December 1999 Moral Progess: Reality Or Illusion? By Rabbi Alvin Kass As the twentieth century and the Second Millennium come to an end, many people are asking: "Is there progress?" In other words, amidst all the changes that have occurred over the last thousand years, has the world become a better place? There is no question but that in some areas, progress is real and palpable. Take medicine for example. Both the quality and the quantity of our years here on earth have expanded dramatically. Until about a hundred years ago, most people went through half their lives with a toothache. Today, however, few people born after 1960 even know what a toothache is. Economic improvement is also extraordinary. It is no minor matter that the thirty million Americans who are today classified as living in "poverty" enjoy a standard of living that a quarter of a century ago would have been considered average. When it comes to moral progress, the issue is far more problematical and ambiguous. There have certainly been some remarkable changes in our own country of a very positive nature. Slavery and legally sanctioned racial segregation came to an end. The rights of women to equal treatment and opportunity multiplied geometrically. At the same time, the twentieth century is incontrovertibly the bloodiest in all of human annals. In a long history, filled with persecution and oppression, Jew hatred reached unprecedented depths in the Holocaust. Mankind's arsenal of weapons grew to include mustard gas, atomic bombs, thermonuclear rockets, biological and chemical warfare. There is surely good reason to question the reality of moral progress. The belief in progress was actually introduced by the Hebrew Bible. Prior to that the Greek view prevailed that life was wholly cyclical in nature. According to this way of thinking, the same sequence of events repeated itself from time immemorial and will go on eternally. In sharp contrast, it was the Jews who contended that life was a drama whose opening act occurred in the Garden of Eden and whose climax will take place during the messianic age when God’s purposes on Earth will achieve total and complete fulfillment. History is the saga of mankind’s march through time from beginning to end. The optimism that has permeated so much human thought since the Age of the inlightenment in eighteenth century Europe was essentially a secularized version of the Biblical concept of progress. A frequently overlooked ingredient in Judaic thinking, however, is the conviction that progress does not consist of a smooth, incremental, and almost automatic movement in time from worse to better, from ignorance to enlightenment. The reason is that God made man free, possessing the capacity to utilize his abilities in a positive and constructive way, or to harness them in a manner that is ruinous to himself and to the world. Human nature contains both a yetzer hatov, a good inclination, and a yetzer hara, an evil inclination. These two parts of our personality are constantly working against each other, and the goal of Judaism is to help the good inclination to get the upper hand. But there are no final victories, and the battle goes on for as long as we live. As the Talmud teaches: "Don't trust in yourself until the day of your death." The tragic elements of history result from the triumph of the yetzer hara in the arena of life. Therefore, while Jews were convinced that life was not "just one damn thing after another," they also recognized that history is not an uninterrupted, triumphal, forward march. In short, human beings possess the potential of achieving progress; but whether they do so depends in the last analysis upon the strength of their will and determination. One thing is certain. There will be progress only if we adhere to the ethical principles that constitute the essence of Biblical and Talmudic thinking: love, justice, honesty, truth, compassion, and forgiveness. As we enter a new century and a new millennium, may our loyalty to these ideals assure that mankind will achieve a measure of moral progress that will keep pace with his economic scientific, and technological achievements.