the Torah and halachah; (2) military victories as such are never miracles; (3) many great rabbis preferred not to live in the days of the Messiah if this meant witnessing the humiliation of the Gentiles by the Jews. Would to God that Christians had always kept these three points in mind as a remedy against triumphalism! Granted the unique witness of Israel, this volume shows plainly enough that Jews and Christians...