fe's aim, deepened and spiritualized
their ethical ideals. Some of these considered the essential principles of
morality to be love of God and of the fellow-man;(1536) while rabbinical
ethics in general laid great stress on motive as determining the value of
the deed. The words, "Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God," so often repeated
in the law, are taken to mean: Fear Him who looks into the heart, judging
motives and intentions.(1537)

6. As the Mosaic Code presented the ceremonial and moral laws together as
divine, so the rabbinical schools treated them all as divine commandments
without any distinction. Hence the Mishnah and the Talmud fail to give
ethics the prominent place it occupies in the prophetic and wisdom
literature of the Bible and did not even make an attempt to formulate a
system of ethics. The ethical rules in the "Sayings of the Fathers" and
similar later collections make no pretentions to being general or
systematic. The ethical teachings became conspicuous only through contact
with the Hellenic world in the propaganda literature, with its aim to win
the Gentile world to Judaism. Thus at an early period handbooks on ethics
were written and circulated in the Greek language, some of which were
afterward appropriated by the Christian Church. This entire movement is
summed up in the well-known answer of Hillel to the heathen who desired to
join the Jewish faith: "What is hateful to thee, do thou not unto thy
fellow man; this is the law, and all the rest is merely commentary."(1538)

On the whole, rabbinical Judaism elaborated no ethical system before the
Middle Ages. Then, under Mohammedan influence, the Aristotelian and
Neo-Platonic philosophies in vogue gave rise to certain ethical works more
or less in accord with their philosophic or mystic prototypes. In
addition, ethical treatises were often written in the form of wills and of
popular admonitions, which were sometimes broad and human, at other times
stern and ascetic. One thought, however, prevailed through the ages: as
life emanates from the God of holiness, so it must ever serve His holy
purposes and benefit all His earthly children. "All the laws given by God
to Israel have only the purification and ennobling of the life of men for
their object," say the rabbis.(1539)

7. Perhaps the best summary of Jewish ethics was presented by Hillel in
the famous three words: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But
if I am for myself alone, what am I?