Awards

• Winner of National Jewish Book Award (Jewish Life) 2008

Overview

"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."

Full Product Details

Author:   Harold M. Schulweis
Publisher:   Jewish Lights Publishing
Imprint:   Jewish Lights Publishing
Dimensions:   Width: 16.10cm , Height: 1.70cm , Length: 23.40cm
Weight:   0.001kg
ISBN:  

9781580233750

ISBN 10:   1580233759
Pages:   176
Publication Date:   30 October 2008
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Replaced By:   9781580234191
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

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"

Reviews

There are few Progressive rabbis writing today anywhere in the world who can equal Harold Schulweis for integrity, honesty, clear-sightedness and common sense. In Conscience, Schulweis has carefully crafted a wonderful book on conscience and conformity. Conscience is divided into eight sections: Conscience Confronts God, Human Conscience and Divine Legislation, Conscience and Covenant: Vertical and Horizontal, Against Conscience, Witness to Goodness, The Conscience of an Anti-Semite, Cultivating Conscience and The Bridge Across the Rivers of Either- Or. Each section is subdivided and through the sub-sections Schulweis develops his theme with specific examples. Starting from exploring the key biblical relationships with God of Abraham and Moses, and the rabbinic approach to halakhah, Schulweis considers the nature of the covenant between God and Israel, whether it is a horizontal one, requiring give and take on both sides, or whether it is a vertical one where God dictates and Israel does what it is told! Chapters 5 and 6 are in many ways the most fascinating, notably the latter with its case studies of convinced anti-Semites who nevertheless risked everything in Nazi-occupied Europe to save Jews. In chapter 7, Schulweis considers some of the recent stains on America's reputation, such as the torture and inhuman treatment by American troops of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but disappointingly ignores the even viler excesses of the Bush regime such as the suspension of the Geneva Conventions for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and the outsourcing of torture. What is also missing from this otherwise superb book is any mention of the tension between the dictates of one's Jewish conscience and a desire to support the State of Israel and the actions of Israeli governments and the Israeli military. I read Conscience against the background of the assault on Gaza and this seemed a huge lacuna.--Rabbi Dr Charles Middleburgh Union of Liberal and Progressive Synagogues (01/01/2009) A new take on the oldest Jewish book a woman's perspective is the Jewish Book Council's pick of the year. The Torah: A Women's Commentary (URJ Press), edited by Tamara Eskenazi and Rabbi Andrea Weiss, was announced this week as winner of the Everett Family Foundation's Jewish Book of the Year Award. The Torah, which emphasizes Jewish women in the Bible and offers a women's perspective, is the first such collection of scholarship and commentary on Jewish scriptures written by women in several countries and in Jewish denominations. No one questions why women should read a Torah commentary written by men, Rabbi Weiss wrote in The Jerusalem Post last year. For the longest time, that is all we had. The new commentary does not seek to supplant existing Torah commentaries, but to supplement them, adding an array of new voices to our collective conversation about the Torah. Benny Morris's 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (Yale University Press) won the Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award in the history category, and the two other books about Jewish women and the Torah A Jewish Woman s Prayer Book (Spiegel & Grau), edited by Aliza Lavie, and Esther Takac s Genesis The Book with Seventy Faces: A Guide for the Family also won JBC awards. Other winners included The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (Palgrave Macmillan) by Father Patrick Desbois and Conscience: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey (Jewish Lights Publishing) by Rabbi Harold Schulweis. The authors of those books and 14 others will be honored March 5 at the Center for Jewish History.--Steve Lipman The Jewish Week (01/16/2009) This remarkable study constitutes a profound and stirring call to action in our troubled world from one of America's great religious leaders. 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. He thus has sterling credentials to present a study on Conscience in the Jewish and general traditions. In his Introduction, Rabbi Schulweis writes that conscience may be understood as the hidden inner compass that guides our lives and must be searched for and recovered repeatedly. At no time more than our own is this need to retrieve the shards of broken conscience more urgent. His clarion call to rethink our moral and political behavior examines the idea of conscience and the role conscience plays in our relationships to government, law, ethics, religion, human nature and God and to each other. From Abraham to Abu Ghraib, from the dissenting prophets to Darfur, Rabbi Harold Schulweis probes history, the Bible and the works of contemporary thinkers for ideas about both critical disobedience and uncritical obedience. He illuminates the potential for evil and the potential for good that rests within us as individuals and as a society. By questioning religion s capacity and will to break from mindless conformity, Rabbi Schulweis challenges us to counter our current suppressive culture of obedience with the culture of moral compassion, and to fulfill religion s obligation to make room for and carry out courageous moral dissent. The author draws from a wide range of biblical, Talmudic, midrashic, as well as secular sources to make his point. While revering tradition, he holds that there are times when the wisdom of our conscience is more authentically the voice of God than the words of our tradition. A bold affirmation of God s gift to humans to think through issues and follow our own heart, at the same time as we honor our past. Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, president, Union for Reform Judaism, expresses his reaction to the book by calling it, correctly in my view, remarkable, and writing the Schulweis eloquently makes the case that faith can never be passive; it must assault our conscience and push us to do right. Rabbi Schulweis leadership in the Jewish world, in word and action, has made him one of American Jewry s great luminaries. We are all indebted to him for producing this ground-breaking statement on a major ethical and theological issue.--Dov Peretz Elkins Jewish Media Review (11/02/2008) 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.--CONNIE MARTINSON Beverly Hills Courier (01/02/2009) Remarkable . Eloquently makes the case that faith can never be passive; it must assault our conscience and push us to do right. Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, president, Union for Reform Judaism Clearly reveals a new depth of understanding of the gift of partnership in creation afforded by God to His beloved children through the exercise of moral consciousness and 'fear of God.' Archbishop Hovnan Derderian, Armenian Church Western Diocese Learned and thoughtful demonstrates that conscience constitutes the vital core of Judaism, challenging us in our complacency and inspiring us to transform morality into deeds. Professor Susannah Heschel, author, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus Calls on us to recognize that sometimes the promptings of our conscience are more authentically the voice of God than the words of our tradition. Rabbi Harold Kushner, author, When Bad Things Happen to Good People

There are few Progressive rabbis writing today anywhere in the world who can equal Harold Schulweis for integrity, honesty, clear-sightedness and common sense. In Conscience, Schulweis has carefully crafted a wonderful book on conscience and conformity.Conscience is divided into eight sections: Conscience Confronts God, Human Conscience and Divine Legislation, Conscience and Covenant: Vertical and Horizontal, Against Conscience, Witness to Goodness, The Conscience of an Anti-Semite, Cultivating Conscience and The Bridge Across the Rivers of Either- Or. Each section is subdivided and through the sub-sections Schulweis develops his theme with specific examples.Starting from exploring the key biblical relationships with God of Abraham and Moses, and the rabbinic approach to halakhah, Schulweis considers the nature of the covenant between God and Israel, whether it is a horizontal one, requiring give and take on both sides, or whether it is a vertical one where God dictates and Israel does what it is told! Chapters 5 and 6 are in many ways the most fascinating, notably the latter with its case studies of convinced anti-Semites who nevertheless risked everything in Nazi-occupied Europe to save Jews.In chapter 7, Schulweis considers some of the recent stains on America's reputation, such as the torture and inhuman treatment by American troops of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but disappointingly ignores the even viler excesses of the Bush regime such as the suspension of the Geneva Conventions for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and the outsourcing of torture.What is also missing from this otherwise superb book is any mention of the tension between the dictates of one s Jewish conscience and a desire to support the State of Israel and the actions of Israeli governments and the Israeli military. I read Conscience against the background of the assault on Gaza and this seemed a huge lacuna.--Rabbi Dr Charles Middleburgh Union of Liberal and Progressive Synagogues (0

There are few Progressive rabbis writing today anywhere in the world who can equal Harold Schulweis for integrity, honesty, clear-sightedness and common sense. In Conscience, Schulweis has carefully crafted a wonderful book on conscience and conformity. Conscience is divided into eight sections: Conscience Confronts God, Human Conscience and Divine Legislation, Conscience and Covenant: Vertical and Horizontal, Against Conscience, Witness to Goodness, The Conscience of an Anti-Semite, Cultivating Conscience and The Bridge Across the Rivers of Either- Or. Each section is subdivided and through the sub-sections Schulweis develops his theme with specific examples.Starting from exploring the key biblical relationships with God of Abraham and Moses, and the rabbinic approach to halakhah, Schulweis considers the nature of the covenant between God and Israel, whether it is a horizontal one, requiring give and take on both sides, or whether it is a vertical one where God dictates and Israel does what it is told! Chapters 5 and 6 are in many ways the most fascinating, notably the latter with its case studies of convinced anti-Semites who nevertheless risked everything in Nazi-occupied Europe to save Jews.In chapter 7, Schulweis considers some of the recent stains on America's reputation, such as the torture and inhuman treatment by American troops of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but disappointingly ignores the even viler excesses of the Bush regime such as the suspension of the Geneva Conventions for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and the outsourcing of torture.What is also missing from this otherwise superb book is any mention of the tension between the dictates of one's Jewish conscience and a desire to support the State of Israel and the actions of Israeli governments and the Israeli military. I read Conscience against the background of the assault on Gaza and this seemed a huge lacuna.--Rabbi Dr Charles Middleburgh Union of Liberal and Progressive Synagogues (01/01/2009)

Remarkable . Eloquently makes the case that faith can never be passive; it must assault our conscience and push us to do right. Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, president, Union for Reform Judaism Clearly reveals a new depth of understanding of the gift of partnership in creation afforded by God to His beloved children through the exercise of moral consciousness and 'fear of God.' Archbishop Hovnan Derderian, >Armenian Church Western Diocese Learned and thoughtful demonstrates that conscience constitutes the vital core of Judaism, challenging us in our complacency and inspiring us to transform morality into deeds. Professor Susannah Heschel, author, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus Calls on us to recognize that sometimes the promptings of our conscience are more authentically the voice of God than the words of our tradition. Rabbi Harold Kushner, author, When Bad Things Happen to Good People

Author Information

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.

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