Halacha and Morality Aren’t Meant to Clash

Does God command something because it is good, or is it good only because God commands it? Plato posed a version of this question in the Euthyphro nearly twenty-four centuries ago (“Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?”) and it lies at the heart of a similar tension in Jewish philosophy: does halacha define morality, or does morality exist independently of halacha?

This is the subject of a lecture series at Beit Avi Chai by Prof. Shalom Sadik, associate professor in the Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. In the series, Sadik argues that the medieval Jewish philosophers who wrestled with this question found harmonizing Torah and ethics far less of a challenge than many do today.

Shifting moral clocks

“Halacha doesn’t define morality,” Sadik says. The deeper question is whether “God asked us to do something because it’s good or is it good because God asked us to do it.” If goodness is independent of revelation, why do halacha and modern secular morality often seem to pull in different directions?

For Sadik, the answer lies less in Judaism than in us. “In the modern world we think of morality in a certain way that goes against religion,” he says. “This creates a dichotomy between halacha and morality.” Contemporary ethics, he argues, treats individual freedom as close to sacred, so that the only real transgression is harming someone else. Through this lens, much of halacha looks arbitrary at best and oppressive at worst. But read through an older lens, the dissonance mostly disappears. “In the Middle Ages, it was much easier to harmonize Torah and morality,” Sadik says, pointing to Maimonides – Judaism’s greatest medieval philosopher – as the representative case: “Maimonides saw a problematic gap between Aristotle and Judaism, but the moralities were the same.” Aristotle’s ethics placed loyalty to family and one’s people at their core, as did halacha.

A curriculum for acquiring morality

Maimonides develops this theme in the third part of the “Guide for the Perplexed,” where he insists that every commandment – no matter how arbitrary it seems – serves an intelligible purpose: correcting a false belief, an unhealthy character trait, or a flawed social arrangement. According to his reading, halacha is not moral because it is divine, but because it is the right instrument for a moral end already worth pursuing. For example, sacrifice, which by Maimonides’ time had not been practiced by Jews for a thousand years, inculcates humility, weans people off idolatry, and channels an existing human impulse towards worship.

Sadik contrasts this with contemporary morality. Most people, he argues, “think that freedom is the base of morality and the only bad thing to do is to hurt someone else. If true, this makes it hard to explain the Torah. If you work through Aristotle’s lens it’s much easier.” A morality organized around loyalty and commitment rather than individual liberty, he says, explains commandments that otherwise seem illogical. “For example, there are some religious societies that don’t accept divorce. In secular societies it’s far more acceptable.” He extends this logic to how children care for ageing parents – the debate between nursing homes and staying at home is, in his reading, a live moral question precisely because Judaism, following Aristotle’s model, “tried to build a greater commitment to group belonging than to individual freedom.” For Maimonides, Sadik says, the law itself becomes “a pedagogical tool to educate people in some principle of morality” – not as a substitute for ethics, but a curriculum for moral growth.

“You must be a good person to be a good Jew”

Sadik’s course examines Maimonides as well as three other thinkers – all with different views on where law ends and morality begins. Sa’adia Gaon (882-942), in Emunot ve-Deot, divides the commandments into two categories, “one you can understand and one you can’t understand,” a distinction Sadik says resembles the one Judah Halevi (c. 1075–1141) would later draw in The Kuzari.

According to Sadik’s reading, Halevi’s own answer is more radical. Halevi distinguishes “political commandments” (ethical obligations that any decent society requires) from commandments that come directly from God and insists a person must master the first category before the second can mean anything. “If there’s a contradiction between a moral commandment and a religious commandment, the moral commandment is more important, because it’s the basis of the religious commandment,” Sadik says. “You must be a good person to be a good Jew. If you don’t practice justice, the sacrifice has no positive influence.” In other words, halacha cannot simply overrule morality. Sadik gives the example of contemporary poskim disagreeing over whether an adult child is obligated to arrange costly, painful root-canal treatment for an elderly parent – a case that highlights the tension between the formal duty to honor one’s parents (which includes a prohibition against physically harming them) and an independent moral judgment about what actually serves their wellbeing.

Not only for Jews

Isaac Polqar (or Isaac ben Joseph ibn Pulgar) is a far less familiar name than the other three, and Sadik treats him like the wild card. A physician, poet, and committed Averroist (member of the medieval school of philosophy based on the interpretations of Aristotle by the XII-century Islamic philosopher Averroes), he was active in Christian Spain from the late XIII to early XIV century. He takes the Aristotelian argument to its most logical conclusion in his major work Ezer ha-Dat, written against his former rabbi-turned-apostate Abner of Burgos (c. 1270– c. 1347, or later). Sadik summarizes his position as follows: “He thinks that the halacha is completely the moral law, and people who don’t practice it aren’t moral, even if they’re not Jewish.” For Polqar, Sadik says, the Torah is not only for the Jews but for every society, “like Plato says the law is for the republic.”  

The gap between medieval and contemporary morality

These four philosophers all wrote before modernity’s split between law and ethics. The course closes with a set of dilemmas that demonstrate the gap between medieval and contemporary morality. For example, medieval thinkers, prioritizing family and continuity above individual desire, expected a gay man to suppress his inclinations and marry a woman, whereas a modern posek is far more likely to weigh the man’s own wellbeing as a competing moral value. Another example is a wife who refuses to observe family purity laws, including immersion in the mikveh. “What’s more important – the practice of the commandment or the aim of the commandment?” Sadik asks. “Maimonides would say it’s better to stay married and not practice some elements; a modern posek might say you should divorce if she won’t go to the mikveh.” The deeper disagreement, he argues, is structural: “Medieval philosophers think morality can’t contradict religion; if it seems there’s a clash, it’s because you don’t understand morality, or because every law has some problematic extreme cases. By contrast, modern commentators recognize that there can be a clash.” This is a reminder that a law can look immoral to us while still being intended as the most reliable route to the very morality we use to judge it.

For more, see Prof. Shalom Sadik’s online series at BAC, “Morality and Mitzvot: Do They Go Hand in Hand?” (in Hebrew).

Main Photo: AI