Maggie's Farm

Ethics is an optic, such that everything I know of God and everything I can hear of His word and reasonably say to Him must find an ethical expression. In the Holy Ark from which the voice of God is heard by Moses, there are only the tablets of the Law. The knowledge of God which we can have and which is expressed, according to Maimonides, in the form of negative attributes, receives a positive meaning from the moral ``God is merciful,'' which means ``Be merciful like Him.'' The attributes of God are given not in the indicative, but in the imperative. The knowledge of God comes to us like a commandment, like a Mitzvah. To know God is to know what must be done. Prophets preoccupied themselves not with the immortality of soul but with the poor, the widow, the orphan and the stranger. The relationship with man in which contact with the Divine is established is not a kind of spiritual friendship but the sort that is manifested, tested and accomplished in a just economy and for which each man is fully responsible. ``Why does your God, who is the God of the poor, not feed the poor?'' a Roman asks Rabbi Akiba. ``So we can escape damnation,'' replies Rabbi Akiba. One could not find a stronger statement of the impossible situation in which God finds himself, that of accepting the duties and responsibilities of man.

- Levinas, Difficult Freedom, "A Religion for Adults"