Man’s physical side, however, is notoriously unresponsive to the edicts of reason. The body is a cauldron of material energies, complex and conflicting forces which are, in Berkovits’ words, “unaware of the existence of any moral code.”⁶¹ The behaviors of the human body are guided by its needs and appetites, which have no innate knowledge of or care for the demands of moral behavior. The matter of securing the body’s “cooperation” therefore becomes a central problem. “Only now are we able to appreciate the seriousness of man’s ethical predicament,” Berkovits writes. “On the one hand, the mind of man, the custodian of all spiritual and ethical values, is by itself incapable of action; on the other, the life forces and all the sources of material energy, without whose instrumentality no ethical action is possible, are by their very essence completely indifferent to ethical or spiritual concepts…. The human body, the tool of individual moral conduct, is essentially amoral.”⁶² Moral behavior therefore requires full coordination between man’s understanding of the good and his behavior as a physical being—a coordination which is itself no small achievement, and therefore which no discussion of morality can afford to ignore.

The mistaken belief that man can be made good solely through preparation of the mind is, in Berkovits’ view, the salient tragedy of Western civilization. The Greeks understood, to varying degrees, the nature of the problem.⁶³ But beginning with Christianity, which decisively parted from its Hebrew biblical tradition when it wrote off the body as part of an incorrigibly sinful world, Western man as represented by European thought has associated the question of morality almost exclusively with the question of what a truncated, spiritualized actor, possessing only reason or faith, ought to do. The question of how, once right action has been determined, one is to overcome inner obstacles to taking the proper action is understood, when it is considered at all, to be a separate issue, relating to other realms such as psychology or education. “Since the days of antiquity,” Berkovits writes, “Western civilization has mistakenly believed that it is possible to convince the body by reasoning with it…. And so it hoped in vain for effective ethical conduct through education. At its best, Western civilization was talking to the mind and never really reached the body.”⁶⁴

The result was that despite centuries of moral teaching, Western man was never able to overcome the intrinsic amorality of his material element. The rise of murderous regimes in the heart of the most philosophically developed civilization stood for Berkovits as testimony to the West’s failure to grasp the nature of morality. “In this respect, there seems to be little difference between ages of greater or lesser enlightenment; except that, in times of greater intellectual advancement, as knowledge increases, man grows in power proportionately and becomes correspondingly more dangerous…. Notwithstanding enlightenment, man seems to remain an essentially unethical being.”⁶⁵ Thus by focusing exclusively on the training of his reason, and leaving aside the very practical and consequentialistic question of how the body may be trained to follow the commands of the intellect, Western man was never adequately prepared to act decisively in the face of evil.

As opposed to this tradition, Berkovits argues that Judaism has consistently maintained the centrality of the question of the physical. The rabbinic tradition is deeply occupied with man’s composite nature as it pertains to his moral behavior. In the midrashic literature, man is consistently described as dual, combining both the “upper” and “lower” realms, resembling both the angels and the animals.⁶⁶ Commensurately, he possesses a “good inclination” which must be trained to outwit and overcome the “evil inclination,” a naturally more powerful immoral urge associated with man’s animal side. In later times, as well, much of Jewish moral literature focused not on the derivation of correct beliefs but on the discipline required to bring about moral behavior.⁶⁷ 

According to Berkovits, Judaism addresses the problem of the human body by creating a comprehensive normative system that relates to the material on its own terms. Unlike the mind, the body cannot be taught through logical persuasion, for its “knowledge” does not take the form of words, arguments, or even primarily emotions. Rather, it “understands” through habits, and through what Berkovits refers to as the “bodily awareness”—that is, through acquired, reflexive reactions to circumstances within the world. To train the body to be moral, an appropriate method must be introduced:

Morality, like any other performative skill, requires actual physical training. If man is to live a moral life, rather than merely to think moral thoughts, it is not enough that he study the nature of the good or the right; he must also educate his physical element through its habituation to moral behavior, which requires a regime no less demanding than what is required for other areas of life in which performance is the measure of success.

To illustrate what such training might be like, and why it is essential for morality, Berkovits draws an analogy to military training: Just as it is potentially catastrophic for a soldier to learn to fight only in the context of an actual war, without advance preparation, so too is it perilous to ask a person to inhibit his powerful, amoral tendencies in the face of a moral challenge if he has not had advance preparation. Just as training for war means subjecting soldiers to a regimen of rehearsed fighting as if there were an actual enemy, so too does the Jewish tradition recognize the need for a method of moral rehearsal even in the absence of an actual moral challenge. This it achieves through the system of ritual laws, which discipline man’s material side to disregard its own desires and act instead according to the prescriptions of the mind, as if there were an actual moral challenge being faced.⁶⁹ 

Thus for Berkovits, even the “ritual” aspects of Jewish law which are devoid of obvious moral worth are nonetheless crucial for the moral training they provide. The dietary laws, for example, can be understood as preparation for a situation in which proper moral conduct may come into conflict with a specific physical urge, in this case the appetite for food. Through the continual, controlled inhibition of this appetite for the sake of a higher law, man learns to limit the influence of this urge upon his actions. When combined with similar training with regard to other physical inclinations, man’s physical side as a whole becomes conditioned to responding correctly and accurately whenever emotions or inclinations conflict with moral demands:

This does not, of course, mean that the ritual laws have no meaning beyond their utility. Berkovits is careful to avoid casting Jewish ritual solely in an instrumental light, at the expense of the symbolic, devotional or historical meaning the rituals entail. He dedicates an entire chapter of God, Man, and History to showing how these commandments direct our composite selves not only toward moral behavior, but also toward a proper relationship between the individual and God.⁷¹ What it does mean, however, is that the lattice of Jewish practices could not have simply been a collection of independently derived, socially encouraged devotional rituals, but needed to be a comprehensive system of law, if it were to fulfill its educational mission. Law, in the sense that it is meant here, means acting out of obligation, even in contravention of momentary desires. It means forcing our material side to act according to principle rather than inclination. Considered independently, symbolic rituals do not need to be “laws”; they can be undertaken on an individual basis, out of one’s appreciation for their esthetic virtues, and perpetuated through convention. By presenting rituals as law, Judaism demands of man that he impose a discipline on his own material self throughout his life. In this way, the tradition trains him as a moral being in a way that no amount of discourse can.