The Jewish Family Ethics Textbook (JPS Essential Judaism)
Digital Verbum Edition
Overview
2021 National Jewish Book Award Finalist for Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice.
Judaism offers us unique—and often divergent—insights into contemporary moral quandaries. How can we use social media without hurting others? Should people become parents through cloning? Should doctors help us die?
The first ethics book to address social media and technology ethics through a Jewish lens, along with teaching the additional skills of analyzing classical Jewish texts, The Jewish Family Ethics Textbook guides teachers and students of all ages in mining classical and modern Jewish texts to inform ethical decision-making. Both sophisticated and accessible, the book tackles challenges in parent-child relationships, personal and academic integrity, social media, sexual intimacy, conception, abortion, and end of life. Case studies, largely drawn from real life, concretize the dilemmas. Multifaceted texts from tradition (translated from Hebrew and Aramaic) to modernity build on one another to shed light on the deliberations. Questions for inquiry, commentary, and a summation of the texts’ implications for the case studies deepen and open up the dialogue.
In keeping with the tradition of maḥloket, preserving multiple points of view, “We need not accept any of our forebears’ ideas uncritically,” Rabbi Neal Scheindlin explains. “The texts provide opportunities to discover ideas that help us think through ethical dilemmas, while leaving room for us to discuss and draw our own conclusions.”
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- Addresses social media and technology ethics through a Jewish len
- Includes case studies drawn from real life to help concretize the dilemmas
- Guides teachers and students of all ages in mining classical and modern Jewish texts to inform ethical decision-making
- Introduction
- Parents and Children
- Honesty
- Social Media
- Sex and Intimacy
- Medical Ethics at the Beginning of Life
- Abortion
- Medical Ethics at the End of Life
- Conclusion
This is a most important book introducing students to the profound depth of Jewish Family Ethics found in classic Jewish literature.
—Rabbi Mel Gottlieb, president, Academy for Jewish Religion, California
A richly rendered, sensitive, and nuanced volume. As a beloved teacher of Jewish studies in a pluralistic Jewish high school, Scheindlin presents cutting-edge issues that loom large for today’s youth with warmth and empathy toward his audience and a reverence for Jewish tradition.
—Elliott Rabin, director of thought leadership at Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools, New York City
This is the book we have been waiting for! For inquisitive high school students and adults of all ages and streams of Jewish life who are eager to wrestle with questions of ethics, this creative book by an esteemed teacher grounds the most urgent moral issues of our time in eye-opening texts. The Jewish Family Ethics Textbook is sure to generate lively conversations from the classroom to the dinner table.
—Rabbi Judd Kruger Levingston, director of Jewish studies, Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and author of Sowing the Seeds of Character: The Moral Education of Adolescents in Public and Private Schools