Dina de-malkhuta dina, Shmuel’s statement that “the law of the land is the law,” is found in several places in the Talmud.1 Though the source of this rule is obscure, there is a general consensus that it imposes a religious obligation on observant Jews to observe not just Jewish law, but also the secular laws of the country in which they live.

Despite this edict, time and again we seem to read about otherwise extremely observant Jews who are accused of violating all kinds of secular laws, from money laundering, to tax evasion, to (lately) organ selling. Each time one of these stories hits the press, the outraged clamor of “dina de-malkhuta dina!” is heard from critics in the community, albeit usually from those to the left of the offenders on the political-religious spectrum.

These critics point to the rule of dina de-malkhuta dina as proof that the offenders (usually to their right) aren’t really observant, because if they were, the offenders would follow Shmuel’s mandate to observe secular law. Instead, they are, at best, stuck in 17th-century Europe, or, at worst, hypocrites who simply pick and choose which halakhic mandates they want to follow.

I have represented numerous very observant Jews in criminal proceedings across the country. While I would not judge my clients’ observance and certainly do not pretend to know the quality of observance of their communities as a whole, one point about the application of dina de-malkhuta dina should be noted. Rather than obeying most halakhic mandates and disregarding secular law despite dina de-malkhuta dina, at least part of the problem stems from the fact that many of these offenders treat secular law just as they treat halakhah. Often, that is precisely the problem; they treat criminal statues too much like a malleable halakhic mandate, which leads to tragic results.

An Example: To illustrate, consider a client who approached me several years ago to defend him in connection with a federal criminal investigation. This client is a rabbi whose education was entirely in Orthodox Hasidic yeshivot in Brooklyn. He never studied any secular subjects at all. The investigation related to a public stock offering by a mutual savings bank that was converting to a publically owned company. Because a mutual savings bank is owned by its account holders, these account holders are typically given first rights to buy shares, and since the shares often quickly rise in value, the account holders often make a substantial return by later selling them into the market. Because of this lucrative opportunity, federal regulations prohibit the account holders from buying pre-issue shares on behalf of anyone else and, in order to buy them, the account holder must certify that he or she has no agreement with any third party regarding the disposition of the shares.

My client, and many, many others in the Orthodox community, saw these conversions as an opportunity to make a quick return on a low-risk investment. But he faced two problems. First, he didn’t have the cash to buy the shares, so he would have to borrow from an acquaintance with interest — presenting a halakhic problem. And second, he didn’t have a bank account that entitled him to buy shares, so he would have to reach an agreement with someone who did have an account — presenting a secular law problem. How he attempted to address both problems makes my point here.

Form Over Substance — The Heter Iska: Halakhah contains a strict prohibition against lending or borrowing money with interest.2 Not surprisingly, however, halakhah has also come up with a way to achieve all of the effects of a loan with interest while technically avoiding violating the law. This is done by the use of a heter iska. Here is how it works. Assume my client, in order to make the investment in the bank, needed $100,000. His friend is willing to lend him $100,000, but wants ten percent interest.

The heter iska provides that the $100,000 is an “equity investment” in my client’s future business prospects. Technically, the equity investment is a risk and therefore is not a loan. Also, if the enterprise is profitable, the lender/investor is entitled to a share of the profits, again different from a loan. But by way of the heter iska, the parties agree that instead of the lender/investor being actually at risk and being actually entitled to a share of the profits, the parties agree that the only way the lender can lose his money is if the borrower can prove losses by way of an accounting done by two witnesses. Because this accounting is almost impossible to satisfy, the risk of loss is nothing more than a theoretical possibility. Similarly, the parties provide that the lender/investor will receive a “stipulated share of profit” in the amount of $10,000, no matter how the actual enterprise fares.

By using these legal fictions, the parties are able to call themselves “investors” and “equity partners” even though the money is not at risk and it bears a fixed return, the classic hallmarks of a loan. It looks, walks, and quacks like a duck, but in the eyes of halakhah, it’s a goat.

Form Over Substance — Investing in Shares of a Mutual Savings Bank: As noted earlier, federal regulations prohibit the account holders of a mutual savings bank from reaching any “agreements” with any outside investors. To get around this problem, my client “lent” the account holder the $100,000 that he had borrowed, and “agreed” with the account holder that if the account holder “desired,” he could repay the loan with stock rather than with cash. Because the account holder “technically” could have satisfied the loan with something other than the stock, my client argued that there was no technical “agreement” for the sale of the shares. By way of these two legal fictions, my client was able to claim that the loan from his friend was really an “investment,” and the investment with the account holder was really a “loan.”

The Government Prosecutor Was Not Initially Impressed: The U.S. Attorney’s Office took a dim view of the arrangement regarding the bank shares, arguing that for all intents and purposes, this was an agreement to purchase shares. My client provided the money; the account holder bought the shares and turned them over to my client. Therefore, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, my client had caused a false statement to the bank when the account holder attested under penalty of perjury that he had “no agreements” with any third parties regarding the distribution of the shares.

Fortunately, I was able to convince the U.S. Attorney’s Office not to press charges against my client. Specifically, I argued that my client’s use of the heter iska, which obviously was done solely for personal reasons, showed that my client has an unusual understanding of the importance of form over substance. Specifically, I argued that my client would never carry outside on Shabbat, would never eat chametz on Pesach, and would never borrow money with interest. However, he would carry outside if there were an eruv, he would sell his chametz to a non-Jew on Pesach, and he would rely on a heter iska. Each of these shows that my client truly believes that obedience to a regulation is a matter of form rather than substance. Luckily, the U.S. Attorney’s Office agreed that my client’s unusual take on regulatory compliance applied to his entire life, which supported an argument that he acted in good faith and no charges were brought.

This example demonstrates how some Orthodox Jews’ violations of secular law may be founded in part on the manner in which they apply the dina de-malkhuta dina. Raised in an atmosphere that respects legal fiction and form-over-substance, they apply these types of fiction to secular matters as well — even, perhaps, when the substance clearly violates the law.3

Thus, instead of respecting halakhah and ignoring secular law, the problem stems from treating the two systems too similarly.  Respecting secular law is entirely different from respecting halakhah.

Are Haredim more prone to illegal or unethical conduct than others? Once upon a time, the question would have appeared absurd. In recent years, however, with headline after headline reporting case after case of alleged malfeasance by Haredi Jews, the perception has now become widespread that the most ritually rigorous sector of the Jewish community is also the most ethically lax.

What remains unknown, though, is how much that perception owes to reality and how much to a prejudice among people toward the Haredim or the visibility of Haredi Jews (most Americans don’t wear their religion on their sleeves – or suits or skirts or heads).

When people ask me if Haredim are more prone to unethical or illegal conduct, I respond that I don’t know. No one does. I’d like to think that the Torah’s own exacting standards, as well as halakhah’s insistence that Jews respect the laws of the lands in which they reside, elevate Orthodox Jews to a higher plane of ethical conduct. Surely, none of us should be jumping to negative generalizations.

But there can be no denying that there are Jews, including Orthodox and Haredi Jews, who have engaged in wrongdoing. It behooves us all to bemoan that sad reality, and it obliges those of us in the Orthodox world to try to understand how Jews who are focused on doing things Jewishly right can engage in conduct that is Jewishly wrong.

And Jewishly wrong it is to misappropriate money from its legal owners, be they Jews, non-Jews or a legitimate government like ours. I recall vividly an address nine years ago by the revered dean of Yeshiva Torah Vodaath and member of Agudath Israel’s highest rabbinic body, Rabbi Avrohom Pam, of blessed memory, at the last Agudath Israel national convention of his life.

Rabbi Pam was too ill to attend the convention in person, but videotaped his address beforehand so that his words could be shared with the thousands in attendance. He pointed out that it makes no difference whether one is acting as an individual or on behalf of an institution, or whether one is dealing with a Jew, non-Jew, or government. “Meticulous honesty,” he declared, is the mandate of every Jew, and must be “the hallmark of every observant Jew.”

Why, then, is it not? I offer my thoughts not as an excuse for bad behavior, but as a means of trying to identify some of the factors that may cause it, in the hope that understanding might lead to improvement. I will focus on two factors in particular: ignorance and poverty.

Many financial crimes are born of ignorance, which is often a by-product of insularity.

It might be safe to assume that Bernard Madoff was quite aware that his conduct was illegal, but that is not necessarily so for Yankel, whose friend asked him to deposit a personal check and then transfer the funds to a business client. “Money laundering” might not be a term Yankel has ever heard, much less a concept whose illegality he realizes. And then there is the rabbi operating a free loan fund who never knew he had to register with the state, and the tax avoidance strategy suggested to Moishe by an acquaintance who assured him it was legal…

To be sure, there may be instances where conduct is so obviously inappropriate that the ethically sensitive individual should be expected to avoid it even if he is unaware of its illegality. Still, there are many circumstances where the ethical line is far from clear and where individuals may violate laws of which they have no inkling whatsoever. Ignorance of the law is not a legal excuse, but it often does speak to the question of moral culpability.

To the extent, then, that ignorance of the law is a factor in Haredi malfeasance, it is important to educate the community. Toward that end, Agudath Israel has been sponsoring a series of gatherings and seminars — the turnouts thus far have been extremely impressive — aimed both at acquainting the community we serve with knowledge of American law and impressing upon the community the vital need to respect it.

But that is not enough. The next phase of a meaningful “dina de-malkhuta dina” education project needs to take place in our yeshivot and day schools. Young Haredi children must learn that compliance with the law of the land is an essential component of a Torah-true lifestyle.

Another fact to consider is the dire poverty of much of the Haredi community. Even living extremely modest lifestyles, young Haredim are hard pressed to provide for their generally large families (which, however others may feel, are to Haredim their most important “acquisition” in life). The costs of a religiously observant life and of private education for one’s children are formidable. The temptation to cut corners, even when doing so borders, or crosses, the line of legality, is surely powerful.

I do not believe such corner-cutting is rampant. Most Haredim comport themselves with dignity and integrity. Many of the social pathologies that afflict other poverty-stricken communities are virtually non-existent among Haredim. We have much to be proud of. Still, economic pressure is a powerful force that can lead astray even the most pious of our people.

A number of organizations sponsor programs designed to combat poverty in the Haredi community: job training and placement programs, housing assistance programs, programs designed to help people live within their means. In addition to the inherent value of the offerings, they also help people live as law-abiding citizens in the full sense of the term.

If Haredim in the headlines prompt us all to better address Jewish poverty, wherever it exists, the scandal will have yielded something precious. Perhaps that will be the silver lining in the troubling cloud that hovers over us at this time.

The following excerpt is from the 1945 novel T’mol Shilshom (Only Yesterday) written by Israeli Nobel Laureate S. Y. Agnon. The novel, like Agnon himself, is torn between the secular Zionist culture of the newly born Jewish settlement in Palestine (represented by Tel Aviv) and the traditional Jewish culture of Europe and the “Old Settlement” (represented by Jerusalem). The (anti-?) hero of the novel is Yitzhak Kumer, a peripatetic oleh who embodies the restless, unsettled movement between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

The excerpted paragraph comes from a scene that brings together many of these competing claims and values. The speaker is Malkhov — an ultra-Orthodox Jew in whose inn the characters gather. Malkhov does not exhibit much love for the Zionist movement, and yet his inn is in Tel Aviv, the Zionist city, and not Jerusalem. Among the guests is Yosef Haim Brenner (1881–1921) who was, in reality and in the novel, an author and secular Zionist ideologue who, it turns out, Malkhov knows from his younger days in yeshivah. In his soliloquy, Malkhov introduces the tensions between the new secular Zionist understanding and the embrace of Hanukkah as a nationalist symbol of freedom from tyranny, and the traditional understanding of Hanukkah as celebrating a miraculous religious event. He cites Eliezer Ben Yehudah (1858–1922), the so-called father of the Hebrew language, and Boris Shatz (1867–1932), the founder of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Both Shatz and Ben Yehudah represent secular Zionism in Jerusalem (as do the Bezalel school and the resurrected Hebrew language).

It is in this context that Malkhov, using Ben-Yehudah’s words with obvious glee, points out the internal contradictions in the Zionist embrace of Hanukkah.

When Professor Boris Shatz made his Bezalel [Academy of Arts and Design], he ran into Hanukkah, this holy festival that they have started to call ‘Festival of the Maccabees.’ They went and made it into a celebration of lust. They erected a statue [idol] of Mattathias the High Priest [depicting him] as he is holding a sword in his hand to stab the traitor/ transgressor who sacrificed a pig on the altar which they had made for the Evil Antiochus. They passed the whole night in revelry and orgiastic eating. On the morrow, Ben Yehudah wrote approvingly of the celebration in his newspaper. He was, however, uneasy with the statue that they had erected in the hall, for this Mattathias was a zealous defender of his religion — his religion and not his land. For during the whole time that the Greeks had invaded our land and stole and plundered and murdered and slaughtered and destroyed cities and villages — Mattathias and his sons sat in Modi’in and did not lift a finger. When, however, the Greeks began to harm the religion, as it says in the prayer: ‘to make them forget your Torah and force them to transgress the Laws of Your will,’ he and his heroic sons jumped like a lion, etc., and they established in honor of the event a festival for eight days. And now, says Ben Yehudah in his article, and now I have no doubt that at the time that we were gathered last night in his honor, if the breath of life were breathed into the statue, or if he himself were alive, that he would stab us all as one with the sword in his hand, that he would sacrifice us all on the altar.

From S.Y. Agnon’s T’mol Shilshom (Only Yesterday), trans. Aryeh Cohen

The process of an iceberg breaking off from a glacier is called “calving.” I guess this makes me a calf, because I definitely did not stay with my parents on their metaphorical ice sheet of accomplishment. Both of them were energetic, highly motivated, and ambitious. They each had enormous drive to succeed — and they did. I, on the other hand, always regarded myself as an appreciator, an observer, rather than a doer.  As a young person, I had nothing in mind for my future self. Well, marriage, of course, but certainly not a career. I always knew that temperamentally I was not one of the worker bees.

Whereas some people would not know how or why they were so different from their parental models, upon reflection I knew exactly. For one thing, I was an only child — and a girl, at that. I was also born in 1940, so that my coming of age was just on the cusp of the women’s movement. Certainly no one in my family ever said, “Think about what you’re going to do, honey.” I viewed college as a social occasion and didn’t much care if I graduated — forget about graduate school. With a little maturity under my belt and four years of analysis, I was able to understand the dynamic underlying my lack of ambition.

Do not underestimate the effect of being a beloved only child in a privileged home where both parents saw to it that my confidence level was perhaps dangerously high. I was, quite simply, comfortable; comfortable in my skin and comfortable with the life I had. There was nothing I needed to prove, and I certainly didn’t have the “neurotic motor” that was driving both my parents. I thought long and hard about this “neurotic motor” theory when I wrote a memoir of our family, published in 1982. I needed to think about why the workaholic examples before me simply did not register; why it was almost as though I were inoculated against trying to accomplish something.

“The neurotic motor,” which I believe to be my own concept, seemed the perfect explanation not only for my parents, but for most high achievers. This “motor” supplied the incentive and the will to be outstanding. My father’s neurotic motor, for example, was to stop being the poor kid on the streets of Detroit. Unable even to finish high school because of his father’s death and the family’s financial need, he hustled and became a great salesman. His ultimate success was to be among the first business geniuses to combine discounting and franchising. The result was that he was the founder of Budget Rent A Car.

My mother’s neurotic motor was to forge an identity for herself apart from her identical twin sister. Though she became wildly famous and influential as “Ann Landers,” she could never quite ditch the twin act because her doppelganger followed her into the advice business as “Dear Abby.”

I had nothing to prove; I was missing the neurotic motor. This is not to say that I am without neuroses, just that the desire to become a high achiever was never part of my script. My parents never pushed me to follow in their footsteps and, in fact, were supportive of my choices, both as a mother and homemaker and, later, when I wandered into a career.

The fact that I did ultimately become a syndicated columnist and author was totally accidental and, if it hadn’t been handed to me, I’m not sure it would ever have occurred to me that I could do something and get paid for it. I have the late Gene Siskel to thank for dragging me to meet his boss, the feature editor of the Chicago Tribune, where Siskel was then a very young movie critic, fresh out of Yale. His unusual thinking was that I was such a facile talker that maybe I could write. This is often a mistaken idea, but in my case, it was not. And, interestingly, both my mother’s writing and my own have been said to sound as though we were talking.

Honesty demands that I admit I have basically arranged things so that mine is a toy career. I have never knocked myself out. Even now, I would rather read than write. I would rather travel than be tied to a rigid schedule. While it is said that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, the iceberg that separates from the glacier can sometimes drift quite a distance.

Agnon’s sentences from Only Yesterday about the festival of Hannukah may be described as a human pyramid, the kind usually found in Chinese circuses where several acrobats stand on one another’s backs, so several voices and speakers are piggybacked here one on top of the other, until it is compelling to ask what is the import of that whole choir and not merely of one voice among them.

In order to lead the reader past the maze of voices, I reconstruct, briefly, my own process of discovery — a form of literary detective inquiry.  It all began with an e-mail from Sh’ma editor, Susan Berrin, asking that I respond to a short excerpt of an English translation from Only Yesterday that scourges the religious zealotry of Matityahu the Hasmonean. I read and was puzzled; had S.Y. Agnon actually turned so against Matityahu? With such graphic bluntness? Had he suddenly lent his voice to the ideological disputants and joined the cause of a searing anti-religious attack in the name of a universal, spiritual Judaism, California-style? Is this Agnon, the consummate ironist?

When I opened my Hebrew copy of the novel T’mol Shilshom and saw the quotation in its context, I realized that this was no ideological declaration on the part of Agnon, heaven preserve us, but rather remarks from the lips of a certain Malkhov, owner of a hostel in Jaffa, who is quoting the remarks of Eliezer Ben Yehudah, as published in his newspaper after the first Hanukkah ball at the art school Bezalel, where the founder, Boris Schatz, had erected a statue of Matityahu the Hasmonean, the very statue that had raised its sword against the revellers. As if that were not quite sufficient, among the interlocutors of Malkhov-Ben Yehudah-Boris Schatz-Matityahu, present in that same scene is Agnon himself in the figure of Hemdat, and none other than Yosef Haim Brenner, who, it would appear, bursts into such uproarious laughter that he has to grasp the table so as not to fall and finally apologizes for his vulgar laughter, a savage laugh.

I read it and my head spun from the whirlpool of voices, and in an effort to squeeze my head in among the characters, filled my desk to tottering with books, and embarked on a thrilling read of the visionary giants of generations past, most of them renounced zealots: From Matityahu the high priest, a descendant of Pinchas the zealot, and his impaling of sinners, through Ben Yehudah, whose zealotry for the Hebrew language sometimes verged on the ridiculous (one day when a scorpion crawled into his Jerusalem home toward his baby son and his frightened wife cried, literally, “scorpion,” Ben Yehudah refused to budge, for her shout had not been “in Hebrew”). I continued with the figure of the prophetic giant Brenner, the perennial controversy monger, and with the eccentric figure of Boris Schatz, and his statue of Matityahu raising his sword as a frightening old man, and could not decide if he was a kind of Michelangelo’s Moses risen to his feet, or a Santa Claus turned aggressive. But imagine my surprise to find that even Malkhov was not fiction, but fact — a follower of Chabad, a friend of Yosef Haim Brenner since their  yeshivah days. That same Malkhov had a guest house in Jaffa by the sea, and contributed to the renaissance of Israeli festivals and writing; the quoted sentences from Only Yesterday are taken almost verbatim from Malkhov’s eulogy of Ben Yehudah. And then I discovered that a relation of mine, the researcher Nurit Govrin, dedicated a detailed essay to Malkhov, and in that moment, in the dizziness between identity and fiction, a creeping anxiety found its way into my heart that perhaps it was to Nurit the researcher, and not to me the novelist, that the question was intended.

But the more I immersed myself in reading, the more I saw how many ideological shake-ups each of those figures went through in their turbulent lives, and how that whole period of the First Aliyah, and the Second, at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, was paved with fierce debate over questions of identity and vision. Those subjects do not merely continue to preoccupy us to this day, as if not a thing has changed (starting from the tension between secular and religious, for instance, and ending in the question of Jewish settlement among Arabs), but rather the zealousness of the debate then lends our period, for all its divisions, rather a pale complexion.

There’s little space here to describe Boris Schatz and his statue, or Ben Yehudah’s internal conflicts, which led him to write what he did about the ball at Bezalel; or to debate the question of whether Brenner was a believer of sorts or anti-religious; or to delve into the relations between Brenner and the Hassid Malkhov. Nor will I get into the question of how it came about that secular Zionism renewed the festival of Hanukkah by emphasizing the heroic religious zealotry of Matityahu and his sons, but identified with their nationalism side by side with emphatically singing, almost as a hymn, the song “We Are Bearing Torches,” which includes the atheist lines: “We saw no miracle; we found no jar of oil.”

I will not address all that, rather the fact that these same anti-zealous sentences are a part of a paradoxical pyramid of voices. Perhaps Agnon tried to hint to us to avoid the sin of hubris (a Greek sin, perhaps involved in Hanukkah), the sin of the ideological ego: the single voice that pretends it holds truth (or perhaps God) by the beard. Perhaps thus he reminds us how much the Jewish drama, in all generations, is full of zealotry. But, then as now, we are all in one boat, and it has many paddles, and almost always they are not rowing together but each in his own direction. And how through a miracle, as in a circus show, the boat somehow manages to keep travelling forward, both in the days of the First and Second Aliyah, and in the 21st century, even between California and Jerusalem.

Perhaps thus, and in the savage laughter of Brenner, Agnon conveys with delicate and biting irony his anti-zealous message, a multivocal message. And perhaps it is the miracle of Hanukkah, which has not been emptied of its oil: the ability to laugh even at the shake-ups of belief and history. For they are like that very spinning top, which sometimes falls on “nun” for ness (miracle) and sometimes on “pei” for po (here), and if we play with the top not in Israel but in the Diaspora, it will fall on “shin” for sham (there). And everyone is merely a different face of one spinning top, a choir of voices and commentaries on one page. All part of one novel.

Most traditional Jews go to significant lengths to keep kosher; we buy only kosher-certified products and will not eat in non-kosher restaurants. As a member of this demographic, I find discussions about the ethics of kashrut harmful to both kashrut and Jewish ethics. Let me explain why: Values for traditional Jews, both ethical and ritual, are defined by the Torah. A plethora of biblical sources and talmudic discussions guide us in defining those Jewish values. To understand the definition and scope of kashrut, I reach back to the wisdom of my tradition.

I keep the ritual of kashrut because it is God’s will, not because of ethical sensibilities. As a kosher consumer, I don’t consider it an ethical imperative to wait six hours between eating meat and milk, to eat cows but not pigs, or to abstain from food that is cooked by a non-Jew. Kashrut is fundamentally a ritual law and not about ethics. As an obvious example, I don’t consider one who does not keep kosher to be unethical in any way.

Talk of the ethics of kashrut hurts Jewish ethics. It renders a tradition that possesses immense wisdom irrelevant at best and nonsensical at worst. If we take words that have specific meanings and manipulate those words to the point where they are unrelated to their original meanings, we have rendered these terms devoid of any content that is uniquely Jewish. These words now have no connection to their original Jewish meaning, and are therefore no longer seen as Jewish values.

If we intend to speak about ethics, let’s use the language of Jewish ethics that are found in Torah and talmudic sources. Let’s use these sources as models for new initiatives to raise our level of ethical living. Jewish groups that choose to focus on ethical issues should be applauded. But we make a mockery of Jewish tradition when we draw inaccurately on our sources to make claims about kashrut, and we thus weaken rather than bolster our push for ethical living. Ethics is ethics; kashrut is kashrut.

Talk of the “ethics of kashrut” hurts kashrut as well. Kashrut will suffer if placed under constant, intense scrutiny. The industry should be held to high standards, and when it (or we) behaves in unscrupulous or inappropriate ways, those transgressions must be addressed; yet the magnifying glass of the community or outside observers should not be focused only on kashrut. How we scrutinize the kashrut industry — that is, how we observe and react to the labor used to make kosher food — should not be harsher than how we observe the manufacture of the shoes we wear or the toys our children play with. By focusing on the merchant selling food, while giving a free pass to the merchant next door who sells suits made in sweat shops in Asia, we appear unfair and biased. Where does our scrutiny begin and end? Do Jewish organizations shine the same magnifying glass on all donations, requiring disclosure of the source of all funds collected to ensure that the money was earned ethically? We probably know a number of Jewish philanthropists whose money would no longer be accepted if this were the case. Many Jewish organizations would be forced to close down and would become the focus of much negative attention.

Jewish values are supposed to affect every aspect of our lives. Let’s applaud those who work to create a culture of Jewish ethics. Let’s examine our sources and develop appropriate language to focus on Jewish ethics in every area of our lives. But please don’t pick on one mitzvah while giving everyone else a free ride.