Let’s start with a question.
An adult couple accidentally runs over their pet dog. Instead of burying their dog in the garden, they take it home, cook it in the oven, and eat it.
Here’s the question: have they done something immoral?
Most of us will have an instinctive reaction: what that couple did was disgusting. We will feel some revulsion.
But whether you think it was morally wrong will depend on how you see the world. It will depend on your moral palate.
This was what was demonstrated by the Jewish-American psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, in his popular book, The Righteous Mind.
Haidt sought to find out why it was that caring, rational people could disagree so profoundly on moral issues. Why was it that America was so polarised? There, people fight furiously about issues like abortion, guns, and marriage, as if they have no common moral basis.
Haidt argues that we do have shared moral bases, but our morality is more like the palate on our tongue. “We humans all have the same five taste receptors, but we don’t all like the same foods,” he says. “It’s the same for moral judgments.”
We have, he says, five main taste receptors: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.
If you are an educated person who lives in an urban area of a Western capitalist country, you are likely to feel that the couple who ate their dog did not do anything morally wrong. You’ll be disgusted, sure, but you might not think that they violated any kind of moral rule.
That’s because, in these cultures, people have a moral palate that puts a big emphasis on ethics of care and harm. If nobody was hurt, then there’s nothing immoral.
If, however, you live in a close-knit community of farmers, you are far more likely to say that the couple who ate their dog did do something morally wrong. That’s because those cultures have a strong sense of sanctity and taboo.
Both of these systems are ways to help people get on with each other. In a busy metropolis like London, you need to be able to live and let live, because if you can’t tolerate diversity, society will fall apart. In a tribal farming community, like ancient Israel, you need to have strong social norms to protect people.
Both these impulses – care and sanctity – come from a deep, ancient social need.
Since humanity’s beginning, our survival has depended on our ability to care for our most vulnerable members. How would we have lasted a single generation if not for looking after the young, the old, and the vulnerable?
From the start of civilisation, we have also needed to be able to express disgust. It comes down to the most basic distinction between excrement and edibles. We need to tell each other: “this food is poisonous; this disease is contagious; this behaviour is dangerous…” Without clearly agreed boundaries and taboos, we would quickly perish.
It is worth holding these two tendencies in mind – care and sanctity; purity and justice – as we approach our readings for this week.
Our Torah portion goes into minute detail about how to do proper sacrifices, how to lay out the Temple, and who is supposed to do what in religious services. To us, the attention to detail might seem absurd.
But remember that this is part of a group of people’s moral palate. This is their sense of the sacred. Messing it up, from their point of view, would be ethically disastrous. It would be similar to eating the family pet.
No wonder, then, that the prophet Ezekiel opens the haftarah by telling the Israelites “if they are ashamed of all they have done, make known to them the design of the temple.” Failure to get it right, says Ezekiel, is a serious sin.
There are two great moral impulses in Torah: justice and purity. This trend appears throughout the whole Scripture: contradictory, competing moral voices speak through our books.
The voice of justice tells us about care and compassion. It tells us about fairness and redistribution. The voice of justice charges us towards more equality and more freedom. Justice says that a society is only as strong as its weakest members.
The voice of purity tells us about how to keep holy things sacred. It tells us what the boundaries are on sex, so that we do not cross them. The voice of purity tells us not to eat octopus and not to mix linens. Purity makes sure everything is kept in its proper place, so that society can function, and people feel safe.
The voice of purity might feel less relevant to us today. We celebrate the prophets for their concern for the most vulnerable, because it fits so well with our ethics of care. We see ourselves in the narratives of the exodus because they chime with our moral intuitions about freedom from slavery. Laws on architecture… feel less like big moral issues.
That’s because what the big taboos and boundaries are can change a lot between time periods.
When I was growing up, one of the big focuses of popular disgust was gay men. There was a long period when the media was seemingly obsessed over sex between men, especially in public toilets. This was the full gambit of taboos: waste and excrement; sex between the wrong sorts of people; and blurring the boundaries between public and private.
I think that is why some of the things that cause people moral disgust today just don’t bother me. I have had to push through a society telling me I was disgusting, and unlearn that contempt towards gay people. Now, the other sources of disgust just seem like passing fads.
Knowing that has helped me understand where others are coming from.
I find Haidt’s ideas about moral palates really helpful for thinking through why sometimes it’s hard for people to agree. My ethical taste buds are highly attuned to care and fairness, but I don’t get much flavour from sanctity, and I can barely taste authority.
Please do not think that one of these is left-wing and the other is right-wing. There are plenty of conservatives deeply motivated by wanting to make sure people are cared for and that distribution is just. There are just as many socialists who want to ensure the purity of the Marxist tradition, and to live in a world without contaminating ideas or contaminating people.
What we morally feel is not just about ideology, but about all the factors in our cultures and upbringing that make us need to focus on certain values.
So, this is my advice. The next time you encounter someone that you really disagree with, try not to assume they are evil or weird. Think back, instead, to this Torah portion. Maybe what is just a building to you is somebody else’s Temple. Maybe what really triggers one person just doesn’t impact you.
Haidt’s goal, when he did this study, was to make it possible for people to talk to each other across divides. I don’t want us to become like America, where some issues cause massive wedges between neighbours.
So let’s try listening to each other, and hearing each other’s worldviews.
Shabbat shalom.
Sim Lev 