Proper consideration of social issues: impartiality, expertise in facts and values, and tradition, the need to make decisions

Which brings me to my last point: the place of expertise; and the related question of the status and domain of religious judgement.

The ubiquity of Jewish law, its tendency to see each human activity as a potential sanctification, meant that sages required extensive expertise in the realities to which the Torah was applied. ⁴⁴ To this day, leading rabbinic authorities will be asked questions from medical ethics to a mistake in Torah scroll; from business practice to the determination of the time of nightfall. Nor, given the situational character of much of Jewish law, can these questions be divorced from the specific human context in which they are asked.

This meant, in practice, that the sage had to be a man of the people; and there was always fierce opposition to the professional­isation of the rabbinate. The sage had to earn his living like anyone else; as sage he was unpaid. Many of the early rabbis were manual workers; ⁴⁵ the medieval authorities were traders, shopkeepers, and often doctors. If they were often poor men, there was also a tradition that the wealthy would try to marry their daughters to scholars. So if the rabbi himself did not know the problems of large business or finance, his wife or father-in-law did.

To a large measure this was the source of rabbinic authority. Rabbinic Judaism came into being with the collapse of all formal hierarchies of religion: there was no Temple, no active priesthood, the supreme court had little power and was in decline. The sage had the authority only of his personal Torah learning and his practical wisdom; and the situation is essentially unchanged today, despite the apparent and alien intrusions of, say, the Chief Rabbinate in Israel. Informed and informal consent picks out the leading sages of any generation; and those whose judgement carries weight are, more often than not, men with no formal standing in the community.

One incidental consequence is that there never has been, and could not be conceived, an identification of Judaism with any particular political stance. Another is that it was recognised from the earliest stage that there were vital religious questions which could only be answered on the basis of secular expertise. For example, the most sacred institutions like the Sabbath, the Passover and the Day of Atonement, must be set aside for the saving of life. But the diagnosis of a dangerous condition could only be given by a doctor. ⁴⁶ This was the archetypal situation in which religious and secular experts had to work hand in hand to prescribe a course of conduct. The same is true about the most crucial political question, namely war. Jewish law allows the present state of Israel to wage war only on essential defensive grounds. But a rabbi has no special expertise in military intelligence and strategy. He is bound, on religious grounds, to yield to the judgement of experts, regardless of their religious standing and, more poignantly, always aware that they may just be completely wrong. It is an axiom of Judaism that "a judge must rule on the basis of the available evidence".⁴⁷ There is neither religious nor secular infallibility; but decisions must nonetheless be made.

The point at which Jewish law takes off, on any issue to which there is not already an agreed ruling, is the question. Someone

- a doctor, perhaps, or a social worker, or a businessman - will turn to a rabbi or a scholar in whose judgement he has faith, and formulate a question. In the case, say of an issue in genetic engineering or business procedure, the onus is clearly on the questioner to supply the relevant facts in his presentation of the problem. He will be aware that, even though the rabbi will often consult independent experts, he is bound to present the issue as objectively as possible; for a slanted question will not elicit a balanced answer; and if the answer is imbalanced, it will not carry weight with the Jewish community. No rabbi would consciously allow himself to be used for the advocacy of a sectional interest or a particular ideological stance.

His role, once the question has been posed, is to analyse it into its component parts and to bring to bear all the resources of 2000 years of recorded debate. Where does this problem have an analogue in the past? What views were then proposed? How did tradition decide between them? Is the problem really comparable, or have changed circumstances altered the moral issue? The authority of the answer lies only in its cogency, and in the fact that it is a response to a question; to someone who wanted to know. The Jewish encounter with the policy issues of an age, in short, occurs when an expert in the facts seeks the guidance of an expert in the values; and there is nothing to compel that seeking, short of a continued demonstration that Judaism is in touch with life.