Conscience: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey

At this critical moment in the world's history, we are called sharply but lovingly to think in new ways about our moral and political behaviour by Harold Schulweis, one of America's great spiritual leaders. Like the biblical prophets, he speaks to people of all faiths, all backgrounds in this call for renewal of conscience. "The urgent challenge for religion is to provide religious groups with the resources needed to resist immoral authority. Religion is morally obligated to instill the sanctity of conscience that may balance the culture of obedience with the culture of moral disobedience. Organized religion appears unable to envision the interdependent coexistence of obedience and disobedience, a time to obey and a time to disobey." A provocative book, it examines the idea of conscience and the role conscience plays in our relationships to law, ethics, religion, human nature and God - and to each other. From Abraham to Abu Ghraib, from the dissenting prophets to Darfur, he probes history, the Bible and the works of contemporary thinkers for ideas about both critical disobedience and uncritical obedience, illuminating the potential for evil and the potential for good that rests within us as individuals and as a society.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 Judaism and Conscience 3 A Word about Conscience 5 1. Conscience Confronts God 7 Abraham and Moral Audacity 8 Moses Nullifies God's Law 10 Moses Cites Scripture to God 12 Moses Frees God 14 Four Dissenting Prophets 16 Hannah Hurls Words Toward Heaven 17 The Psalmist Awakes the Slumbering 19 Natural Moral Sensibility 20 2. Human Conscience and Divine Legislation 23 Rabbinic Legal Conscience 26 Laws That Never Were and Never Will Be 27 The Rebellious Son 28 Idolatrous Cities, Leprous Houses 30 Capital Punishment 30 Sotah: The Ordeal of Jealousy 31 Illegitimacy: When Conscience Fails 32 The Chained Woman 33 Maimonides: Within the Letter of the Law 34 The Myth of Absolute Immutability 35 Moral Relativism 36 The Fear of God and the Fear of Torah 38 What Is Meant by Conscience as "Fear of God" 40 Matters of Temperament 42 3. Conscience and Covenant: Vertical and Horizontal 45 The God of the Philosophers 45 The Duality in One Covenant 46 The Vertical Covenant 48 Statutes 50 The Consolations of Obedience 52 The Horizontal Covenant of Conscience 53 Legends of Conscience 54 4. Against Conscience 59 The Myth of Gyges 61 Freud: The Truth about Human Nature 62 Nietzsche: The Craftiness of Conscience 63 Social Darwinism and Conscience 64 Theological Suspicions 66 Judaism: The Morality of Theistic Humanism 68 5. Witness to Goodness 71 Ben Gurion's Search for Morale 73 To Discover Conscience in Hell 75 An Entire Village: The Conspiracy of Goodness 77 Stefa Krawkowska: The Heroism of Hiding 78 Seven Sisters and a Mother Superior 79 Diplomat Rescuers 80 Aristides de Sousa Mendes: Undiplomatic Diplomacy 82 Sempo Sugihara 85 Conversation with a German Pastor 87 6. The Conscience of an Anti-Semite 91 The Enigma of Anti-Semitic Rescuers 92 Zophia and Zegota 94 Motivations for Altruism 96 The Ambiguity of Good and Evil 97 Capturing the Evil Tempter 98 7. Cultivating Conscience 101 Obedience and Authority 101 Abu Ghraib and the "Prison" of Stanford 103 The Milgram Experiment 106 8. The Bridge across the Rivers of “Either-Or” 109 Either-Or: The Way Options Are Shared 110 Not in Heaven But on Earth 112 Abraham Isaac Kook: The Art of Reconciliation 114 Facing God 115 What Can Religion Do? 118 The Pedagogy of Conscience 119 The Habit of Conscience 120 Heroes of Conscience 121 Transmitting Conscience 123 The Many Faces of Conscience 124 The Pendulum of Duty 126 Notes 127

About the Author :
Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis, one of the most respected spiritual leaders and teachers of his generation, has been a rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, California, for close to forty years. He is the founding chairman of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, an organization that identifies and offers grants to those non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews threatened by the agents of Nazi savagery. He is also the founder of Jewish World Watch, which aims to raise moral consciousness within the Jewish community. Synagogues and other religious institutions are now supporting this effort across the country. Rabbi Schulweis is the author of many books, including: Conscience: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey (Jewish Lights), Approaches to the Philosophy of Religion, For Those Who Can't Believe, Finding Each Other in Judaism, In God's Mirror, and two books of original religious poetry and meditation—From Birth to Immortality and Passages in Poetry. His Evil and the Morality of God is regarded as a classic.

Review :
It doesn't take a genius to figure out when one receives a letter from a charity informing one that whether they had two million or ninety million invested with Madoff that something is wrong with our world. One of the wisest men I have met, Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis has written Conscience: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey (Jewish Lights $19.99). It is pertinent today as it is in discussing the Old Testament. Oddly enough, Hebrew had no word for "conscience", modern Hebrew has the word “matzpun” which is derived from the Hebrew “tzafun” which connotes hiddenness. The major question Schulweis addresses is “What is the appropriate response to divine laws that run against the grain of conscience? He points out Abraham's dialogue with God over God’s intention to kill all of Sodom. God is not the implacable authoritarian commander whose plans cannot be questioned. Rabbi Schulweis points to Moses convinces God that the second commandment to visit the sins of the father on the next generation was wrong. As we talked, I did ask Rabbi Schulweis, “Does God have a conscience?” In the light of torture at Abu Ghraib in our days, one can use the question, “Must an immoral law, divinely given, be observed?” God’s Law or Halacha must have conscience, and yet changing times can have their affect. By what sort of logic are divine laws overturned? In the case of a wife suspected of adultery, she was to drink the waters of bitterness and hear the priest give a horrible curse. If she was guilty, her body would swell and her thighs would “fall away”. To change a bad law requires compassionate conscience and moral courage. Conscience allows us to tell truth to power, which is the irony that Eli Weisel’s Foundation should have lost so much money in the Madoff debacle. Where were those who questioned the man’s investing policies who did not speak up? Does greed overcome conscience? He quotes Thomas Malthus and Herbert Spencer that attend the voice of conscience and our economy will be drained and our energy exhausted. Rabbi Schulweis told me about his foundation, the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, dedicated to the study and recognition of the phenomenon of Christian rescuers and to raise funds so that in their waning years they have some security, recognition and material help. So far they have given help to over 2,000. He includes in the book the remarkable help given to the Jews in the Holocaust by diplomats who gave over and above documents to rescue them from the Naziis. Among those mentioned are Aristides de Sousa Mendes of Portugal and Sempo Sugihara of Japan. Rabbi Schulweis ends the book with the thought that we are frozen in the overwhelming bias toward the duty to obey without question. A fact that has led us to war in Iraq and blind belief in an economic fantasy led by a duplicitous Pied Piper.