Elul and Euthyphro
In this week's and last week's parasha, as in much of Deuteronomy, moral oratory is front and center. How do we connect such language to God?
Our illustrious forbearer Plato famously discussed these issues in his dialogue Euthyphro. Socrates met Euthyphro near the courts where was awaiting trial; he had been accused of falsely educating his young followers. Euthyphro told Socrates that he was accusing his father – of murder. He explained the story: a hired man of theirs had killed another servant, and his father tied the murderer hand and foot, throwing him into a pit without any sustenance while he went to ask the local priest for his judgment on the matter. While he was gone, the hired man died – thus Euthyphro had come to accuse his father himself of murder.
At Socrates's surprise that a man would accuse his own father of murder, Euthyphro responded that he was knowledgeable in the ways of the gods. That is Socrates opening to start, in his faux-naive fashion, a dialogue into the meaning of "godly." Does this concept have a definition? Is something pious because it is loved by the gods, or is it loved by the gods because it is pious? If the former, we could conceivably be commanded to follow a decree of the gods (or God) even in the absence of moral good – an untenable situation to our moral intuition. If the latter, what need to we have of gods (or God)?
(Note that Euthyphro is a dialogue with many interesting parts, and the Wikipedia article is good. The parallels with the Jewish tradition are notable. One of Socrates' first critiques of Euthyphro's naive confidence in his own piety is this: the gods dispute among themselves, so how are we to know that there is a unitary definition of the pious? While we don't believe in many gods [albeit some believe in multiple emanations of the Godly] we do believe in multiple opinions. How can three rabbis and four opinions represent one Godly will?)
The Jewish response to this dilemma is to tack a sign marked Theodicy over the door labeled Philosophy. We don't need to navigate the Euthryphrian dilemma because we know God is good, merciful and compassionate.
But in Elul we land on the ram's horns of our own dilemma, called the Akedah. And how do we escape that? Surely, no matter how one understands the plain meaning of the tale, no good was decreed by God on that day – even if it was never meant for Isaac to be actually sacrificed and the entire task was meant as an ordeal.
One way to escape this dilemma, or to cop out of it, is to realize that Abraham was commanded to sacrifice as an individual. He had to confront the Divine will with his own will (perhaps in our day one must confront the Categorical Imperative). But we, as a community, do not have to confront such Divine dilemmas. We can proceed confident that God is good, that our relationships with each other and all other people must be founded on those Divine attributes we know to be good.
