Something I just realized is that a common cultural mistranslation that happens in my life is I'll say someone like "it's not good to litter" or "it's nice when the street isn't covered in litter" and people will react by saying like "oh so you think people who litter are bad people who should be punished? You know there's an these systemic factors that cause litter on streets and it's mostly not about individual moral goodness and criminalizing litter only hurts poor people and funnels people into prison"
And obviously, to me, none of that is implied by what I said. Because in Judaism we have the concept of Lishma: that you should do good things for their own sake and not because of systems of punishment and reward (Pirkei Avot 1:3). I'm not saying it's good to not litter because otherwise you're evil. It's just good to hold onto your trash until you find a trash can and you should do that lishma, for it's own sake. It's good because it's good for the environment and that's enough reason.
Another part of this cultural mistranslation is that Jews only believe Jews have to follow halakhah and even then there's no real punishment for violating halakhah you just have an obligation to fix your mistakes and repair harm, again, lishma, for it's own sake. You have to do it, but not because you will go to hell (which we don't really have in Judaism) but because it's the right thing to do and through your faith you feel that obligation to do it. We made a blood covenant with a terrifyingly powerful force that included a promise to repair harm, and so we are obligated to uphold the covenant.
But this means when I say "it's not good to litter" I'm not proposing a brutal crackdown on litterbugs. I'm stating that this is a judgement I'm holding myself to and maybe those in my community or who are close to me. But I'm not enforcing this against strangers or holding other groups of people to my standards. I'm well aware that individual actions at a large scale are only affected by large scale phenomenon not individual judgement. Of course it's systemic issues.
But in Christian culture, everything is a moral judgement and all moral judgements are universal and all immoral behavior must be punished and discouraged universally. This is just so core to how Christmas grew up that all of this can be assumed whenever anyone says anything is good or bad.
I think likewise my sense of valuing things that are "nice to do" or "nice to have" but that are completely separate from what you're morally obligated to do is kinda correlate to this idea of "elevating the mitzvah" where sometimes there's things we do like using pure olive oil for a menorah not because we have to but because it just makes the mitzvah even better. Maybe christians don't have good concept? I don't actually know. But it's very familiar to me that there's things you're obligated to do and then there's things that are even better than doing what you're obligated to do, just because it elevates things not because you really have to do it. Like I use wax candles every year there's nothing wrong with that. It just makes things feel really special when you use olive oil. There's nothing severely wrong with individual level littering if you really can't find a trash can but doesn't it make life so much better when you make the effort to throw away trash properly?
Anyway that's my late night stream of consciousness about how sometimes cultures have different ramifications for evaluative statements on behaviors
