The year 2001 began as the United Nations Year of Dialogue between Civilizations. By its end, the phrase that came most readily to mind was ‘the clash of civilizations.’ The tragedy of September 11 intensified the danger caused by religious differences around the world. As the politics of identity begin to replace the politics of ideology, can religion become a…
…Noahide commandments. A third view, more stringent, held that it was someone who had undertaken to keep all the commands of the Torah except one, the prohibition of meat not ritually slaughtered (Avodah Zarah 64b). The law follows the Sages. A ger toshav is thus a non-Jew living in Israel who accepts the Noahide laws binding on everyone. Ger toshav…
…accepts the Noahide laws binding on everyone, and ger toshav legislation is one of the earliest extant forms of minority rights. According to the Rambam there is an obligation on Jews in Israel to establish courts of law for resident aliens to allow them to settle their own disputes – or disputes they have with Jews – according to the…
…Mishnah Torah, argues that the people of Shechem were collectively responsible for failing to bring their prince to justice for his crime against Dina. After all, the Noahide laws demand the establishment of legal courts by Gentiles to enforce justice. According to the Rambam, the entire town was complicit in this violation. The Ramban offers a counter-argument. He posits that…
…dual nature of our moral situation. On the one hand, we are members of the universal human family and thus of the (Noahide) covenant with all humankind. There are indeed moral universals – the sanctity of life, the dignity of the human person, the right to be free, to be no man’s slave or the object of someone else’s violence….
…(Gen. 8:21). God has not changed; neither has man. What have changed are the terms of their relationship… God [now] makes a covenant with all humanity, based on the prohibition of murder (Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed’). The Sages were eventually to identify seven ‘Noahide’ laws, but the principle is essentially the…
…the depth grammar, of the Jewish mind. The duality has legal-theological expression in the form of two covenants, the first with Noah and all humanity after the Flood, the second with Abraham and his descendants, given detailed articulation at Mount Sinai and during the wilderness years. On the one hand there is the Noahide covenant with its seven commands: not…
…The Noahide covenant is universal, with its seven basic moral commands. These are the minimal requirements of humanity as such, the foundations of any decent society. The other is the richly detailed code of 613 commandments that form Israel’s unique constitution as “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). So there are the universals of Judaism –…
…with Abraham and his descendants, given detailed articulation at Mount Sinai and during the wilderness years. On the one hand there is the Noahide covenant with its seven commands: not to murder, steal, commit adultery, blaspheme, worship idols or practise needless cruelty against animals, together with a positive command to establish a system of justice. These are the minimal and…
…faiths finding their own relationship with God within the shared frame of the Noahide laws. These laws constitute, as it were, the depth grammar of the human experience of the Divine: of what it is to see the world as God’s work, and humanity as God’s image. God is God of all humanity, but between Babel and the end of…