Social Action in Jewish Thought

The Core Source:

The Particularist Approach:

The Universalist Approach:

Modern Day Discussion:

Rabbi JB Soloveitchik - Abraham's Journey

The universal problems faced by humanity are also faced by the Jew. Famine, disease, war, oppression, materialism, atheism, permissiveness, pollution of the environment – all of these are problems which history has imposed not only on the general community but also on the covenantal community. We have no right to tell mankind that these problems are exclusively theirs. God has charged man with the task of fighting evil, of subduing the destructive forces of nature and transforming them into constructive forces. The Jew is a member of humanity. God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply; fill the land and conquer it, dominate the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every beast that walks the land” (Gen. 1:28) is addressed equally to non-Jew and Jew. As human beings, Jews are duty bound to contribute to the general welfare regardless of the treatment accorded them by society (p. 203).

Rav Aharon Lichtenstein - 'Jewish Philanthropy - Whither?' - Tradition 42:4 (2010)

For committed Orthodox Jews – and, a fortiori, for serious bnei Torah – the utter dismissal of universally oriented hesed as an expression of avodat Hashem cannot be accounted a live option. Our polestar is, rather, Rambam’s invocation of the divine order as an implicit norm, in the spirit of “ve-halakhta bi-drakhav,” imitatio Dei [imitating the ways of God], informing our actions and perceptions:

For it is stated, “God is good to all, and His mercy extends to all His works” (Ps. 145:9) and it is stated, “Its ways are ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace” (Proverbs 3:17).

Divine universal beneficence and the Biblical focus upon the Torah’s symbiotic relation to peace and harmony are more than a model. They constitute a charge. […]

[T]he underlying premise is that matan Torah and concomitant election of knesset Israel were intended to superimpose a higher level of obligation, rooted in newly acquired identity, but not to supersede prior commitment, grounded in preexisting, universal identity. (pp. 13, 15)

Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, The Duties of the Heart and Response to Suffering (1999), p.59

[The] tendency, prevalent in much of the contemporary Torah world in Israel as well as in the Diaspora, of almost total obliviousness to non-Jewish suffering is shamefully deplorable. Surely Avraham Avinu and Moshe Rabbenu felt and acted otherwise, and intervening mattan Torah has not changed our obligation in this respect. Priorities need to be maintained, as regards to both practical and emotional engagement; but between that and complacent apathy there lies an enormous moral gap. […] [The] notion that only Jewish affliction is worthy of Jewish response needs to be excoriated and eradicated.

Rav Aharon Lichtenstein - Leaves of Faith 2 - Chapter 10

Nevertheless, given our present situation, I see no alternative to turning inward. The combination of rising assimilation and declining power mandates increased concern for specifically Jewish needs - spiritual, physical , and emotional. Despite the best humanitarian intention, we cannot escape the pressure of priority. "Many are thy people's needs, and their wit is limited," intones the piyyut and this aptly describes our current situation.Whether certain communal manifestations of of our collective generosity were in order a generation ago is perhaps debatable; that most can no longer be afforded is not. At the same time, we should make an educational effort to contain the insidious effects of creeping insularity. The notion, altogether too prevalent in some circles (albeit, perhaps not those likely to read this paper), that the concerns or even the suffering ofmere goyim are irrelevant to us cannot be countenanced.

Avraham Avinu and Moshe Rabbenu, at any rate, thought otherwise.

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, Man of Faith in the Modern World (1989)

We are often accused of being parochially clannish. This may be true, for otherwise we would have succumbed long ago, considering our historical vulnerability. But this self-involvement is not hermetically exclusionary. The universal emphasis is prominent in all our prayers, in Scripture, the Talmud, and the Midrash; and when opportunities were benign and condition propitious, we have contributed far more than our proportionate share to the welfare of humanity. [….]

It is, therefore, characteristic of the universal embrace of our faith that as the shadows of dusk descend on Yom Kippur day, after almost twenty-four hours of prayer for Israel, the Jew is alerted through the Book of Jonah, prior to the closing of “the heavenly gates” (Ne’ilah), that all humanity are God’s children. We need to restate the universal dimension of our faith, especially when we are sorely persecuted and are apt to regard the world in purely confrontational terms.

Professor David Berger - Jews, Gentiles, and the Modern Egalitarian Ethos

As in R'Ahron Soloveitchik's understanding of kiddush Hashem, R'Moses' rhetoric strongly implies that the demands of God, not merely his preferences, go beyond the letter of the law.

Why then does the letter of the letter fall short of the ultimate will of the Lawgiver? Arguably, God wanted to give a people He knew would be persecuted and beleaguered some leeway to respond to their oppressors in less than ideal fashion when circumstances genuinely demanded this. Perhaps He needed to reinforce a sense of special standing so that positive Jewish self-image would be sufficiently strong to withstand the deflation of exile, subordination, and suffering. Perhaps He wanted to provide us with the test of developing our moral character in the absence of rigid commands. Perhaps some of these considerations played a role, perhaps none, perhaps all of them and many more. In the final analysis, we cannot know. But the assumption that we are in fact called upon to transcend the parameters of these laws is rooted in authorities of impeccable credentials.

Professor David Berger - Jews, Gentiles, and the Modern Egalitarian Ethic

Let me conclude by addressing a questions which lurks beneath the surface of this entire discussion. If we choose to follow a minority position, or even carve out a new variant of that position, because we feel a powerful moral imperative to do so, are we not running the risk of suggesting that the majority of great Jewish authorities through the ages suffered from a sever moral failing? For two complementary reasons, I do not believe that this is the case. First, people who lived in a society that attempted - with considerable success - to degrade and humiliate them would have understandably felt very little motivation to qualify and reinterpret explicit directives in the Talmud. When a Holocaust survivor says something sharply pejorative about all goyim, I react very differently than I do when an American-born Jew under the age of fifty says the same thing. There is nothing remarkable in the Rishonim's acceptance of discriminatory laws; what is remarkable is the Meiri's striking reassessment.

Second, there is a fundemental point that halacha is ultimately rooted in the word of God. With varying degrees of success, we all set aside moral qualms with respect to absolutely unambiguous divine directives that appear problematic to us. In the context of authentic Judaism, submission to the divine will is paramount, and the suppression of some humane instincts in the face of clear-cut halacha may be necessary. To ascribe moral failings to the Rabbinic authorities of an oppressed people for failure to reinterpret the straightforward meaning of sacred texts discriminating against their persecutors is inappropriate, unfair, insensitive, and incorrect. But this does not mean that we must suppress our own moral instincts when we honestly see them as consistent with, even generated by, the values and teachings of the Torah writ large. We have 'al mi lismoch' [on whom to rely], and our religiously informed ethical instincts have a role to play as we examine text and tradition to reach a conception of our relationship to non-Jews that will honour the universal mission assigned to the children of Abraham.

[Earlier in the article Prof. Berger states: 'I do not advocate mechanical historicizing of such statements, nor do I believe that positions influenced by Rabbi's experience should be automatically discounted. Nonetheless, not only do I see no religious obligation to read the formulation of this stricture in a historical vacuum; the change in context is precisely what gives us the right to denounce a contemporary Jew who would use this language while retaining our reverence for the great medieval talmudist.'

Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter - Tikkun Olam: Defining the Jewish Obligation

It seems clear that the silence in the Talmud and subsequent Rabbinic literature does not reflect a principled objection to the values here being discussed but is rather the product of historically grounded mitigating circumstances...

The fact is that the big world out there has not been good to the Jews...Can there be any wonder then, that the genuine sense of obligation to the welfare to society was not high on the list of the national, communal, or personal priorities of previous Jewish generations?