32 Mark Washofsky are capable of justifying torture, albeit under carefully delineated circumstances, as a weapon against terror, it is not unthinkable that some liberal rabbis, and certainly liberal rabbis working within the ancient discourse of Jewish law, would reach a similar conclusion.

Still, it is difficult to imagine that we liberal halakhists, with all our devotion to the language of Torah and mitzvah, would find in Professor Warhaftig’s contrast narrative a convincing portrait of our relationship to Judaism and modernity. Indeed, we would see his story as an exceedingly one-sided view of the liberal political culture of the modern West.”’ It is true that some theorists identify liberalism with libertarianism, a rights-based ethic that proclaims the supreme value of the individual’s right to choose among competing conceptions of the good. Under that conception, the self is prior to any ends that it might choose, so that the only“sacred” and inviolable good is the freedom of the individual to decide for herself just which of those ends to pursue. This, of course, is how Warhaftig understands the moral thought of Western culture. There is, however, a competing approach: the “communitarian” view, which holds that the individual is always situated within a community, a tradition, or(to use the word that has figured prominently in this essay) a narrative that to a great extent constitutes the self and its identity. Where the libertarian proclaims the supremacy of the“unencumbered self” that stands outside of any particular conception of the good, the communitarian responds that we are never wholly separated from the aims and aspirations that characterize our group attachments. Our ethical thinking always takes place from within a web of common meanings and understandings that characterize particular traditions, serving as the starting points of ethical argument and enabling the members of the community that shares that story to arrive at substantive moral conclusions.’” We liberal Jews exercise our ethical thinking within the context of just such a tradition. We, no less than our Orthodox brothers and sisters, engage in serious discourse over substantive moral values; our liberal Jewish ethical tradition, consequently, cannot be caricatured as a dogmatic commitment to freedom of choice as the exclusive or the only absolute moral value. To be sure, our tradition or narrative entails a deep and abiding commitment to the dignity— the kavod— of the individual human person. Yet this signifies our affirmation of human dignity as a necessary condition of the moral life: it is only through the acceptance of the concept of human and civil rights that moral values can be realized. We liberals can certainly agree that unrestricted personal freedom and the ceaseless pursuit of