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MITCHELL HEISMAN
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obey the Lord your God to observe faithfully all Hiscommandments and laws which I enjoin upon you this day,all these curses shall come upon you and take effect…(Deut.27:13-15)
If the law failed to reveal these divine consequences, itnonetheless had social consequences. It is said that if youdon’t believe in God, and just do the mitzvahs of Judaism,you will end up believing. Mitzvahs performed had thepower to take the raw material of freed Hebrew slaves, without inclination towards the political, and create orderout of that chaos. They had the creator’s power to makesomething out of nothing. The creation of the Jews waspossible only by going beyond sociobiological “nature”. Thecreation of the Jews began with a decree of “supernatural”law.Of the major religions, Confucianism might be the closestanalog to early Judaism. It is not simply becauseConfuscius’s golden rule, “Do not do unto others what youwould not want others to do unto you” (Analects 15:23), isvirtually identical to Hillel’s; versions of the same goldenrule can be found in nearly all the major religions. Judaismand Confucianism both emphasize ancestral wisdom as aguide for living in this world. They both emphasize behaviormore than belief. Westerners tend to notice the relative lackof focus on ultimate justifications in Confuscianism, but it isexactly here that one can discern an analogous emphasis onbelief in learning and actual behavioral results. Jewish thinking identifies the
Yetzer ha-tov
as the goodinclination and the
Yetzer ha-ra
as the evil inclination. Thelatter is associated with aggressive and lustful instincts(comparable to Freud’s id). Since “the predilection of man’sheart is evil from his youth” (Genesis 8:21), the Jewishprescription is to change undesired inclinations through

GOD IS TECHNOLOGY
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learning or channel them towards the good. Judaism’s focuson
behavior
managed socially destructive inclinations bychanneling them towards socially constructive ends (muchlike many secular liberal-capitalistic philosophies). Ifchanneled properly, Mosaic morality could overlap withforms of individual self-interest. Judaism is a technology based on an informal science ofhuman behavior. Jewish moral laws are meta-sociobiological. They work to counter some aspects of Jewishnature, and strengthen other aspects of Jewish nature, because they work on an understanding
about
Jewish nature.The last six of the ten commandments, for example, suggestthe basic social problems they sought to negate or correct:familial insubordination, murder, adultery, theft, lying, andgreed. The popularity of the ten commandments amongChristians and Muslims strongly suggest that the socialinclinations that defy the commandments are hardly uniqueto Jews.The normative aim of Mosaic law is not the radicallyaltruistic self-annihiliation of universal love, but rather, thegolden mean. Without the internal peace and unity that theMosaic golden mean aspired, Jews would be left fightingagainst themselves, and henc