Law and Morality

So it's a snow day here in Wilmington, but despite that I traipsed across this article thanks to Jewish Ideas Daily.

For those who've studied with me you've heard me ask the question (posed once to my HUC class by Dr. David Aaron) whether one can speak of Jewish ethics in the abstract or whether it all comes down to Halakha. The article (linky below) describes a symposium dealing very much with that question; that is, do ethics inform Halakha or vice versa?

What comes out of the article, at least for me, is a terrific Orthodox framework for dealing with those advocates for racism (e.g. our friends the 5o rabbis) that still allows for a fairly strict understanding of the text.

The follow-up question for me, then, is whether the inverse could be true as well. That is, can we use Halakha to create an ethical framework that works in the liberal/Progressive, (Post)modern Jewish communities like my own?

Law and Morality