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March 22, 1969

Doing Your Own Thing? A Jewish View (1969)

General Jewish Thought
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G-dless Goodness (1966)

The question is often posed to us, sometimes by ourselves: can I not be good without being religious? Is it not possible to be decent without accepting all the minutiae of religion? Is not good behaviour sufficient without observance of all the rituals? That question has recently been answered ‒ in a sophisticated fashion ‒ by a number of theologians who have declared ‒ borrowing a phrase from Nietzsche, the German philosopher ‒ that “G‑d is dead.” This means that G‑d has no relations with our world, that He is unconcerned with man, and that therefore He is irrelevant and meaningless. Hence, they conclude, we must construct a morality in human terms ‒ without reference to traditional religion; we must devise a secular ethic and propound a G‑dless goodness.How shall we respond, we who | are believing and observing Jews, we who deny that — Heaven for-bid — "G-d is dead,” but who insist instead, on affirming un-dying faith in the Torah’s Elohim hayyim, the living G-d of the Bible?First, we cannot deny that there are good people who do not believe in G-d. We have all met such people in our own personal experience. However, Judaism maintains that such goodness can-not last forever. The moral instincts that prevail today among the non-religious are but the residue of a religious reser-voir which is rapidly drying up. They are living off the ethical I interest from the quickly dwind-ling religious capital of two or three generations qgo.For ethical living is the branch of a tree of life, of which the roots are religion. When you cut off the root, the branch does not wither immediately, but eventually it must die. So, ethics is a natural consequence of religion. Reject religion, and within a few generations ethical living and ׳ moral instincts must die as well. .Why Good ... and to what extent?Secular ethics, G-dless goodness, is inadequate for yet another reason, as the late Dr. Isidor Epstein has pointed out. It simply is not inwardly compelling. There comes a time when…
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Student Notes on Philosophy 78 (1969)

ספר התניא - every man has an animal soul, a נפש הבהמתית, vital principle in the body – הנפש הבהמתית, הגוף, ואת הצד האנושי שבאדם. הנפש האלקית – only jews have it, has three parts (1) נפש (2) רוח (3) נשמה – highest of three parts. כמו שהאלוקות מתגלה בי ספירות, כמו כן האדם מתבטא רוחניותו בעשר הספירות. החידוש המיוחד שבתניא
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The Pursuit of Fun (1961)

When the Founding Fathers of America wrote the Declaration of Independence, they included one new phrase which was to have wide repercussions later in the history of this country. That phrase is, “the pursuit of happiness.” The idea of happiness is, of course, nothing new. Americans did not invent it. It has been known in a hundred languages and experienced universally for millennia. Our own Torah dedicates three entire sections as parashath moadim, the description of the major holidays on which we are commanded ve’samachta hechagekha, "thou shalt be happy in thy festivals.” What was new in the formulation of the Founding Fathers was the emphasis on happiness as something to pursue. Serious thinkers have not always looked with favor on this phrase. Not that there is anything wrong with being happy — their outlook is not jaundiced — but they have two reservations: first, is happiness really to be the highest goal of man? Is it subordinate to or more important than, let us say, the idea of duty, or respect for others, or faithfulness, or honor? And second, can happiness really be acquired by pursuing it? Is it not really a rather elusive prize which you can win only indirectly by living in a certain way, and not by a direct chase? But all these debates are really academic. Today we accept happiness as terribly important; for many it is the highest value that life has to offer. And we no longer ask questions about the wisdom of pursuing it in order to attain it. We do not simply pursue it; we are relentless, fanatic, single-minded in our hot chase of happiness. Also, we have changed the word “happiness” to “fun,” and with it has come a change of the content of our aspirations. Happiness, at least, implies an ordered, harmonious way of life which offers deep satisfactions. Fun is nothing of the sort. It is escape, pure and simple. It is a matter of losing yourself consciously in a world where all tensions are released and inhibitions loosened. And the pursuit of fun ha…
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