[Avodah] Hypocrisy in halakhah

[Zev Sero]

Micha Berger wrote:
> I think that our treatment of unzerer vs nachriim is different can be
> explained by at least 2 factors:
> 
> 1- There is a difference in one's responsibility to a brother
> and one's responsibility to others. (As RRW noted last January in
> <http://www.aishdas.org/avodah/vol25/v25n023.shtml#03>, not that I
> would approach the idea with the same emphasis.) To take a clear case,
> ribis. The pasuq refers to the borrower as achikha. If your brother is
> stuck needing cash, charging him interest is a little callous. When it's
> a stranger, interest is more acceptable. The pasuq explicitly tells you
> that ribis isn't immoral, it's a matter of ahavas Yisrael and achdus.

I'm glad to see that you agree with this point, since it's the one I've
been making here for years, apparently to your disapproval.  IMHO this
explains nearly all the differences in halacha between us and them.
We owe them only the basic duty that every person owes every other:
not to harm them, not to steal from them, not to defraud them.  But
we have no positive obligation to help them in any way; we do have such
a duty to our brothers, precisely because they are our brothers.

All the ways in which we must treat our fellow BY are ways in which we
would naturally treat an actual brother whom we genuinely loved; the
Torah doesn't even need to tell us that.  But what the Torah does tell
us is that if for some reason we do not have such feelings for a BY
we should act as if we had them, in these specific ways; doing so may
lead us to develop that feeling of brotherhood that we ought to have.
When it comes to the others, however, they aren't our brothers, so
there's no reason we ought to feel anything for them, and thus no
reason we should behave as if we did.  If we happen to like one of them
we're not forbidden to do them favours, but if we don't we don't have to.

That's all I've been saying, so if you agree then I don't know why
we've been at odds.


-- 
Zev Sero               Something has gone seriously awry with this Court's
zev at sero.name          interpretation of the Constitution.
                       	                          - Clarence Thomas