How to Save a Life: Humanist Judaism and Biological Ethics After the Holocaust

This paper will give a historical account of how American humanist Judaism adopted Jewish survival, on the terms of “bare life,” as an ethical and spiritual imperative after the Holocaust. It uses the case study of Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s Jewish Renewal, emphasizing its contributions to Jewish thinking on the “ultimate value” of human life. Building on the work of Shaul Magid, this paper shows how the ongoing success of Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s Jewish Renewal opened new questions about the value and status of human beings in Jewish tradition. Traditional Jewish legal interpretation subjects the human to the framework of legal (halakhic) personhood extant in Jewish texts. Schachter-Shalomi’s vision of Jewish practice expands the boundaries of the value of human life beyond the legal context, interacting with the humanist psychological theory of Abraham Maslow to propose a new model of human flourishing that accounts for the value of all human beings by virtue of their biological existence. This is consonant with mainstream Jewish arguments for the sanctity of human life, under the doctrine of pikuach nefesh (saving life). While traditional accounts of Jewish ethics maintain distinctions between the position of the Jew and the non-Jew in determinations of legal and ethical obligation, Jewish humanists’ use of biological language to describe human flourishing opened the avenue for the inclusion of non-Jews as subjects of ethically obligated action. Ultimately, this paper seeks to show, through the example of Schachter-Shalomi and Jewish Renewal, how humanist Judaism mobilized the universalizing potential of biological descriptors of the human to loosen the boundaries of Jewish ethical thought after the Holocaust.