The Problem with Jewish Values

Does the term "Jewish values" mean anything?

Contemporary Jewish discourse often feels like a semantic race against substance. There is indeed a familiar rhythm in the way we talk about Judaism. When we can’t - or don’t want to - define the content and substance of Jewish Life, we use a cluster of words that sound profound but mean very little: continuity, identity, peoplehood, Jewish values.

These terms serve both as avoidance mechanisms and as reductionist devices. By talking about something vague and undefinable, like identity, we avoid harder conversations about what Jewish Life actually entails. By speaking of peoplehood, we reduce Judaism to one of its dimensions. In most cases, the usage of these terms seeks to offer Jews a sense of belonging “on the cheap,” that is, without making any meaningful demands.

I want to focus on “Jewish Values” because it may be the most seductive of them all. It carries moral weight and ethical heft, without demanding serious engagement with Jewish practice of text. It gestures towards a tradition, but it doesn’t bind us much to its normative core. In other words, it allows us to speak in the name of Judaism while remaining comfortably modern.

There are, however, deep problems with this concept.

To begin with, the word values does not appear anywhere in the Bible or the Talmud. It is, in fact, a modern invention designed to deal with a modern problem: the weakening of traditional sources of morality and authority. Thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche used the term Werte to describe competing systems of meaning in a disenchanted world—no longer commanded, but chosen. Later, Max Weber would describe a world of plural “value spheres,” often in conflict, reflecting a fractured moral universe that replaced the moral monopoly (and coercion) of the Middle Ages.

“Values,” in other words, are what remain when commandment becomes optional. They are the vocabulary of a world in which authority has thinned, obligation has softened, and meaning has become a matter of preference.

Sociologist Talcott Parsons theorized this further. “Values” became the abstract standards that guide action within a complex society. To fulfill that role, they must be sufficiently general to be shared, internalized, and flexible enough to accommodate pluralism. Religion, in this framework, becomes a carrier of values, reinforcing consensus rather than imposing obligation. What Parsons describes sociologically helps explain what we experience culturally: values are the moral language of a world that can no longer sustain thick, authoritative systems of obligation.

Later thinkers deepened this critique. Charles Taylor traced the shift from received obligation to chosen identity and, later, Hannah Arendt went further still, warning that the very term “values,” borrowed from economics, renders moral claims comparable and ultimately exchangeable.

This approach differs sharply from traditional Judaism.

Judaism, as we saw, doesn’t speak of values, but of mitzvot. It’s more about obligations than about ideals, more about commands than preferences. What we admire is less relevant to what we are required to do.

The core categories of Jewish life are not values, but mitzvah, aveirah, zechut, chova, commandment, transgression, merit, and obligation. These terms point to a juridical, behavioral, and covenantal framework. They presume a relationship between a people and God, and between individuals within that people, and a normative, binding law. By contrast, the phrase “Jewish values” emerged gradually in the 20^th century as Jews sought to translate a tradition of law and covenantal obligation into the moral language of modern society. Its great advantage for American Jews was that it allowed Judaism to be invoked without being obeyed, or even studied in depth.

In a culture of expressive individuals, the language of values transforms a commanded life into an expressive one. It replaces ‘You shall’ with ‘I feel’.

It’s not that speaking about Jewish values is bad per se. One can distill what we call “values” from rabbinic sources. It is impossible to read halakhic literature without identifying underlying values, as, according to the textbook definitions, “enduring beliefs about what is good or desirable.” The sanctity of life, the obligation to care for the stranger—these can indeed be derived.

Given that Judaism has an inferred system of values, we can say that using the term is not wrong, but an attempt to translate ancient ideas into a language intelligible to modern people. However, many things can be lost in that translation, and the risks of using those terms uncritically are not just philosophical but practical.

“Jewish values” has become a remarkably efficient rhetorical device. It allows us to retrofit Judaism to whatever we already believe. Want to argue for social justice? Invoke “Jewish values of tzedek.” Want to defend market capitalism? Invoke “Jewish values of property and individual agency.” Environmentalism? “Jewish values of stewardship.” Universalism? “Jews values of human dignity.” Nationalism? Also, “the Jewish value of peoplehood.” Organizations on both the far right and the far left - and everybody in between - use the term to mean everything and anything. Naturally, recognizing the power and fungibility of the term, everyone seeks to claim it.

Crucially, “Jewish values” allows institutions to avoid harder questions. It is much easier to rally people around “values” than around obligations. Values inspire; mitzvot bind. Values are inclusive; commandments discriminate—they draw lines, demand choices, impose limits. Why tell Jews that they have to learn sources, practice rituals, speak a Jewish language, or create Jewish culture, when it’s much simpler to tell them only to adhere to a certain moral mood that they already share?

This is why “Jewish values” belongs to the same family as identity, peoplehood, and continuity.

Each of these terms performs a similar function: they create the appearance of substance while deferring the question of content. Identity tells us that being Jewish matters—but not what that means. Peoplehood tells us we belong—but not to what, or why. Continuity tells us we should persist—but not what is worth continuing. Values tells us Judaism stands for something, but not what it obligates.

They are placeholders for conversations we are reluctant to have.

Saving Values

As we noted above, at the root of our fascination with the language of values lies a valid intuition: the need to translate Judaism to the moral and conceptual language of modernity. When society spoke in terms of values, Jews had to adapt to be part of the conversation. When many Jews also think and speak in modern concepts, Judaism has to learn the language.

That is legitimate, as long as we remember that the translation is not accurate or complete. We know this from another example: the translation of Judaism into “religion.” Judaism is a religion—but not only a religion. It also contains elements of nationhood, peoplehood, and shared destiny that the category cannot fully capture. Yet once the translation takes hold, it reshapes the conversation.

The same is true of values.

Indeed, thoughtful figures recognize the risk early on.

Louis Jacobs, who did much to mainstream the concept (in 1960, he wrote what is probably the first major work on “Jewish Values”), raises some cautionary notes. He grounds values in halakhic and textual sources and treats them as emerging from mitzvot rather than as replacements for them. Max Kadushin tried to refine the idea of values when applied to Judaism. For Kadushin, the moral language of Judaism consisted of “value-concepts”—fluid, tacit, and inseparable from the lived texture of halakhah, study, and communal life. They were not items on a list but currents in a system, taking on meaning only in context and in tension with one another.

By contrast, what passes today as “Jewish values” reads like the product of a nonprofit branding exercise: a set of declarative, universally accepted principles - justice, compassion, repair—that can be divorced from their sources, arranged on a website, and made to underwrite whatever program happens to be at hand. What is lost is precisely what made those concepts Jewish in the first place: their embeddedness, their ambiguity, and their capacity to bind rather than merely to inspire.

And yet, it would be too easy—and too modern in its own way—to simply discard the language of values. First, as we noted, the language of values is too ingrained in our culture to simply eliminate it. Second, if we jettisoned “values” and replaced it with another buzzword, we would have gained nothing.

So the challenge is how to “thicken” the term. To imagine what it would mean to speak of Jewish values in a way that doesn’t dissolve Judaism into personal preference or a popularity to please modern sensitivities.

Perhaps it would require three shifts.

First, inverting the pyramid.

As Jacobs and Kadushin proposed, we should treat values as emerging from texts, practices, and traditions. Not the other way around. In other words, accept that covenant precedes values. Values shouldn’t be vague appeals, but arguments grounded in a canon and in deep knowledge. Values can’t replace education and practice.

Second, moving from universal values to the particularity of obligation and practice.

A value that does not translate into some form of obligation—ritual, ethical, communal—is not yet Jewish in any meaningful sense. Most “Jewish” values are or have become universal. For a value to be “Jewish,” it must be anchored in particularism. The fact that we supposedly invented certain values doesn’t make them Jewish. Most cultures value justice and generosity. What makes those values Jewish is the way in which they are expressed. Jewish generosity as an abstract value is no different from Christian generosity, but tzedakah, as a structured obligation, is different from Christian charity.

Third, from values to tension.

Authentic Jewish thought is rarely harmonious. It is structured by competing claims and axiological dilemmas: justice and mercy, particularism and universalism, law and compassion. A discourse of “values” that presents Judaism as a seamless moral system is not only simplistic; it is unfaithful to its sources. In Judaism, no value is absolute, and any value always works in opposition to another.

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At its core, the problem with “Jewish values” is not that it is wrong, but that it is insufficient. It reflects a broader shift in modern life—from covenant to expression. By speaking of values, we no longer ask, “What is demanded of me?” but “What resonates with me?”

“Jewish values” fits perfectly into that shift. It allows Judaism to survive in a world of hyper-empowered individuals—but at the potential cost of transforming it into something else.

The challenge, then, is not to abandon the language of values, but to resist its most comforting tendencies; to insist that Judaism is not only a set of ideals we endorse, but a framework that makes claims upon us. To acknowledge that the language of “values”, like that of “religion”, can’t faithfully capture the unique nature of Judaism. We must balance the modern vocabulary of values with the more ancient notion of covenant. Otherwise, Judaism becomes not a tradition that forms us, but a mirror in which we see ourselves.