Ethics at the Center

Elliot N. Dorff, Ethics at the Center: Jewish Theory and Practice for Living a Moral Life (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2024) pp. 249.

When a senior scholar is a prolific author, he/she will often get asked “which one of your books should I read?” Initially, many will get insulted. After all, a scholar’s work is cumulative, one book builds upon the other, one’s thought evolves, one’s understanding develops. With his latest work Ethics at the Center, my distinguished colleague and friend Elliot Dorff has offered us a clear answer for he has distilled his life’s work by choosing to present 17 seminal essays from his life’s work, offering commentary as to his evolving thought and all coming together to reemphasize the work’s substile: Jewish Theory and Practice for Living a Moral Life.

The reader will appreciate the diversity of Dorff’s thought and the variety of issue he addresses. He has written on Matters of Life and Death, Love Your Neighbor and Yourself, The Way into Tikkun Olam To Do Right and the Good: A Modern Jewish Approach to Personal Ethics, to name but a few of his many books. This work appears in the Jewish Publication Society’s impressive Scholar of Distinction series. Readers of this will come to understand Dorff’s philosophy of Jewish life and thought, his decency and his fierce passion for ethical living. A philosopher by training his analysis of issue is sharp and rooted in critical thinking. As a member of the Law Committee of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly he has addressed some of the most important issues of our time, rooted in his understanding of Jewish law, but also grounded in an understanding how law and tradition must evolve to confront issues not imagined in the time of the Torah and the Rabbinic era while respecting the wisdom contained in both the written and the oral tradition, and insisting that it can be applied to the most contemporary of events. At the center of his thought is a deep belief in a God of compassion who has created human beings in the divine image, with each human being having a sacredness all their own.

He engages in dialogue seriously and respectfully, prepared to listen and learn, but never shying away from defending and advocating his point of view. In this volume he republishes his seminal exchange with the late Reform Jewish theologian Eugene Borowitz on the differences between Reform and Conservative Judaism and their understanding of individual consciousness and communal loyalty. I remember well the exchange and I also recall that both movements’ circulated the dialogue, each believing that their perspective had prevailed. The dialogue’s importance has endured in the years since it publication as society has focused increasingly on individualism. The Rabbis would well understand as they taught that all disagreements for the sake of heaven will endure. Dorff also published his contribution now decades old to the evolution of Jewish military ethics as the IDF’s code of ethics was being refashioned in the 1990s, rejecting Michael Waltzer’s, the world’s leading authority on “just war theory,” that the IDF borrow the insights of that tradition since our own has little to say since it had not been forced to address war in practice, not in theory, for almost two millennia. No, Dorff argues, we can extrapolate from Biblical and Rabbinic sources important Jewish values and we can not only borrow but Judaize secular just war theory to come to insights Judaically rooted and uniquely our own, tested by timeless values while being responsive to the exigencies of the contemporary world.

Each essay is introduced by a contemporary reflection and Dorff is not hesitant to disagree with his earlier writings and to tell us why understanding that there is a cumulative wisdom to a scholar’s work, to a Rabbi’s career. As I read this work, I kept recalling Yehuda Bauer’s Rethinking the Holocaust, written at a comparable stage in his long life – he passed away last year at 98 —  as he reflected back on the meaning of his many scholarly offerings, and on Philip Roth’s Rereading Myself and Others.

Among the issues addressed in this work are abortion, sexual orientation, playing defamatory and violent video games, providing references when truth may be harmful, modesty in communications and even whether charities may accept donations from ill gotten games. One can barely be more pragmatic and yet in the same work Dorff writes, as he often does, of God in several distinct chapters and of his distinct philosophy of Jewish law.

There comes a time in one’s career when the best way forward is to look back and insist on the core of one’s work, the essence of one’s values, now four score years strong, Dorff has done this with characteristic lucidity, with great modesty and with a passionate insistence that ethics must be at the Center of Jewish life, it is the essence of what God and Jewish tradition demand of us.

And to answer a question often posed to Dorff, to understand his work one can do no better than read Ethics at the Center. I suspect for many first-time readers this will be but a beginning and when faced with the exigencies of life and the need for guidance, they can turn to the rest of his vast oeuvre for guidance and illumination. He truly is a scholar of distinction.