Where is God in the Moral Landscape?

In his 2010 book, The Moral Landscape, atheist thinker Sam Harris argued that human values “translate into facts that can be scientifically understood: regarding positive and negative social emotions, retributive impulses, the effects of specific laws and social institutions on human relationships, the neurophysiology of happiness and suffering, etc.” Indeed, “the more we understand ourselves at the level of the brain, the more we will see that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human values.” Harris responds to this reality by putting forward his vision of a Moral Landscape:

a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks correspond to the heights of potential wellbeing and whose valleys represent the deepest possible suffering. Different ways of thinking and behaving - different cultural practices, ethical codes, modes government, etc - will translate into movements across this landscape and, therefore, into different degrees of human flourishing. I’m not suggesting that we will necessarily discover one right answer to every moral question or a single best way for human beings to live. Some questions may admit of many answers, more or less equivalent. However, the existence of multiple peaks on the moral landscape does not make them any less real or worthy of discovery. Nor would it make the difference between being on a peak and being stuck deep in a valley any less clear or consequential… Movement across the moral landscape can be analyzed on many levels - ranging from biochemistry to economics - but where human beings are concerned, change will necessarily depend upon states and capacities of the human brain.

Morality, for Harris, is as objective as can be. There may not be one clear answer to pressing moral questions, but our scientific understanding of human nature offers real pointers in the right direction. There are many things that I expected going into reading a book on moral challenges sent to me by a Chabad Rabbi, but agreeing with Sam Harris was not one of them.

Lodestone: When G-d’s Rules Don’t Seem Right (Targum Press, 2023) is Rabbi Mendel Adelman’s letter to everyone who has ever felt morally uneasy reading the Torah or wondered why so many people who have never even heard of the Torah can still lead such moral lives. In it, he presents a fully fleshed out theory in conversation with contemporary science and philosophy. His fundamental starting point is quite similar to what I quoted above from Harris:

Those at the extreme ends of morality and amorality, those lacking a moral compass or with an oversensitive one, have a biological impairment. That must mean that for the average person, their moral compass is also biological in nature rather than just a creation of society. The fact that we feel that certain things are right and certain things are wrong is more than just what our parents repeated to us thousands of times. It has a component that is part of who we are, encoded into what makes us human.

But if it is the case that morality is objectively woven into us, and that therefore “the Torah is unnecessary to teach us basic moral behavior," why is the Torah needed at all? Why not simply say “Thou Shalt Be Moral” or allow humanity to just naturally traverse the moral landscape? Surely many otherwise mutually exclusive traditions are more-or-less, on the same page already. As one well known pop-psychologist put it,

the great myths and religious stories of our past, particularly those derived from an earlier, oral, tradition, were moral in their intent rather than descriptive. Thus, they did not concern themselves with what the world was, as a scientist might have it, but with how a human being should act… our ancestors portrayed the world as a stage - a drama - instead of a place of objects.

Adelman suggests that the reason for this is because the Torah is “not just about doing the right things [but] about people doing the right things for the right reason.” He continues that “the Torah is not merely a list of dos and don’ts. It is about the meaning of the dos and don’ts. It is about bringing meaning and purpose into everything, even things that you would have done without it.” Furthermore, as countless historical events have taught us, humans “can think our way around any inclination we might feel. The human brain can overpower any latent feelings of empathy. We are commanded not to do certain things so that we don’t think of excuses to do them.”

The Torah, then, provides us with a God-given map that both Jews and Non-Jews can use to situate ourselves within the moral landscape and then follow in order to reverse it in the most efficacious way possible along with many fellow travelers. Unlike other mythologies, the Torah is not only about doing what is right, but about doing so while knowingly connecting to a Being far bigger than us and that Being’s overarching plan for our world.

But what happens when that map and our intuitive sense of moral direction contradict? Adelman lays out four areas in which our moral compass can seemingly diverge from the Torah:

1. Cases where the Torah permits something that our moral intuition tell us is wrong.

2. Cases where the Torah obligates something that our intuition tells us is wrong.

3. Cases where the Torah’s punishments seem too harsh for the crime.

4. Cases where the Torah’s punishments seem too lenient for the crime.

In each case, the visceral feeling of contradiction is not to be ignored. But what is one to do with it? It would be easy to tell readers to simply suck it up and accept the Torah as-is. That is perhaps the expected move for a Chabad rabbi writing to a broad audience. But that is not what Adelman suggests, at least entirely. Rather, he writes that

If the Torah permits something that seems wrong, we should step forward and forbit it on our own. The Torah is a minimum, not a maximum. We should use our intuition about right and wrong to guide us.

If the Torah commands us to do something that feels wrong, forbids things that we think should be permitted, or has punishments that are too harsh, we should look for loopholes. Find any way we can to make them work together.

It is only if there is truly no resolution to be found that we must acknowledge that “God’s commands take precedence".” Afterall, God is the verse Source of our moral compass. But that should not stop us from following our moral intuitions as far as they can take us, and a good rabbi can go a long way in guiding one across the landscape. This is because a rabbi is not merely someone who reads ancient texts, but “a conduit of the spirit of the Torah, the will of G-d, and the innate moral compass.” Indeed, a rabbi deciding a particular ruling “must accurately assess what is best for that person. They need to be empathetic, kind, and in touch with their inner rhythm of morality. The Rav looks inside at what his heart tells him and then looks in the books for confirmation or rejection.”

While there will not always be an answer that we like, ourselves, our morality, and God’s Torah must work hand in hand to bring our lives and our world closer to the ultimate ideal and into the Messianic Age. Torah is meant to be a guide on that journey, not a hinderance and as such it is incumbent on each and every one of us to minimize the distance between our natural moral intuition and the Torah that we ponder, preach, and practice day in and day out.

With Lodestone, Rabbi Mendel Adelman has offered a thin but thundering volume that asks hard questions, pulls no punches, and offers both practical and philosophical guidance in direct conversation with contemporary discourse. More traditional readers may not appreciate the apparent call to one-up Torah’s morality in our own lives or to search near and far for loopholes, but those in more remote communities will likely appreciate the candor and honesty. While there are some old-school talking points and apologetics rehashed, most of the discussion is novel and exciting. Chabad does not always have the best reputation for engaging with modern conversations in a nuanced and knowledgeable way, so this book was a true breath of fresh air for me. Available here.