The Torah selected three examples of what would inspire such fear, concern over one’s house, one’s wife, and one’s vineyard. Having first named these specific concerns and declared them as legitimate under the circumstances, the Torah proceeds to include all other kinds of concerns which inspire fear for his impending death in the heart of a person. (verse 8). This pattern is not as unusual as it strikes us at first glance, seeing that Solomon employs it in Kohelet 1,3-9. He begins by listing examples of things he considers futile in this life, such as 1) a generation goes, another takes its place, a constant change, nothing remaining whereas the “dead” earth remains forever.
2) The sun rises and the suns sets; 3) the rivers all end up in the ocean but the ocean never flows over. Solomon tires of listing all the phenomena that recur constantly since the days of creation, all except man, because no new generation is exactly like the generation preceding it. The result is that the generation that has died is not remembered as it has never been replaced. This is why Solomon considers death the most futile phenomenon, seeing it wipes out what there was without replacing it. By the time Solomon reaches verse 9 he comes to the conclusion that seeing that there is nothing new in this life on earth which has not happened before, everything is remembered by reason of that very fact. However, just because one generation is not at all like a previous generation, man’s existence is apt to be forgotten, precisely because there is no one around anymore to duplicate what previous generations have done. There is therefore nothing by which to remember the existence of previous generations. (verse 11 there)
״אִם כֶּסֶף תַּלְוֶה אֶת עַמִּי אֶת הֶעָנִי עִמָּךְ...״ (שמות כב, כד) עַמִּי וְנָכְרִי - עַמִּי קוֹדֵם, עָנִי וְעָשִׁיר - עָנִי קוֹדֵם, עֲנִיֶּיךָ וְעֲנִיֵי עִירְךָ - עֲנִיֶּיךָ קוֹדְמִין, עֲנִיֵּי עִירְךָ וְעֲנִיֵי עִיר אַחֶרֶת - עֲנִיֵּי עִירְךָ קוֹדְמִין.
"If you lend my people money, even the poor with you..." (Exodus 22:24) My people and strangers - my people have precedence, a poor person and a rich one - the poor have precedence. Your poor and the poor of your city - your poor have precedence, the poor of your city and the poor of another city - the poor of your city have precedence.
Rabbi Israel Salanter (1809-1883), father of the Musar movement.
Once, Rabbi Salanter visited a new matzah bakery in order to check its work practices and level of kashrut. He reviewed all the manufacturing procedures extensively and observed the intense labor and toil of the employees. At the end of Rabbi Salanter’s visit, the bakery owner proudly asked him, “What does the rabbi say?” He answered, “The Gentiles accuse us, G-d forbid, of using the blood of Christian children in matzah. While this is not the case, from what I have seen here, there is indeed a violation of the prohibition on blood in food. The blood of the workers is mixed with the matzah! I will not certify this bakery as kosher.”
In another case, Rabbi Salanter was asked what demands particular attention when baking matzah. He answered: “One must be scrupulous not to yell at the woman kneading the dough.”
He was also quoted as saying, “It is prohibited to enhance your mitzvot at the expense of others.” One day Rabbi Salanter was hosted by a rich man. When he performed the ritual hand-washing before the meal, he used a sparing amount of water. He was asked, “Doesn’t the Torah say it is praiseworthy to wash with a lot of water?” He answered, “I can only do that in my own home. Here, however, I must consider the needs of the servant who must carry the buckets of water.”
When attending large dinners, Rabbi Salanter also hurried to finish eating quickly in consideration of the waiters and other workers, who had to wait until the end of the meal to go home. “Justice, justice you shall pursue in order that you may live in and inherit the land.”
Rabbi Yehuda Brandes, "Judaism and Human Rights: The Dialectic Betwen 'Image of God' and 'Holy Nation'"
What is the relationship between Judaism and modern discourse on human rights? The short answer to this question is that the humanistic and liberal values that underlie modern human rights discourse are not foreign to Judaism. Quite the contrary: they exist within it and emanate from it, in the Bible, halakhic literature, and modern religious philosophy.
The book of Genesis, especially the story of the Creation, is the wellspring of fundamental human principles. The creation of human beings in the image of God serves as the starting point from which primary values are derived. These include human life, human dignity, property, equality and freedom, and the family. Many precepts originate from these fundamental values. The value of life, first mentioned in the Bible in the verse “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed” (Gen. 9:6), leads to injunctions such as “You shall not murder” (Exod. 20:13) and “Do not stand idly by when your neighbor’s life is threatened” (Lev. 19:16).
The values of equality and freedom stem not only from the fact that all human beings were created in the divine image but also from the fact that they are all descendants of Adam and Eve; the corollaries of these values include the laws of labor relations, which mandated fair and equal treatment of workers by employers even in societies that practiced slavery, and are all the more applicable in our own day and age.
The universal dimension of the Torah is found in the book of Genesis, which contains ethics that were given to all human beings descended from Adam and Noah. This constitutes the ground floor, the basic values of the Torah and Judaism, parallel to the modern system of human rights and hardly different from it in any essential way. The next level, designated “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6), represents the dimension of the selection of Israel to bear a special divine mission.
Before the Israelites received the Torah at Sinai, we learn that the purpose of this gift was to make them into “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”
The concept of a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” obligates the Jewish people to observe an additional and much broader set of precepts than the basic and universal code constituted by the “Seven Noahide Commandments”; even though this code actually encompasses much more than seven precepts, the Torah imposes on the Jewish people an extremely comprehensive canon of statutes that are not incumbent on other nations.
The two tracks are presented not as merging but as colliding—the track of the “image of God,” which is the basis of human rights, and the track of “a kingdom of priests and holy nation,” which constrains and limits universal human values.
How do the Torah and Halakhah deal with the tension between these two tracks or two opposing systems for living? The fundamental axiom is that we are not dealing with tension and contradiction between the Torah and some external and alien culture, but with an internal tension that stems from the existence of two principles that coexist within the Torah itself. Dealing with and resolving these two opposing poles is the very soul of talmudic thought. It is based on the notion that “both these and those are the words of the living God” (BT Eruvin 13b): both of these contradictory positions are valid and true, and no final and absolute decision can be rendered in favor of one or the other.
