Published: 17 February 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
We knew what God did and didn’t want; what He expected from us and what was ludicrous. He didn’t care for black-suited fashion, especially in the summer. He, like us, was repulsed by the price of kosher meat. And He, like any rational person, could tell the difference between Kosher l’Pesach and Chametz Coke.
We ramped up our moral superiority when considering the “religos” being publicly outed for their hypocrisies. Our indignation was further provoked when we heard that jails not only provide kosher food, they facilitate minyanim for the religious criminals. Oh the irony.
“Religion poisons everything”, wrote Christopher Hitchens.
When I trudged my own way into the halls of a yeshiva, it was this duplicity that ignited my moral temper and energised my first philosophical assault on the rabbis.
“Why are religious people so unethical?”
More than 20 years later, I still struggle with it, despite now being an Orthodox rabbi.
Every moral being oscillates between two, often mutually exclusive, drives; our instinct for physical and emotional pleasure on the one hand, and our moral conscience to live by our values on the other.
When these feelings complement one another, no free choice is needed, but when they contradict one another our true character is revealed. This is the moral battlefield where our spirit is either refined or corrupted.
Moral failures are par for the course in life, but it’s how we respond to those failures that determines our developmental path. We can choose to take responsibility for our “misbehaviour” and seek means and methods to improve, or we can choose to recalibrate our values to conform to our behaviour. A little cognitive dissonance, if you will.
We do both at different times; because we, like all people, are complex.
The Torah is not an elixir of moral behaviour, although it may be the elixir of moral clarity. It is a system that affords one a structure to emotionally mature and to develop both ethically and spiritually. But it isn’t magic.
The morally corrupt can take any form; don’t be persuaded by the attire, the title or even the eloquence of their speech. People of dubious character tend to absolve themselves of responsibility by finding a hook to hang their depravity on. If it’s not religion its socialism, if not that then nationalism, humanism and veganism - take your pick.
The Vilna Gaon once remarked that the Torah can be compared to water. Just as water provides strength to a seed and promotes its growth, so too the Torah gives strength to the individual and makes them grow. Some people develop into flowers, others into weeds.
Religion doesn’t poison people, but poisoned people will find adequate support and justification for their depravity in their religion.
Illustration: John Kron
