RT Review
T1 Elliot Dorff. Love Your Neighbor and Yourself: A Jewish Approach to Modern Personal Ethics. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003. xvii, 366 pp.
JF AJS review
VO 29
IS 1
SP 181
OP 183
A1 Haas, Peter J. 1947-
LA English
PB University of Pennsylvania Press
YR 2005
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1778841937
AB The subtitle tells it all: the book is not about bioethics, business ethics or communal ethics, but about the kind of ethics one should establish for one's personal life. Starting with issues of privacy, the book moves us through sexual ethics, relationships within families, forgiveness, and finally, hope. Although traditional Jewish sources are mined for their insights, in the end, this is one person's notion about what Jewish ethics can (and should) say about issues of personal ethics. Dorff acknowledges this right in his preface, “throughout the book, I present what I take to be an authentic reading and application of the Jewish tradition but surely not the only one. I therefore take care to use judgment [emphasis in the original] in assessing how the tradition should be best applied to modern circumstance, by providing arguments from the tradition and from modern sources and circumstance to justify [emphasis in the original] my reading of the tradition and arguing against alternative readings” (p. xii). In short, the book is not descriptive of the Jewish tradition but prescriptive, laying out how one should think about these issues as a modern American Jew who wants to think “Jewishly.”
K1 Rezension
DO 10.1017/S0364009405320095