Two Kinds of Universalism

With regard to many of the standard ethical/philosophical questions, Jewish views are both complex and contested. But with regard to the universality of moral rules, there is general agreement on one simple proposition: all human beings live “under the commandments.” They don't all live under the same commandments: the 613 laws of the Torah are “laws” only for the people of Israel. They are a particularist code, but the particularism is limited to religious matters – rituals, holidays, physical purity, sacrifices, and so on – and then to specific legal elaborations and sometimes expansions of the moral rules. (Actually, the particularism extends also to the narrative in which the rules are embedded, but I will postpone that issue until later in my argument.) The moral rules themselves are common to humankind, and they have the same form as the religious code; they are divine commandments. There are Jewish writers who believe that morality is “natural” – that is, accessible to all rational beings. If the moral rules had not been revealed and commanded, they argue, we would have found them or constructed them for ourselves: “These are matters written in the Torah which, even if they had not been written there, reason would have required that they be written.” But it is a central feature of the Jewish tradition that the rules were in fact written; they were revealed and commanded – first to the “sons of Noah” (that is, to all humanity) and then to the people of Israel.