Encountering the life, work, and thought of Rabbi Simḥah Zissel Ziv from my orientation as a normative Christian social ethicist, I found myself both fascinated and horrified (at times) by his ideas and his project of musar. Mostly, though, I found him enigmatic. Coming from a Calvinist tradition, I found that his obsessive concern for people's “evil inclinations” (139) was familiar territory and a theological understanding of human nature that I find deeply troubling in my own tradition. John Calvin famously referred to humans as no more than worms and supported the doctrine of “total depravity,” which holds that humans are slaves to sin due to our “fallen nature.” which is a result of the actions of Adam and Eve in disobeying God.
As a Christian social ethicist, more specifically as a Protestant and a scholar-activist, my own scholarly work and intellectual interest is in thinking critically and faithfully about...
