By Dr.Fred Reiss

WINCHESTER, California—The Nazis regime rejected all the theoretical work by Nobel physicist Albert Einstein, referring to it as “Jew physics.” Similarly, they banned the teaching of the ideas of quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg, calling it the work of a “White Jew.” Yet, history has shown that neither relativity nor quantum mechanics is a Jewish science—the product of a single Jewish mind. These are examples of just plain-old science, influenced by men and women from many religions, nationalities, creeds, and so forth. So, can Joseph Telushkin be correct? Is there a valid construct called “Jewish ethics, and if so, can Jews claim to have an exclusive system for properly interacting in the world?

Ethics, the systematic study of moral systems, began with the Greek philosopher Socrates,  who proposed that individuals will do what is right if they know what is good. But, what is the meaning of “right”? How do we know what deeds are actually “good”?  Two schools of ethical thought exist in modern times. One says that people make ethical choices based on the perceived consequences of their actions. We might call this moral subjectivism. The other school, moral objectivism, says that there is a standard by which one can judge an action as either morally right or morally wrong. When that standard is derived from the unalterable laws of the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, then, there is a Jewish ethics. In fact, there is one Hebrew sentence buried among hundreds in the early morning (Pesukei D’zimra) High Holiday service which says, “And you taught them [the Jewish ancestors] the laws of life.”

The sentence does not read the laws of nature, or the laws of mathematics and astronomy, etc., but the laws of life, the laws that affect the interactions among all peoples—Jewish ethics.
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin takes the biblical verse (Leviticus 19:18), one of the 613 commandments, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” as the over-arching theme of the second, and most recent, volume in his Jewish ethics series. The Talmud

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tells us that Hillel, a late first century to early second century Jewish scholar and teacher, called this commandment the sum of the entire Torah. Like many of the other commandments, this commandment gives the final outcome,
without describing the deeds required to demonstrate that the commandment is fulfilled. Telushkin’s book masterfully fills this void.

Geometricians use axioms to prove theorems and then used the theorems to generate associated corollaries and lemmas. Like them, Telushkin extracts the meaning from the commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” to generate many implicit and explicit corollaries and lemma-like statements, which he reduces to actions that clearly demonstrate how to show mastery of this commandment.

From the simple sentence “love your neighbor as yourself,” Telushkin branches off into the Jewish ethical behavior associated with visiting the sick, comforting the mourner, and Tzedaka, meaning charity. He also describes the ethical behavior of business intercourse between Jew and non-Jew, kindness to animals, matters of life and death, and the cardinal virtues of justice and tolerance.

As a form of moral objectivism, Jewish ethics says that in a given situation, there is a right thing to do, and a right way to do it. Telushkin lays out the Jewish ethical road map and points to the rough terrain that impedes people from properly fulfilling the commandment. He provides the reader with numerous anecdotes, tales, vignettes, scenarios, portrayals, and stories—sometimes very powerful and moving stories—narratives, explanations, and quotes from both ancient and modern traditional sources to drive home his ethical corollaries.