Today’s Western society is built on the foundations of two cultures: the Jewish and the Greek. Both treasured the human mind. The Greeks reached the pinnacle of intellect at their time. But the experience of Mount Sinai had taught the Jew that there is something greater than the human mind. There is a G‑d, indescribable and inexplicable. And therefore, a world could not be built on human reason alone.
The idea annoyed the Greeks to no end. While they appreciated the wisdom of the Torah, they demanded that the Jews abandon the notion that it was something divine.
Ethics, to an ancient Greek, meant that which is right in the eyes of society. To a Jew, it means that which is right in the eyes of G‑d. The difference is crucial: Ethics built solely on the convenience of the time can produce a society where human beings are treated as numbers in a computer, or where the central value is the accumulation of wealth. At its extreme, it can produce a Stalinist Russia or a Nazi Germany.
A healthy society is one that recognizes that which is beyond the human mind. And a healthy society is a balanced one, whose soil nurtures human accomplishment but whose bedrock is the ethical standard of an Eternal Being.
I wonder if you would have any comment about this idea..
In childhood, the child learns in relation to their parents disciplining style or favoratism and values who they are.
Sometimes the mislearnings learned in childhood have ill effects on us as persons. This is similiar to the Greeks, this is the rules of the family..
When we mature we take an adult perspective on what we learned or mislearned as a child about life in home and school. We learn to look at our situation from an individual relationship with G-D perspective and reassess our experience in childhood to see if the childhood adults were fitting into the rules given by G-D.
Then we develop an individual and confident relationship with G-D dispelling the childhood mislearnings, developing a more stable individually disciplined approach to life with G-D's rules being our guide. like the Jews doing right in G-D's eyes.