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 mind is one that recognizes that there will always be
wonder, because G-d 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.
