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PDF FormatThis can be seen in the Noahide laws themselves. There are seven commandments that were accepted by the rabbis as “the laws of the children of Noah.” During the time before the editing of the Babylonian Talmud was completed, there was some disagreement among the rabbis as to how many commandments would be included. Three of the seven commandments were understood to be especially important, since they were laws for which a Jew is obligated to give up his life rather than violate: (i) Idolatry; (ii) shedding innocent blood; (iii) sexual immorality.44 The decision to make these three prohibitions categorical was made at a time when the Jews were suffering extreme hardships: According to the tradition, the leading rabbis in the land of Israel held a meeting immediately after the failed revolution of Bar Kochba and the resulting persecution of Jewish religious practice by the Roman emperor Hadrian, in the second century C.E. Hiding in an attic in the town of Lod, they had a very practical need to determine what Judaism’s “red lines” would be—that is, which forbidden practices a Jew should be willing to commit in order to avoid execution, and which should be resisted even if that meant one would “die and not sin.” 45 It was in this context that the rabbis arrived at these three cardinal prohibitions. It is significant that the rabbis did not decree that a Jew must die rather than violate the Sabbath, the dietary restrictions, or the prohibition on eating on Yom Kippur.46 A Jew was to sacrifice his life only when asked to choose between death on the one hand, and idolatry, murder, or prohibited sexual acts on the other. Such an act of martyrdom was considered to be “the sanctification of the divine name.”47 In other words, it was seen as not only the moral thing to do, but also the holy thing to do.48 This law, moreover, is incumbent on non-Jews no less than on Jews. Both Jews and gentiles, when in extremis, are expected to fall back to the basic moral law considered to have been in effect before the revelation of the specific Jewish laws.
To understand this more fully, it is instructive to look at each of these cardinal prohibitions in depth. To begin with idolatry, it seems clear that this prohibition pertains to a person’s relationship to the greatest transcendence, which is always God in one way or another. This is what the rabbis assumed to be the meaning of one of the most common biblical names of God, Elohim, which is understood as representing the most universal manifestation of God.49 It is worth noting how this prohibition relates first externally, to the Jews’ relationship to gentiles, and then internally, within the Jewish world.
The prohibition of idolatry became extremely important for Jews in the Middle Ages for understanding the religious status of Christianity and Islam. These religions claimed to be worshiping the same universal God as the Jews. There were some Jews who said that these claims were true, and therefore that Christians and Muslims were not the same as the ancient idolaters so castigated in the Bible and the Talmud. There were others who claimed that Muslims, and even more so Christians, were not worshiping the one true God. These judgments depend on how one defines idolatry and interprets its prohibition. If one takes the latter to mean that gentiles must worship God the same way that Jews worship God, then the prohibition of idolatry for gentiles would seem to require their eventual conversion to Judaism.50 But if one understands it as requiring that gentiles only worship the same divine object as the Jews, then Jews can make great allowances for the different ways various gentiles worship that same God.51 The practical implication of these medieval discussions is to determine the degree to which Jews can show respect for the religious practices of Christians and Muslims. (Today, another practical implication of these medieval discussions is whether there is enough theological commonality with Christians or Muslims to be able to hold an authentic theological dialogue with them.)
In modern times, understanding the prohibition of idolatry for gentiles has another function, one perhaps more important than how Jews ought to view either Christianity or Islam. It may also give us new tools for judging totalitarian ideologies like Nazism and Communism, under whose rule the Jews suffered so greatly in the twentieth century. Neither Nazism nor Communism would allow the Jews to live as Jews. Nazism did not allow the Jews to live at all; Communism eradicated Jewish learning, language, and practice with brutal efficiency. Unlike Christianity or Islam, though, neither of these totalitarian ideologies refers to absolute transcendence, to the Creator, God. What we see here is the deification of a finite creature: The state, or the party, or the volk.
The philosopher Emil Fackenheim has argued that one must understand Nazism and its evil to be an idolatry and not just a secular ideology. Thus Fackenheim identifies Nazism as “the modern idolatry because, being unsurpassable, it reveals all that idolatry can be in the modern world.”52 Fackenheim defines idolatry to be the substitution of the infinite (God) with the finite (creature). We may add that the reason the Nazis are morally responsible for their idolatry is because this idolatry is universally prohibited. It is not because the Jews invented this prohibition. The Jews only discovered it, just as the gentiles are also capable of discovering it.
Looking at the Jewish world, the prohibition of idolatry has another function. For Jews, it has become a powerful tool for an internal critique of what can only be regarded as forms of superstition or tribalism. The Jewish people are taught by the Tora that the God they worship is the maker of heaven and earth. Although the covenant gives them a special status in the divine governance of the universe, that special relationship with God is not meant to be exclusive. God’s intimacy with them does not mean that he has lost interest in the rest of his creation: All of mankind are created in God’s image.
Jews flirt with idolatry, which is the worship of a finite god, when they want their God to be too much like themselves. This has inevitably led to various forms of superstition which are, in essence, a practical version of anthropomorphism, making God too much like man. According to Maimonides, the epitome of such anthropomorphism, the error of all errors and the basis for idolatry, is the belief that God actually has a body.53 For Maimonides, the practical prohibition of idolatry and the theoretical prohibition of anthropomorphism, which are two sides of the same coin, are unlike any other prohibitions in the Tora. That is because when God said at Mount Sinai, “I am the Eternal your God”54 and “There cannot be other gods for you,”55 the Jews were not being told something they did not already know.56 In fact, Maimonides saw much of the “religious” legislation of the Tora (that is, what does not directly pertain to interpersonal relations) to be the historical specification of the general, pre-Sinaitic prohibition of idolatry.57 Thus, in practical terms, Maimonides was harshly critical of liturgical innovations that added to the seeming anthropomorphism of biblical language rather than moving beyond it in a more abstract manner.58
With regard to the prohibition of shedding innocent blood, it is important to begin by recalling the supreme importance this has taken on for Jews since the Holocaust, when they were the victims of both unparalleled barbarity and global indifference. However, if the issue is to be addressed coherently and rationally, Jews cannot turn it into a cause for special pleading, as if they have claims on universal justice different from those of other human beings. Despite all her ambivalence about Jews and Judaism, the philosopher Hannah Arendt was right when she insisted that the trial of Adolf Eichmann be seen as the judgment of “a crime against humanity perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people.”59 The Nazis did not see themselves as murderers of human beings like themselves. They killed Jews because they believed that their victims were not human. Their crime was the attempted elimination of an entire people from mankind itself. The judgment against the Nazis, both at the Nuremberg trial and at the Eichmann trial, was that no one can remove the human status from any person or group, because that status is not conferred or denied by another human being. Human dignity transcends all human invention. It is the most fundamental datum, the most basic “given,” and every murder is an attempt to deny the basic rights derived from it. Hence, one might well look upon the true “original sin” to be not the eating of the fruit in the Garden of Eden, but Cain’s murder of his brother Abel.
As for the prohibition of uncontrolled sexual behavior, we see a view of human sexuality that runs counter to the prevailing attitude in most liberal societies. Modern liberalism has insisted that sexuality is the private business of consenting adults. As an element of privacy, it is something that society must not regulate in any way. Jewish tradition—and most other religious traditions as well—regards this laissez-faire attitude as contrary to the needs of human nature, which is necessarily social. When sexuality is left to its own devices, unstructured by social norms, it becomes counter-creative, and even violent. According to what the Jewish tradition regards to be universally binding, the natural context of sexuality is the family.60 The consequences of sexual permissiveness for the spiritual and moral health of society and the individual can be disastrous.
