Leading contemporary Jewish thinker David Novak has here compiled ten of his essays on a variety of issues in Jewish ethics. Drawing constantly on classical Jewish tradition, Novak also looks at a wide range of modern critical scholarship on the ancient sources. He aims to point out certain common features of Jewish and Christian ethics and the normative implications of this overlapping of traditions; he assumes the reality of a "Judeo-Christian ethic," while refusing to minimize the doctrinal differences between the two traditions. The essays address such major normative issues in social justice as ecology, war and peace, the treatment of minorities, and the approach to AIDS patients. This combination of theoretical reflection and practical application, along with careful and detailed analysis of classical Jewish texts, makes the book a welcome contribution to contemporary ethical theory and normative ethics as well as a work of original Jewish theology.

Humans are biological creatures first. Culture is an expression of our brain and neurological function. Intelligence is the key to the flourishing of the human super-species. Humanity has reached the point where two sub-species are now competing within the earthly ecology. These are not defined by any of the existing racial categories, rather, intellectual and cultural behavior. They can be symbolized as Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens sapiens. In evolutionary history, no two sub-species have ever been able to cohabit a limited ecology. The outcome of this inherent selective conflict is written in the history of the human genus Homo, that is, the successive increases in brain size and intelligence and the disappearance of earlier, less corticalized forms of Homo. Civilization will eventually be shaped by the domination of Homo sapiens sapiens.