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AN OBJECTION levelled again and again to views such as mine is: if what you say is true, that the mitsvot are not direct commands given by God but the result of human reflection and adaptation over the ages, why should Jews obey them? Why should contemporary Jews be fettered by the tradition? It is rational to keep divine laws, for who is man to question the will of God? But why should human beings follow laws ordained by other human beings? Why should our lives be governed by the teachings of the masters of old, no matter how eminent, wise, and saintly they were? To reply to this challenge, it is necessary to consider the meaning that can be given to the distinction between God-made and man-made laws.
The ethical precepts of Judaism present less of a problem than the purely ritual precepts in that the former are, in the main, those which human beings can understand and to which they respond of their own volition; those which they would carry out even there were no divine commands. I discussed the relationship between religion and ethics from a Jewish point of view some years ago. I repeat here only the salient points relevant to the theme of this chapter.
The Ethical Basis
A question much discussed by religious thinkers is whether the good in the ethical sense is good because God wills it to be so, or rather whether God wills it to be so because it is good. In other words, is there an autonomous ethic with only an indirect association with religion? To take the fifth commandment as an illustration, is it proper to honour parents because God has so commanded, or does God command it because it is right and proper? If the former is true, then conceivably if God had commanded us to despise our parents that would be right. But if the latter, then God, being God, could not possibly command us to despise our parents. Or, with regard to the eighth commandment, is it wrong to steal only because God has declared that it is wrong, or is it wrong to steal because it is intrinsically wrong and that is why God commands us not to steal?
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