Unlike Berman’s egalitarian and communitarian reading of the Exodus, Hazony’s work shows a hierarchical difference between different roles in the Israelite community, and highlights the individual independence the Exodus created. The ethical teaching of the Bible, Hazony claims, emerges from the distinction between two archetypes in the Bible: the life of the farmer and the life of the shepherd. God eminently prefers the shepherds.
Cain toils and works the land—as God had commanded man to do after the Fall—and even initiates the offering to God. Yet God prefers Abel’s offering from his flock.
Abraham is born and grows up in Ur, the heart of Babylonian civilization, but God sends him to Canaan to be a shepherd at the ripe age of seventy-five. Abraham also challenges and questions God.
Moses, of course, frees himself from the shackles of Egypt to become a shepherd and then frees his people. The life of the shepherd, Hazony argues, is one in which the shepherd “resists with ingenuity and daring, risking the anger of man and God to secure improvement for himself and for his children.” It is a life of “dissent and initiative, whose aim is to find the good life for man, which is presumed to be God’s true will.” The life of the farmer, on the other hand, represents a life “of pious submission, obeying in gratitude the custom that has been handed down.”
Hazony summarizes this ethic:
The nomads have what is more precious to them than all else—independence: Political independence in that they live as nomads, ungoverned, their labor and their property and their actions unregulated and untaxed by anyone other than themselves; ethical independence in that their vantage point and the freedom and dignity of their work allow them to focus on what truly matters—the proximity of all men to danger, error, and death, and the consequent responsibility they must take for discovering the true course for themselves and acting on it.
Public Discourse promoting Judaeo-Christianity. Of course the think-tank is useless.
Pharisees redefining "conservatism" and "nationalism" and "Constitutionalism" too... what could possibly go wrong?
Related:
Understanding the Centrality of Law in Orthodox Judaism https://t.co/y7Y2kzKMzE
— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) May 27, 2020
The Rabbis assume that a niggling detail of the laws of Shabbat can engender a conversation about the ideals of manhood and even about humanity’s ultimate destiny. The reverse is equally true. Assessing the ideal man, or the value of human wisdom, or the goals of a legal system, is inextricably tethered to the small matters of halakhic observance. In tying these ideas together, the Talmud imparts a claim that is alternately maddening and compelling: that the starting point for human exploration and self-actualization is that man stands commanded to live by God’s Torah. The rest, as it were, is commentary.
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