In his book, The Genesis of Ethics: How the Tormented Family of Genesis Leads us to Moral Development, Rabbi Burton Visotzky makes a surprising assertion. We do not learn how to live ethically from the rosy, pristine, and immutable portraits of Biblical exemplars perpetually taught in Sunday School. Rather, Visotzky claims, our education begins by reading the Genesis text carefully in community and unearthing the failings of the much-vaunted patriarchs and matriarchs. Only by studying how deeply flawed and fractured are the figures of Genesis, only by grappling with their limitations and mistakes and considering the contrast between the contrived and the described do we discover “the genesis of ethics” (9–13, 15–16).

As a rabbi and teacher, examining texts for moral wisdom in community is a familiar enterprise. But it is not only in canonized texts that one can discern the genesis of ethics. Indeed, readers of Disgrace are familiar with a deeply flawed and unappealing protagonist, a welter of ethical challenge, limitations, and mistakes. Whether as a teacher, a student, a father, a friend, a man, a protector of dogs, or a chaperone of the dead, David Lurie confronts his own unexpected education. For Coetzee's readers, too, Disgrace is a teacher, a text that awakens controversy, troubles complacency, and like Lurie himself, raises questions about how to live a life.

For David Lurie, there was a time before disgrace: before disillusionment, before disconnection, before making do in both love and work.