The House of Laban

From a historical perspective, there is nothing terribly surprising about the ethical failings we read about every day in the paper. Insider trading, phone hacking, influence peddling, steroids in sports, high school cheating scandals. We are momentarily aghast when we first hear these stories, but then, into the vacuum of our disbelief come rushing in memories of other incidents of cheating, lying, adultery and the like – all of which happened long before the present news cycle. Technology has endowed us with new ways to sin, and the Internet has emerged as a court of public opinion inconceivable to earlier generations. But the realization that human beings are subject to ethical failing – as Ecclesiastes wrote, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

Ethical failing, depressing as it is, does not surprise me. What is jarring and what does still surprise me, is not the wrong that people do, but their insistence on transforming their “wrongs” into “rights,” or at least “less wrong” wrongs, the chutzpadik human proclivity to contextualize, reason, equivocate and justify our failings when standing accused of wrongdoing. Three quick examples: This week we read the testimony of the British phone hackers who not only insisted their actions were justified owing to their circulation-obsessed bosses, but that they were actually serving the public interest. “Phone hacking is a perfectly acceptable tool, given the sacrifices we make, if all we’re trying to do is get to the truth.” Second, the statement from a spokesman for a certain presidential candidate, who defended accusations of adultery leveled at his boss saying, “This appears to be an accusation of private, alleged consensual conduct between adults – a subject matter which is not a proper subject of inquiry by the media or the public.” And closer to home, in response to the Long Island cheating scandal, one writer wondered aloud if the scandal is not a natural consequence of the “hysterical quest for perfect grades, the Tiger mother goal of getting your kid into Harvard or Yale only.” These examples are from just the last three days. I am sure we could cite a million more if given the chance. But I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this fall’s most heinous human failing, already and forever a self-standing class on ethics: Penn State. The crime itself was followed by a systematic abdication of moral responsibility by a chain of people in positions of power. Action by any of them would have protected vulnerable children from continued predatory abuse. Each instance of looking the other way represents an effort to hit the ethical snooze button, to spin human behavior and deflect blame by claiming that whatever the failing was, it was either none of anyone’s business, or didn’t really hurt anyone, or was what everyone else was doing, or was the unavoidable byproduct of a much graver societal evil that is actually far more deserving of our indignation. Who are we, these people would counter, to point fingers? Is there really such a sharp line between good and evil? Besides, were we to be in their shoes, facing their pressures – who is to say that we wouldn’t have acted exactly the same way?!

Which is why, when it comes to Jewish ethics, the situation is sliced very, very differently. As far back as the Garden of Eden, good and evil never functioned on a sliding scale. There was and is good, and there was and is evil. We can tell the difference between the two. The medieval sage Maimonides explains that there is actually only one characteristic that differentiates human beings from every other living being: the ability to distinguish between good and evil and to do that which one pleases with absolutely no restraint. For purposes of today’s discussion, that means that adultery is adultery, theft is theft, cheating is cheating, and no amount of mental gymnastics can blur those categories. And Judaism goes one step further. Not only does there exist absolute right and wrong, and not only do we have the ability to distinguish between the two, but we also readily acknowledge our urge and inclination to do wrong. Embedded within each of us is a yetzer ha-tov and a yetzer ha-ra, a good and an evil inclination. As my teacher Rabbi Louis Jacobs wrote, “The difference between Christianity and Judaism is that Christianity teaches that man sins because he is a sinner, while Judaism teaches that man is a sinner because he sins.” (AJT 246) As Jews we believe that we have the most important thing of all, free choice. Which means that when we discuss ethics, the question is not whether or not there are really such categories as right and wrong. There are. The question is not whether or not we are capable of distinguishing between the two and making a free choice. We are. The question is whether or not we muster the combination of self-discipline and fear of heaven to actually do what we know we should do! It is never – ever – a defensible option to excuse our sins with the suggestion that it was our ignorance, our hardwiring or our environment that is actually to blame.

A case in point is the central character of our parashah this week – Jacob. If there is one biblical figure who reminds us of the jagged moral nature of humanity, it is Jacob. Growing up in his parents’ home, Jacob is manipulative, conniving and exploitative, using every angle he can towards his personal advantage. But in this week’s narrative, Jacob meets his match and then some. He enters the House of Laban, a twenty-year layover that our commentary calls a “dark night of the soul.” Jacob is duped into marrying the wrong sister and subjected to his father-in-law’s deceitful business practices. Laban’s character is so treacherous that in the Passover Haggadah it is Laban’s ill will towards our father Jacob that comes to embody all Jewish persecution. And yet – and this is the heart of the matter – in all of his flawed humanity Jacob holds his moral ground. He builds a business, he builds a family and though he is given every reason to slouch towards the behavior of Laban’s house, he chooses not to. Eventually Jacob is forced to set out on his own. He is pursued by Laban who levels stinging accusations against his son-in-law, accusations to which Jacobs responds, “For twenty years, I worked for you, never once partaking of your flock, making good on every loss…” Jacob forcefully insists that despite his surroundings, despite his own inner demons, he resisted the urge to do wrong. Jacob is a hero not because he is perfect. Jacob is many things, but he is no Abraham. Rather it is owing to the combination of self-discipline and fear of God – what he calls pahad Yitzhak, the “fear of Isaac” – that he emerged unscathed and unblemished from Laban’s house. The commentator Rashi explained that Jacob is called shalem, “whole,” or “having integrity,” because in spite of his environment, in spite of his inclination to do otherwise, how he should have behaved and how he actually behaved were one and the same. When called on the carpet by his accusers, Jacob in his righteous indignation was able to withstand the test.

Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses – what do all our biblical heroes have in common? At some point in their lives each one of them lived in a land of unsteady morality, a condition and state of affairs that makes them not too dissimilar from us. Jacob was not, to use Niebuhr’s language, “a moral man in an immoral society,” he was a man of mixed morality in an immoral society, and that is exactly the point. Jacob’s stay in the House of Laban is given philosophical expression in Maimonides’ introduction to the Ethics of our Fathers (Shemoneh Perakim). Maimonides raises the fascinating and famous question as to who is more praiseworthy - the saint, or the person who subdues his passions and exercises self-restraint? At home in the Aristotelian traditions of his day, Maimonides acknowledges that philosophers believe that it is the person who has no urge to do evil, who somehow transcends the desire to do wrong, who is saintly and who has achieved the highest rung of moral character. Maimonides offers a different, more realistic way of looking at things. He explains that according to the Rabbis, the person who desires and craves iniquity but does not do it is actually more praiseworthy than the person who feels no torment at refraining from evil. As the Talmud explains, “a person should not say ‘I do not want to commit X, Y and Z sin.’ Rather he should say, ‘I do indeed want to sin, yet I must not, for my Father in heaven has forbidden it.” As Ben Zoma taught in Pirkei Avot, “Who is mighty? The one who subdues his own passions.” Or , if you like, as my granny of blessed memory told me, “Elliot, you can get your appetite anywhere you want, just make sure you always eat at home.” Jacob is a model for us, because he struggles with the inner passions and outer pressures that could lead him astray and yet he emerges victorious, his character whole and intact.

Jewish ethics can be distilled into one word: “Ought.” Ethical behavior occurs when what “ought” to happen actually does happen, and unethical behavior is in the gaping chasm that exists between what we ought to have done and what we actually did. People can argue among themselves about what is right and what is wrong, good and evil and the prickly gray area in between. But at the end of the day it comes down to the all important “ought;” an “ought” that is both irrefutable and inescapable in the courtroom of our soul. What ought I do? What ought I have done? Go ahead, try it. Plug in any tough decision you have faced. You don’t need a rabbi to figure it out. There is right and there is wrong and you chose one of them. Just don’t do what seems to be in vogue to do. Don’t delude yourself or the people around you into thinking that you were only doing what you had to do, what everyone else was doing, or what anyone would have done under those same circumstances. When it comes to ethics, excuses are the tools of the incompetent used to build bridges that lead to nowhere.

Emerson once reflected: “It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” We, like our patriarch Jacob, live in a world of swirling morality, there are many doorways to the House of Laban. We can neither control nor predict how the missteps of our time will be judged. Yet our hopes are as audacious as they are modest: to emerge as Jacob did, with the ability to shout out in the quiet sweetness of our soul that despite it all we did what we ought to have done and we are shalem, intact in our integrity, clear in our conscience.