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How would you define the word “good” without peeking into a dictionary? Is it one of those words, that to paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, “I know it when I see it”? Let’s take a moment to go back to our primary sources and see how it is defined. In Genesis 1:4, “God saw that the light was good”, and in 1:10 and 12, “God saw that this was good”. We are left to interpret what “good” means here, but amongst the many interpretations is that God was pleased with the creation. In the middle of the Garden of Eden stood two trees, the Tree of Life, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. We are introduced to a set of opposites – tov v’rah - and the commentary in Etz Hayim notes the following: Thus knowledge of good and bad is to be understood as the capacity to make independent judgments concerning human welfare. We will come back to this. In Genesis 2:18, God said “It is not good for man to be alone; I will make a fitting helper for him.” We begin to learn that the definition of “good” seems to be in the eye of the beholder. King David writes in Psalm 92, “It is good to acclaim Adonai…” and in Psalm 136, “Praise Adonai, for God is good.” From King David’s perspective, God is good, and praising God equally important.

Sadly, we do not use God in our speech anymore, especially in the way that our forebears did, with God a constant presence in their lives. When we talk about good, it covers the following non-exhaustive list: expiration dates for foods and medicines; the quality of a musical performance, or dance, or art, or writing; a description of health; a contractor’s finished product. I’m sure that you can add many more to this list. But what is it that makes something good? Do each of us possess an internal checklist, and if something that we are focused on meets most of the items on our list, we label it “good”? Good and bad can certainly exist simultaneously, such as an evening out in a fine restaurant, where the food was good but the service was bad, for example. But is there a general definition of good that most people think is a good one? I used an app on my mobile phone to look it up, and was surprised to see 42 different examples of the word “good” as an adjective, four as a noun, seven for “goods”, one for “the good”, one as an interjection, one as an adverb, and 18 when used as the central part of an idiom of speech. If my math is accurate, there are 74 different definitions of good. Apparently Justice Stewart is right; we cannot precisely define it, yet know it when we see it.

I’d like to think that if we placed one hundred people in a room, and demonstrated a variety of words and deeds, that the vast majority would be able to distinguish good from bad. Most everyone should be able to agree that if someone drops a stack of books that they are carrying, the good would be to help. Likewise, most everyone should be able to agree that if someone drops a cement block from a bridge that crashes through a car windshield and causes the driver to crash and die, that would be bad. What concerns me is when people align themselves with bad and see no wrong in doing so.

October 7 in Israel is an example of bad. I’d like to think that good people (depending upon your definition) would agree. It is the people who do not think that it was bad, who even celebrated it in word and deed that concerns me. Are they examples of what Sen. Alan Simpson said at the funeral of President George H. W. Bush: H corrodes the container it’s carried in. The inability of anyone to condemn the attack on October 7 demonstrates that corrosion. Those who celebrated showed their corrosion. Those who remained silent demonstrated their corrosion.

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad is portable; we carry it with us every day, eating of its fruit, empowering us to make judgments. To be human means that we will make mistakes. It also means that we have the capacity to acknowledge our mistakes, atone for them, and change. Our daily challenge is to make good judgments about everything we do and say. We are seeing far too many people making judgments that I would not call “good”. Their containers are corroding. That does not bode well for humanity. The silent majority of good people must become a vocal majority, overwhelming the corrosion with the gleaming presence of the Divine spark within each of us. That’s what God expects of us. We must make it so.