In the Jewish View, Animals Don’t Have Rights, but People Have Duties—Even to Animals

In this week’s Torah reading of Ki Teitsei (Deuteronomy 21:10-25:19), there are multiple commandments regulating the proper treatment of animals, including the prohibition against muzzling an ox while it is treading grain and the injunction to shoo away a mother bird before taking its young. The great medieval thinker Moses Maimonides gives three distinct rationales for the latter commandment, two of which can be found in the same work. Placing these varying explanations in the context of other halakhic restrictions on the treatment of animals, Jonathan Sacks seeks to reconcile them:

Maimonides . . . seems to embrace three sharply conflicting views: (1) the law of the mother bird is a divine decree with no reason; (2) this law is intended to spare the mother bird emotional pain [of seeing her offspring taken away]; and (3) this law is intended to have an effect on us [humans], not the animal, by training us not to be cruel.

In fact all three are true, because they answer different questions.

The first view explains why we have the laws we have. The Torah forbids certain acts that are cruel to animals but not to others. Why these and not those? Because that is the law. There will always be laws that seem arbitrary. But we observe the law because it is the law, even though, under certain circumstances, we may reason that we know better, or that it does not apply. The second view explains the immediate logic of the law. It exists to prevent needless suffering to animals, because they, too, feel physical pain and sometimes emotional distress as well.

The third view sets the law in a larger perspective. Cruelty to animals is wrong, not because animals have rights but because we have duties. The duty not to be cruel is intended to promote virtue, and the primary context of virtue is the relationship between human beings. But virtues are indivisible. Those who are cruel to animals often become cruel to people. Hence we have a duty not to cause needless pain to animals, because of its effect on us.

Judaism [thus] reminds us of what we sometimes forget: that the moral life is too complex to summarize in a single concept like “rights.” Alongside rights, there are duties, and there can be duties without corresponding rights. Animals do not have rights, but we have duties toward them.

Read more at Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

More about: Animal rights, Deuteronomy, Judaism, Moses Maimonides

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society