About a decade ago, Ms. Noa Goldman, the principal of our preschool came to my office with a dilemma. It was Parshas Toldos, our parsha, and the children were given coloring pages that told the story of the parsha, and one of the parents was upset. In the coloring page, Eisav was depicted as evil, a bad guy. “A bad guy?!” the parent complained. “You’re telling my child that this man was evil. Who says?” Ms. Noa patiently explained to her that Chazal, our Sages, teach us about all the terrible things he did – he deceived his father, he was a murderer, a philanderer. That makes him a bad person. But this parent wouldn’t have it.
And I understand where this parent was coming from. She is, like me, a millennial. There are a many characteristics that typify millennials; we are labeled as narcissistic and entitled. At the same time, we are also known to be more positive than the generation before us – the negative and pessimistic Generation Xers. But perhaps the characteristic that is most significant is our open-mindedness regarding social and cultural issues, otherwise known as moral relativism.
Moral relativism, first introduced by Baruch Spinoza, in the 17th century, is our calling cry. There is no right, there is no wrong. During the Cold War, presidents could get away with calling the fight against the Soviets as good vs. evil. Try finding those words in a political speech these days. No such thing exists. We sympathize, we justify, and we look for the alternate perspective in everything. Millennials, and the generations that follow us, have a very hard time seeing anything in black and white.
On the one hand, there is something beautiful and G-dly about this nuanced perspective. The Gemara teaches us that the prerequisite for joining the Sanhedrin was the ability to find 49 reasons why an impure rodent, something that is tamei, should be tahor, should be pure. In other words, as the Maharal explains, the ability to see the many shades of grey is a sign of sophistication.
And yet,
Allow me to share with you an article about a criminal, written in Psychology Today, a very popular website:
“…Like so many victims of physical… during childhood, [the criminal] may have experienced an extraordinary sense of helplessness and powerlessness as a boy, stemming mainly from his poor relationship with his exceedingly domineering and controlling father… Such tragic circumstances engender “inferiority feelings” which, in the form of “increased dependency and the intensified feeling of our own littleness and weakness, lead to… aggression … ambition, avarice and envy, coupled with constant “defiance, vengeance, and resentment.”
The author is trying to give the reader some understanding as to why the criminal acted the way he did. The criminal in question is… Adolf Hitler.
While that article is obviously extreme, look no further than one of the most popular movies of the past 5 years, Joker. Joker is a film about a man who commits heinous crimes, murdering people left and right and creating havoc and anarchy. The entire thrust of the movie is to try to help us understand where his behavior stems from.
There’s a part of me that really appreciated that movie. But there’s another part of me that felt disgusted, that felt like we have lost something as a society. In the late 20th century, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a short piece titled, The Parable of the Madman, about an individual who comes to declare that G-d is dead. He is trying to open the eyes of the people around him to the foolishness of believing in morality, of believing in an objective sense of right and wrong. It’s a parable about himself. In that story the madman, exasperated that no one agrees with him, throws the lantern he is carrying onto the floor and declares, “I have come too early. My time is not yet.” In 2019, at the heyday of Millennialism, and with the superb acting of Joaquin Pheonix, Nietzsche’s time had finally come.
We Jews, believers of the Divine origin of the Torah, do not believe in moral relativism. We believe that G-d Himself taught us what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil. And in such a world view, we find terms that are culturally unacceptable. Concepts like sin, evil, bad. In Kabbalas Shabbos last night, we quoted King David who said, “Ohavei HaShem sinu ra, Those who love G-d, hate evil.” If you really believe in G-d, and you believe that He is the arbiter of good, then that should cause you to abhor what is evil.
That does not mean that we are without nuance.
Yaakov’s stealing of the blessings of Eisav is endorsed wholeheartedly by our sages. And yet, the Medrash tells us that when Eisav cried out, that cry was the creation of a generations-long hatred between Rome and Yisrael, of which we suffered from immensely. Nuance.
Similarly, are other religions evil? No, they are not. As Jews we do not believe that everyone must or even should adopt Judaism as their faith, but we do expect a modicum of decency, it’s called the Noahide laws. Is a person who knows no better by definition bad? No. We have concepts like tinok shenishba, that people who were not educated or properly taught cannot always be held accountable. How do we interact with someone who sins? It depends. Will they listen to our rebuke or not? If yes, then fire away. If not, then we are obligated to hold back and salvage the relationship. There is a lot of nuance in our Halachic tradition.
But none of that grey thinking prevents us from believing that there is an objective right and objective wrong.
What some may call our stuffy sense of right and wrong, what we call the Torah, has stood the test of time. Our Torah was seen as archaic or backward throughout history. In Avraham’s times child sacrifice was fashionable. Aristotle, the most enlightened of all philosophers, endorsed pederasty, intimate relationships between adult men and young boys, because it was a wonderful form of population control. And during a good portion of Western history being anything but Christian was a ticket to the back of the societal bus. Just because our belief in an objective moral system doesn’t sit right, doesn’t mean it is not absolutely true.
Earlier this week, the Saudi crown prince visited the White House. A reporter questioned him on the killing of the journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. I have no idea if the crown prince ordered his execution or not. But if he did, to defend him and even to honor him would be in violation of a Torah prohibition called Chanifa, the prohibition against honoring someone who has committed evil. G-d demands of us not only to live by the Torah’s moral code, but to not even imply that we respect someone who does not do so.
And so, Ms. Noa was right in giving out pictures that depicted Eisav as evil. Evil exists and it is essential, especially in a generation and in a culture that nuances Hitler into a pity-worthy victim of parental abuse, that we stand strong. Because “ohavei Hashem,” those who love G-d, “sinu ra,” are able to state without qualification, that we hate and are disgusted by evil.