I was sitting in my Talmud class this week, debating the intricacies of privilege and power in the seder ritual, when my professor interjected this statement:
“Jews and Christians have a lot to learn from each other. Jews can learn love, and Christians can learn responsibility.”
Often, this defining separation appears in the response of each group towards persons in need. Imagine with me a stereotypical Christian and Jew crossing paths with a poor person in the street, when suddenly they each reach to give alms. The Christian says, “I do this because Jesus loves you.” The Jew says, “I do this because I am morally obligated to give to you.”
Both provide charity, and both out of their religious impulse, yet the message is quite different.
In the Talmud we read:
Rabbi Akiva taught: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This is the most important rule in the Torah. Ben Azzai says: “Man was created in the image of God.” That is an even greater principle (Y. Nedarim 9:4).
Rabbi Sidney Schwarz explains this ruling, writing: “It speaks to the fundamental equality of all people. To say that everyone is created in God’s image is to say that everyone deserves respect. It recognizes that we might not always love other people, but Judaism insists that no matter how we feel, we need to treat all people with dignity” Judaism and Justice, 44.
What I hear as a Christian is my own failure to consider my obligation to not only my inner circle, but to my neighborhood and world. This is not to say that there is no sense of obligation in Christianity, but the obligations, at least in many denominations, are generally rooted in following Jesus’ example of loving even the lowest among us. However, this is quite different from the obligation of the Jewish practice of tzedakah, or charity, which insists upon equal communal responsibility as championed by the biblical prophets. By staging my actions of justice and charity as “simply following the way of Jesus” to those “lesser than me,” I rob myself of my agency and therefore of my responsibility.
When I defend injustice because of compassion, I defend the “other” who requires my compassion.
When I defend injustice because of obligation, I defend myself because we are the same.
This ideal is certainly not always lived out. But as a Christian, I am challenged to consider my own share of responsibility to those in my world. What would it truly mean if I lived my life as if I had an obligation to each person around me? Am I relying upon my Christian ethic, all the while refusing to view every person as equally my responsibility? I hope that I will be continually haunted by Arnold Jacob Wolf’s words: “If you try to create a closed world of lovely piety and build it on foundations of injustice and degradation of others, Isaiah and Amos will not let you sleep.”
