What the World Needs Now

Ethical Culture was founded in 1876 by Dr. Felix Adler. He had studied to be a rabbi in Reform Judaism in America, back when Reform Judaism was quite radical intellectually. Adler had been very affected by Emerson and other Transcendalist thinkers. He read Sanskrit; he was familiar with Buddhism. In his first sermon, called "The Judaism of the Future," Adler said the prophetic tradition, this ethics-drenched tradition, thousands of years old, was too precious to save for one people. It should be available to everyone. He suggested they stop passing it along matrilineally, open it to everyone, and expand it into an ethical quest.

After delivering this sermon, he went off to Cornell to be a professor of religion, but about some of the people at his temple pursued him and said, "We really like this idea." It was clearly beyond Judaism, but it was clearly linked to its prophetic tradition.

Adler, in his most famous book, "Reconstruction of the Spiritual Ideal," wrote that the main purpose of marriage was to be a nest for the future. It was to be a spiritual place, where you developed your character and values. And since the basic unit of any ethical question is two--two people--Ethical Culture lends itself to the question of marriage, which begins with two people and draws all these other people in.

Centering, Choosing, Honoring, Caring, Abiding, Repairing, Listening and Celebrating.

These came out of a 14-year study, a grass-roots level conversation we conducted within Ethical Culture. We asked, what are the most basic values without which you don't have civilization at all? These were the commitments we came up with. We felt they were important for the cultivation of ethical cultures, small "e" and small "c." And after the study was confirmed by our national council, I thought, this is such wonderful stuff, it should belong to more than just us. At that point I had been wanting to write about marriage. I wanted to turn these commitments into terms that were directly related to interpersonal relationships.

I use the image of a spiral. In James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," the last sentence comes around and becomes the first sentence, and that's how I conceive the eight commitments. But each time you come around you've been deepened.

But for a person who sees life as a spiritual journey in ethical living, there is no ethical living without the first one, choosing. You can be a good person and conform to your culture and hope that it's a good culture-that it's not Germany in 1939. You can work to a certain level. But real, full-bodied mature living doesn't begin until one becomes a conscious chooser.

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