Words of God
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Learning to be good
Much of western society feels human beings are born 'good.' This is dangerous
This week we read the Torah portion of Mishpatim. Mishpat means law. This week’s parsha is filled with laws.
For the most part ethical laws detail how we behave in the details of our lives. These ethical laws cover civil law, family law, criminal law and much more. According to most classical readers of the text these laws themselves are part of the divine revelation at Sinai itself.
"Moses came and told the people all the words of God and all of the laws (which he received from God on Mount Sinai)".
This seemingly casual verse may actually be the most important and relevant verse in the entire Torah for modern culture. Because the verse is saying that the great revelation of Sinai is the very idea of law. And law is the single most important idea in the creation of a good and just society.
The idea of law teaches us that people are free to choose their paths in life. If a person chooses to harm another human being, an animal or even the earth itself, that person is held responsible for that choice.
Law says that people who do evil things are responsible for their choices. Law rejects the idea that people are naturally good and would behave well if only left alone.
But people are not naturally good. People must do deep spiritual work to choose correctly between good and evil. People must be trained in goodness. People must be trained both to identify what is good, and to disassociate from their natural tendencies to be selfish, shallow and egocentric.
There has been a growing movement in secular culture for many years that stands in sharp contrast with the biblical philosophy of law. This underlying dogma of secular culture in a post-religious world has to place human evil outside of the human being.
The premise is simply that since human beings are naturally good, all evil must be the result of some external force which warps natural human goodness. Many streams of affirm this position; the only argument between them is what external cause is the major factor is causing evil.
For the Marxist it is the capitalist structure of economies and societies; for others it is television violence. For others it might be religion, some feel the problem is government. Unfortunately, however, the dogma that all evil is located outside the human being has several destructive implications.
First, if evil is outside the human being then one does not feel compelled to change and to improve.
Second one does not feel called to teach goodness. For if the problem of evil is external to man, in the world, then he way to achieve goodness and eradicate evil is to change the world, rather than to chance oneself. Marx, for example, sought to change the system of government.
In biblical consciousness however the locus of human evil, and therefore the locus of human change, is within the self! The core issues are not capitalism, television violence or big government. Rather, selfishness, addiction, greed, ingratitude, jealousy, and laziness are the roots of evil.
And these qualities are the default program of much of human nature, and must be transcended in order to access the deeper god self which is the true essence of the human being. But someone who believes that people are naturally good will never do the work necessary to access his deeper divine self.
In the mid 19th century, romantics who popularized the idea that people are naturally good said babies were born with "clouds of glory" over their heads.
It is true that most babies are very cute, but the fact is that they are not born good. One could easily make a case for the opposite: the baby is very often a tyrant ignoring the needs of his parents in order to fulfill his own. Just ask any couple who have not made love in the eight months since the baby was born. Once they finally have time and energy and are in the mood, the baby starts screaming…
It is only after individuating from his mother that the baby, as an autonomous moral being, can decide to be good.
In order to do so the human being must exert effort to transcend his superficial sense of being a fully independent and disconnected being whose primary instinct is to insure its own comfort and survival. He must work to discover empathy, his sense of wholeness and interconnectivity, and his vital sense of love and commitment.
The belief that people are naturally good and only do evil when moved by an external force gives birth to a dangerous popular belief that people who have chosen do perform evil deeds acts are not responsible for their actions because they are victims of external forces. In other words, they are sick, and therefore not responsible.
The basic line of reasoning is that no sane person would actually commit murder, for example, so anyone who does commit murder must be, in some sense, insane. Good and evil have been replaced by adjectives like "sociopath," "acting out," "rage," "paranoid," or "pathologic."
All of this is the product of what we might call a therapeutic culture in which moral context has been replaced by psychological context. The basic argument in therapeutic culture is I am not at fault – the Devil made me do it.
However in modernity the devil has been replaced with co-dependency syndrome, abuse syndrome, enraged husband syndrome, all forms of temporary insanity, and the like.
But idea of this week's parsha is to affirm that sane people can, and do, commit evil and that in order we must work on ourselves to learn to be good.
