# Moshe Halbertal **Moshe Halbertal** (b. 1958, Montevideo) is an Israeli philosopher of law, religion, and morality who holds a dual appointment as the John and Golda Cohen Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and as Gruss Professor of Law at NYU School of Law. He works across three fields that rarely share a shelf — rabbinic legal theory, moral philosophy, and the ethics of war — and the thread connecting them is a single claim about what morality *is*. That claim is the reason he belongs in this vault. Halbertal argues that the moral life does not begin with rules, consequences, or virtues. It begins with a **structural correction to the self**: the recognition that my own point of view is not privileged, that my interests do not automatically outrank yours, and that the standing I grant myself by default is not something I am entitled to. In his formulation in *On Sacrifice*, "the core of morality is the capacity to transcend the self along with its drives and interests." Everything else in ethics is downstream of whether that correction has been made. The corollary is what makes him politically useful rather than merely edifying — and it is the darker half of his work. If self-transcendence is the *engine* of morality, then a counterfeit self-transcendence is the most dangerous thing in politics. Halbertal's central warning is that "misguided self-sacrifice is far more problematic than exaggerated self-love": movements that persuade people they are *giving themselves up* for something larger can license atrocities that naked self-interest could never motivate. See [[Self-Transcendence]] for the constructive argument and [[Sacrifice and Political Violence]] for the warning. ## Formation Halbertal was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1958 and raised in a modern Orthodox family that emigrated to Israel. His father was a Holocaust survivor from Łańcut, in Galicia; his mother was Israeli and taught Hebrew. That combination — a diaspora childhood, a survivor parent, an Israeli education — recurs in his work as an unusual sensitivity to what traditions carry and what they cost. He took his B.A. in Jewish Thought and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in 1984 (cum laude) and completed his doctorate there in 1989 with a dissertation on values as interpretive criteria in Jewish law, supervised by the jurist Menachem Elon and the philosopher [[Avishai Margalit]]. That supervision pairing is the whole shape of his career in miniature: halakhic legal reasoning on one side, analytic moral philosophy on the other. He was a Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1988 to 1992. ## Positions and honors | | | |---|---| | Hebrew University of Jerusalem | John and Golda Cohen Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy | | NYU School of Law | Gruss Professor of Law (appointed 2002) | | Visiting appointments | Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, University of Pennsylvania Law School | | Mandel School for Educational Leadership, Jerusalem | Faculty member | | American Philosophical Society | Elected member (2021) | | National Jewish Book Award | Scholarship category (2013), for *Maimonides: Life and Thought* | | Goren Goldstein Award | Best Book in Jewish Thought (1997–2000) | | Rothschild Foundation | Bruno Award | He is married to the scholar Tova Hartman, with whom he co-authored work on gender and the yeshiva. ## The core argument: the self has no privileged standing Halbertal's moral philosophy starts from an observation about human beings that is descriptive before it is normative. Each of us occupies a point of view from which our own pain is *felt* and everyone else's is merely *known*. This asymmetry is not a moral failing; it is the architecture of consciousness. But it produces a default setting — call it self-privileging — in which my interests carry a weight in my own deliberation that has no justification outside my own perspective. Morality, on this view, is the discipline of correcting for that distortion. It is not the discovery of a new fact but the subtraction of an unearned one. This puts Halbertal in a specific lineage the vault already indexes at several points: - **[[Immanuel Kant]]** — the categorical imperative as a test of whether a maxim survives being detached from the agent who happens to hold it - **[[Adam Smith]]** — the impartial spectator, the internalized third party who is not me and does not care that I am me - **[[John Rawls]]** — the [[Veil of Ignorance]], a device that literally deletes the information that lets self-privileging operate - The **religious** version — the ascetic and mystical traditions in which the ego is the obstacle rather than the seat of the soul, which is where Halbertal's work on **Maimonides** and **Nahmanides** meets his moral philosophy What distinguishes Halbertal from a straightforward Kantian is that he treats self-transcendence as a *capacity* with a psychology, a developmental arc, and characteristic pathologies — not as a logical operation. That is what lets him ask the question the rest of the tradition mostly does not: what happens when the capacity misfires? ## The dark twin: sacrifice *On Sacrifice* (Princeton, 2012) is a short book built on a distinction between **sacrificing to** and **sacrificing for**. Sacrificing *to* is the ritual offering — a gift directed upward at a deity, structured by hierarchy, permanently anxious about whether it has been accepted. Sacrificing *for* is the modern political form — giving oneself up for a cause, a nation, a comrade, a movement. Halbertal's argument is that both are non-instrumental, both express self-transcendence, and the second is far more dangerous than it looks. The danger is a category error: people treat the *cost* they have paid as evidence for the *rightness* of the cause. Thomas Nagel compressed the point into a sentence that should be pinned above every discussion of political violence: if violent action is right, it is right without sacrifice; if it is wrong, sacrifice will not make it right. This is the single most transferable idea Halbertal offers this knowledge base. Sacrifice rhetoric is load-bearing across the American right — in [[Lost Cause]] memorialization, in [[Militia Movement]] martyrology, in the reframing of [[January 6]] defendants as political prisoners and hostages, in the "blood of patriots" register that recurs from the [[Oklahoma City Bombing]] through contemporary [[Stochastic Terrorism]]. In every case the rhetorical work being done is the same: converting willingness to suffer into a warrant for action. Halbertal's book is the clean philosophical refutation of that move. See [[Sacrifice and Political Violence]]. ## Idolatry *Idolatry* (Harvard, 1992), written with [[Avishai Margalit]] and translated by Naomi Goldblum, is his other book with direct political reach. It asks what the biblical prohibition on idolatry is actually prohibiting — a metaphysical error about which beings exist, or a relational betrayal, the "whoring after false gods" the prophets describe. The authors trace both readings from Talmudic sources through **Maimonides** to [[Karl Marx]], [[Friedrich Nietzsche]], and G. E. Moore. The payoff for political analysis is the second reading. If idolatry is fundamentally about **misdirected ultimate loyalty** — treating a contingent, made thing as though it were absolute — then it names a recognizable political pathology that has nothing to do with religion: the leader who cannot be criticized, the nation that cannot be wrong, the movement whose ends justify everything. See [[Political Idolatry]] and [[Cult of Personality]]. ## Military ethics and the controversy Halbertal co-authored the Israel Defense Forces Code of Ethics, work that made him one of the most prominent — and most contested — voices on the ethics of asymmetric warfare. His best-known intervention is "The Goldstone Illusion" (*The New Republic*, November 18, 2009), a long critique of the UN fact-finding report on the 2008–09 Gaza conflict. His position there is characteristically double-edged: he argues the report misunderstands the moral structure of asymmetric war, while insisting that the constraints on a state fighting among civilians are strict, binding, and frequently violated. That position satisfies almost nobody. On the Israeli right he is read as supplying constraints that hamstring the military; on the left he is read as supplying sophisticated cover for it. In November 2015 a lecture he was giving at the University of Minnesota Law School — titled "Protecting Civilians: Moral Challenges of Asymmetric Warfare" — was disrupted for nearly an hour by protesters who called him a war-crimes apologist. Defenders in *Tablet* argued the opposite: that his insistence on strict application of ethical constraints in combat has saved lives. > [!note] How the vault treats this > Halbertal is a contested figure and this page does not resolve the contest. What the vault takes from him is the *analytical apparatus* — self-transcendence, the sacrifice trap, idolatry as misdirected loyalty — which stands or falls on its own merits and is applied here mostly to American right-wing movements he has never written about. Tracing an idea's usefulness is not an endorsement of its author's other positions, and the reverse is equally true. ## Selected works | Year | Work | Notes | |---|---|---| | 1992 | [[Idolatry]] | With [[Avishai Margalit]]; Harvard University Press | | 1997 | *People of the Book: Canon, Meaning and Authority* | Harvard University Press | | 1997 | *Interpretive Revolutions in the Making* | Magnes Press (Hebrew) | | 1999 | *Between Torah and Wisdom* | Magnes Press (Hebrew) | | 2007 | *Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought* | Princeton University Press | | 2009 | "The Goldstone Illusion" | *The New Republic*, Nov. 18, 2009 | | 2012 | [[On Sacrifice]] | Princeton University Press | | 2013 | *Maimonides: Life and Thought* | Princeton; National Jewish Book Award | | 2017 | *The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel* | With Stephen Holmes; Princeton University Press | | 2020 | *Nahmanides: Law and Mysticism* | Yale University Press, trans. Daniel Tabak | | 2021 | *The Birth of Doubt* | Magnes Press (Hebrew) | ## See also [[Self-Transcendence]] · [[Sacrifice and Political Violence]] · [[Political Idolatry]] · [[Avishai Margalit]] · [[Ethics]] · [[Philosophy Hub]] · [[Moral Disengagement]] · [[Veil of Ignorance]] · [[People Hub]]