Noah Feldman, a former student of Maimonides yeshiva day school in Brookline, Massachusetts and currently a law professor at Harvard and a adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine) writes in an article titled The Orthodox Paradox:
…One time at Maimonides a local physician — a well-known figure in the community who later died tragically young — addressed a school assembly on the topic of the challenges that a modern Orthodox professional may face. The doctor addressed the Talmudic dictum that the saving of a life trumps the Sabbath. He explained that in its purest form, this principle applies only to the life of a Jew. The rabbis of the Talmud, however, were unprepared to allow the life of a non-Jew to be extinguished because of the no-work commandment, and so they ruled that the Sabbath could be violated to save the life of a non-Jew out of concern for maintaining peaceful relations between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities.
Depending on how you look at it, this ruling is either an example of outrageously particularist religious thinking, because in principle it values Jewish life more than non-Jewish life, or an instance of laudable universalism, because in practice it treats all lives equally. The physician quite reasonably opted for the latter explanation. And he added that he himself would never distinguish Jewish from non-Jewish patients: a human being was a human being.
This appealing sentiment did not go unchallenged. One of my teachers rose to suggest that the doctor’s attitude was putting him in danger of violating the Torah. The teacher reported that he had himself heard from his own rabbi, a leading modern-Orthodox Talmudist associated with Yeshiva University, [this would be Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik] that in violating the Sabbath to treat a non-Jew, intention was absolutely crucial. If you intended to save the patient’s life so as to facilitate good relations between Jews and non-Jews, your actions were permissible. But if, to the contrary, you intended to save the patient out of universal morality, then you were in fact guilty of violating the Sabbath, because the motive for acting was not the motive on the basis of which the rabbis allowed the Sabbath violation to occur.
Later, in class, the teacher apologized to us students for what he said to the doctor. His comments, he said, were inappropriate — not because they were wrongheaded, but because non-Jews were present in the audience when he made them. The double standard of Jews and non-Jews, in other words, was for him truly irreducible: it was not just about noting that only Jewish lives merited violation of the Sabbath, but also about keeping the secret of why non-Jewish lives might be saved. To accept this version of the tradition would be to accept that the modern Orthodox project of engagement with the world could not proceed in good faith.…
The sad fact is that there is little, if any, halakhic (Jewish legal) support for the doctor's position on the origin of the rabbinic permission to save non-Jews on the Sabbath. Non-Jews are saved because, if we did not do so, non-Jews would not save us and, worse yet, may actually kill us. That is the rabbinic reasoning behind the loophole that allows us (not "commands us," allows us) to save non-Jewish life on the Sabbath or at other times and locations where such lifesaving would be in conflict with Jewish law.
You can see modern day examples of this throughout this blog on posts dealing with Ethiopian Jews and their rescue. In this case, the people needing rescue were considered "doubtful" Jews (safek Jews) under Jewish law, a legal category that, while questioning the Jewish status of these people commands (note the term used here: "commands") rescue as if they were fully and unquestionably Jewish.
Even so, many commenters treat these people as if they were fully non-Jewish, and then go on to excuse the rabbinic and political leaders – like the late Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson – who refused to help save them. Another time this issue has come up is when Israel has sent disaster relief teams to Africa or Asia. Invariably there are a chorus of voices from the ultra-Orthodox world condemning this.
Yet, in practice, throughout much of history, it seems Jews have treated non-Jews on the Sabbath, have saved their lives and given whatever aid possible. This may be because the fundamentalism common among Orthodox Jews today was uncommon throughout most of history. Or it may be that the human need to provide aid and succor overwhelms any religious strictures to the contrary.
Indeed, the history of Jews and non-Jews in ancient Judea during most of the Greek and Roman eras shows that people interacted, often with a high degree of socialization and friendliness. (Indeed, many of our kashrut restrictions – gevinat akum (forbidding non-Jewish cheese), halav akum (forbidding non-Jewish milk), bishul yisrael (forbidding non-Jewish cooking of many foods), and pat yisrael (forbidding non-Jewish bread under many circumstances), all come at least in part to separate Jews and non-Jews.
These restrictions (often promulgated by Beit Shammai, sometimes by violence and force, like the incident described in the Jerusalem Talmud Shabbat 1:4, the source for many of the restrictions noted above and described by the Talmud as the "darkest day" for the Jewish people since the making of the Golden Calf at the foot of Mount Sinai) were accompanied by a commensurate restriction – the forgoing of the command to be a light onto the nations of the world, to reach out and teach monotheism to them.
This closure of Judaism marked, until the flowering of Muslim Spain in the two centuries before Maimonides, after whom the Brookline yeshiva day school is named, the ghettoization of Judaism, a turning inward and, some would say, backward, into a reliance on magic, superstition, incantations, "demon" avoidance and a blend of neo-paganism and monotheism. Orthodoxy, especially haredi Orthodoxy, prizes the fruits of this backward slide – it prays to angels along with praying to God; it prizes the folk medicine of a backward era, often over the highly advanced science and medicine of today; and, in the face of overwhelming genetic evidence to the contrary, it continues to see what to them a very real physical difference between Jews and non-Jews, almost, but not quite, as if they were referencing two different species, not two different religious outlooks.
This is, I suspect, the overriding cause, the first (if usually unspoken) reason behind the tightening strictures put on conversion by haredi rabbis and the sad but all too predictable willingness of so-called Centrist Orthodox rabbis to go along with them.
If conversion to Judaism is an intellectual shift, the rejection of polytheism and the acceptance of monotheism (and this is exactly how it is presented throughout the Bible and in very early rabbinic literature), stricter conversion standards and higher hoops for prospective converts to jump through are not necessary.
But, if conversion to Judaism is a metaphysical shift, involving the nature and origin of the prospective convert's soul (and this is how conversion is often portrayed in latter rabbinic literature starting about the time rabbis became especially concerned with demons and began to formulate prayers to angels), then increasing stringencies deemed necessary to ascertain the "nature" of the prospective convert's soul can, to those less rooted in empirical reality, seem reasonable. After all, the soul cannot be seen; there is no way to detect it. making conversion more and more difficult, more and more demeaning, will drive away all but the most committed of the potential converts. That we may convert only a fraction of those that truly merit conversion, well, that is the price we have to pay for a religious purity determined by the status of an object – the human soul – that we can neither see, qualify or quantify.
This latter approach is concerned with finding Jewish souls "lost" in non-Jewish bodies. It is an idea foreign to Biblical thought and foreign to the earliest layers of rabbinic thought, as well. Yet it dominates halakha (Jewish law) as it is practiced today.
Reasonable people save lives first and ask questions later. Indeed, this is exactly what most Jews do, regardless of their religious outlooks.
Still, it is problematic to have a body of religious law and thought that so demonizes the Other that it is willing – and. in fact, endorses, even if only in theory – allowing a non-Jewish infant to die in a Sabbath building collapse when he could otherwise be saved.
To those who believe, as Schneur Zalman of Liady, the author of the Tanya and the first Chabad rebbe, did. that source of non-Jewish souls is wholly evil, letting a non-Jewish baby die when he could otherwise be saved is perhaps not problematic (Tanya, end of chapter 1):
מה שאין כן נפשות אומות העולם הן משאר קליפות טמאות שאין בהן טוב כלל…
The souls of the nations of the world, however, emanate from the other, unclean kelipot which contain no good whatever…
For the rest of us, as it always has, saving life will trump everything else. We are not here on this earth to judge souls. We have no capability to do so. All we can do is judge people as individuals by their actions.
Apologists will note that the only permission to save Jews on the Sabbath comes from the idea that breaking Sabbath law to save a Jewish life assures that Jewish life will have more Sabbaths to observe. There is a very real question, they point out, whether or not non-Orthodox Jews can be saved on the Sabbath because they do not keep the Sabbath properly, if at all, and saving them only assures many more Sabbaths spent in violation of the law.
What apologists do not tell you is how that halakhic problem is resolved in Jewish law.
It is resolved by pointing out that any Jew, no matter how non-observant of Judaism he may be at this moment, has the potential to return to full observance. There are no barriers to repentance. Therefore, he must be saved.
The non-Jew is still a non-Jew. He will never observe the Sabbath because he is not commanded to do so by God. Therefore, because he will not and cannot legally under Jewish law observe the Sabbath, he is not to be saved.
But allowing non-Jews to die in Sabbath fires, drownings and building collapses makes for bad public policy, especially when those non-Jews are in the majority and have armies and police forces. So the rabbis ruled that Sabbath law was to be set aside to save non-Jews, "for the sake of peace."
The Jewish doctor cited by Feldman was "wrong;" the rabbi "right." And that is perhaps the most serious indictment of Orthodoxy you will ever see.
[Hat Tips: Dr. Gershon Mendel and Dr. S. Rofeh-Filosof.]
