magiadoreal

In an ethical community it is love, or rather caring, that should reign supreme; in a merely moral community, mere rationality will do. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory , p. 146

I am being slow in parting from poetry because I believe that good poetry is perhaps the best example of emotions recollected, in the sense of emotions relived. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory , p. 124

Indeed, both David Hume and Adam Smith nominated friendship as the formative metaphor for thicky relations in a "commerce society" (read "market economy"), rather than family relations. For one thing, we choose our friends, while we do not choose our parents. And free choice is at the center of liberal society. The Ethics of Memory , Avishai Margalit, p. 104

Why should I care if my soul is swallowed up by collective? It is like a drop of water, which tries to gain salvation by merging with the ocean, thereby losing its identity as a drop without adding much to the ocean. The Ethics of Memory , Avishai Margalit, p. 100.

But then, who is the neighbour whom we are supposed to love or care for? Interpretations vary widely and wildly. Take at one extreme the sectarian Essenes associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Their gloss on "thy neighbour" is a fellow member of one's sect. In their sectarian reading of the scripture, all outsiders are by definition wicked, and an Essene has an obligation to hate them. So "love thy neighbour" is transformed in a cultivated cult of hate toward the world. On the other pole we find the old rabbi Ben Azzai who sees the commandment to love (care) as extended to all one's fellow human beings. It is not surprising that those who espoused the Jewish universalistic approach such as Moses Mendelssohn and Herman Cohen, adopted this interpretation of "your neighbour". But this universalistic reading of the verse is far from being the standard interpretation among Jewish comentators. A far more typical reading of "thy neighbour"...

As I reconstruct my parents' debate, it went like this: MOTHER: The jews were irretrievably destroyed. What is left is just a pitiful remnant of the great Jewish people [which for her meant European Jewry]. The only honorable role for the Jews that remain is to form communities of memory - to serve as "soul candles" like the candles that are ritually kindled in memory of the dead. FATHER: We, the remaining Jews, are people, not candles. It is a horrible prospect for anyone to live just for the sake of retaining the memory of the dead. That is what the Armenians opted to do. And they made a terrible mistake. We should avoid it at all cost. Better to create a community that thinks predominantly about the future and reacts to the present, not a community that is governed from mass graves. ( The Ethics of Memory , Avishai Margalit, p. 8)