Almost any article I’ve ever seen to do with Judaism, any religious critique of a political event, and even in promotional materials for Jewish spaces such as synagogues and JCCs, in fact, nearly everything we speak about in the Jewish community, makes some reference to Jewish values. Sometimes we speak of these values specifically: Jewish justice, tzedaka, “tikkun olam,” and so on – but more often we speak in vague generalities – as if Jewish values were a fixed and known set of items, like making a reference to the works of Shakespeare.
But I sometimes find myself troubled by these references. Not because I think it’s wrong to improve the world, or to seek justice – quite the contrary – I’ve dedicated my life to these values, and to doing them Jewishly. But just as in all periods of Jewish history, the American Jewish community has adopted the outlook of the society in which we live, and with it, we have -just as in all periods of Jewish history- adopted many if not most of that society’s values as well.
And in many ways, we are the richer for it: the American secular values of autonomy and self-reliance, assertiveness, diversity, love of novelty and innovation, pluralism and more have been blessings to us and to many groups that have found refuge here – and we have also contributed to the lexicon of values that we share as well. Jews have made outsized contributions to American culture – we are home here, and we are blessed in a way that has probably never existed anywhere else at any time.
I wonder though: perhaps I spent too much time hanging out with the medieval re-creationists in college, but I often muse about the values that we have abandoned, and that we even often disparage: constancy, duty, continence, honor. These are values that we rarely hear about, and are not, at least that I’ve seen, values that are held in high regard in our society.
I don’t know why our society has chosen to emphasize this set of values rather than that, but it would probably enrich us to think about whether we may have lost something when we set them aside. We often associate these “old-fashioned values” with the hierarchies and unequal power – and I don’t necessarily think that’s incorrect – but we live in a world where there are still imbalances of power, and these values were ways that societies chose to ameliorate them. They also contributed to maintaining long-term relationships, partnerships, and societal stability. Perhaps we might want to reconsider whether they have something to teach us.
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