The principle of LIFO – last in, first out – can justify Jacob’s claim to the birthright.
There is an eloquent discussion as to why the Golden Rule in the Talmud is formulated in a negative fashion, “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor.”
There is a brilliant discussion of why loving one’s neighbor as oneself may not necessarily work for everyone. Some people don’t love themselves enough, and now more than ever we see how many self-hating Jews fill our Jewish social halls and voting booths. So, reports the author of this book, Ben Azai comes along and teaches that no matter what you may think of yourself, remember that everyone is created in the image of G-d and as such must be loved and respected.
The book provides justifications for rituals in general, citing Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits who compared them to war games, in this case training people in self-control for use in interactions with fellow human beings.
Other challenging topics dealt with in this book include reward and punishment, and attitudes toward beauty.
As far as attitudes toward tradition, it should be noted that the sources are a wide variety of traditional Jewish sources and the book is written from an Orthodox perspective.
Some readers may feel that the book may go too far in citing midrashim that seem to veer away from the approach to rationalize the activities of the patriarchs. One example was a combination of midrashim establishing that one important woman lived to the ripe old age of 1,500, eclipsing Methusaleh by more than a half of his lifetime! The author himself seems to anticipate possible objections to reliance on or citations of midrashim, and preemptively responds that the Midrashic explanations are used “not as much to reconcile the problematic texts as…. to provide a glimpse of the weltanschauung of the sages, which can often provide valuable insights in addressing modern problems.”
There is a section on source material, and a separate section on the authors of the sources themselves, with such tidbits of information as which Tosafist was taught by a daughter of Rashi, and a follow up to the famous epitaph of the Rambam, “from Moshe (Rabeinu) until Moshe (Maimonides), there was none like Moshe.” The tombstone of the Rama, Rav Moshe Isserles, states “from Moshe (ben Maimon) until Moshe (Isserles), there was none like Moshe.” One might say that from the time Genesis was written until the time The Ethics of Genesis was written, there has been no book quite like this one!