Rabbi Art Green on Human Dignity

Rabbi Arthur Green has been a member of the advisory board of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America since its inception. He is one of America's most interesting and original Jewish thinkers and as Rector of the new Hebrew College Rabbinical School is training a new generation of American rabbis. To open our human rights forum, he has generously shared with us a portion of his forthcoming book on Jewish theology which deals with our responsibility to honor each human being as the image of God. Read Art Green's message and add your comment:

Judaism’s moral voice begins with Creation. Our most essential teaching, that for the sake of which Judaism still needs to exist, is our insistence that each human being is the unique image of God.

“Why was man created singly?” asks the Mishnah. “So that no person might say: ‘My father was greater than yours.’” And “how great is the Creator! A human king has coins stamped out in a press and each one looks alike. But God stamps us all out in the imprint of Adam, and no two human beings are the same!” Each of us is needed as God’s image and can be replaced by no other. It’s as simple as that.

“Why are graven images forbidden by the Torah?” I once heard my teacher Abraham Joshua Heschel ask. Why is the Torah so concerned with idolatry? You might think (with the Maimonidians) that it is because God has no image, and any image of God is therefore a distortion. But Heschel read the commandment differently. “No,” he said, “it is precisely because God has an image that idols are forbidden. You are the image of God. But the only way you can shape that image is by using the medium of your entire life. To take anything less than a full, living, breathing human being and try to create God’s image out of it—that diminishes the divine and is considered idolatry.”

You can’t make God’s image; you can only be God’s image. The Genesis account begins with two words for what we call “the image of God.” Tselem is “image” in a representational sense, and it clearly originally referred to the human form, both body and face. Some versions of the early Aramaic translation of the Torah render the word by the Greek “icon;” every human being is God’s icon. An icon, well known in the Christian art that by the fourth century was part of the dominant culture amid which Jews lived, is a depiction of God, a saint, or a holy scene that comes to bear within it the presence of that holy being, and hence is revered in itself.

To call each person an icon of God is to say that each human both resembles and contains the divine form. Each person is to be held aloft, revered, and kissed, as we have seen the Christians do with their icons. No wonder we have no icons in the synagogue! The synagogue is filled with icons as soon as we walk in! The second term, demut, is somewhat more subtle. “Likeness” is probably the right word for it. To be “like” something is to be comparable to it.

But here we have a great problem. The prophet says quite clearly, speaking in God’s name: “To whom will you compare Me, that I be likened?” and “To whom will you compare God? What likeness can you offer to Him (Is. 40:18, 25)?” Can we indeed be "like" God? Even if our form is theomorphic (yes, that’s the reversal of God as “anthropomorphic”), does that mean we are ipso facto god-like beings? Tselem refers to our hard wiring. We have within us a soul or a spark of inner divinity that is absolutely real and uncompromised. The entire macrocosm, the Self of the universe, is there within each human self, along with the ability, each in our own way, to discover that truth.

But demut is all about potential. It is like a computer program we create on the basis of that hardware, the life we live. We are the tselem of God; we can choose to become God’s demut as we work to live and fashion our lives in God’s image. “I am Y-H-W-H your God who brought you out of Egypt to become your God… (Numbers 15:41).” We are both in process, somewhere along the path. Y-H-W-H is becoming our God; we are becoming God’s image. Our Most Basic Message Rabbi Akiva and his friend Ben Azzai, sometime in the early second century, raised the question “What is the most basic principle of Torah?” What is the teaching for the sake of which all the rest of Judaism exists?

Akiva had a ready answer: “Love your neighbor as yourself (Levitiucs 19:18).” Akiva was Judaism's greatest advocate for the path of love. (Perhaps I should say that he shares this place with Jesus of Nazareth, also martyred by the Romans, just a century earlier.) Akiba was the one who insisted that the Song of Songs was the “Holy of Holies” within Scripture, spoken by God and Israel at Sinai. The tale of Rabbi Akiva and his wife's love is one of the few truly romantic tales within the rabbinic corpus. So too the account of Akiva's death: when he was being tortured to death by the Romans, he supposedly said: “Now I understand the commandment to love God with all your soul—even if He takes your soul.” Thus it is no surprise that Akiva is depicted as seeing love to be the most basic rule of Torah.

But Ben Azzai disagreed. He said: I have a greater principle than yours. “On the day when God made human beings, they were made in the likeness of God; male and female God created them (Genesis 5:1-2)” is Torah's most basic principle. Every human being is God’s image, Ben Azzai says to Akiva. Some are easier to love, some are harder. Some days you can love them, some days you can’t. But you still have to recognize and treat them all as the image of God. Love is too shaky a pedestal on which to stand the entire Torah. Perhaps Ben Azzai also saw that Akiva’s principle might be narrowed, conceived only in terms of your own community. “Your neighbor,” after all, might refer just to your fellow-Jew. Or your fellow in piety, in good behavior. How about the stranger? The sinner? How about your enemy?

Ben Azzai’s principle leaves no room for exceptions, since it goes back to Creation itself. It’s not just your kind of people who were created in God’s image, but everyone. Once we have a basic principle, or even a set of basic principles, we have a standard by which to evaluate all other rules and practices, teachings and theological ideas, laws and political systems. Does this particular practice lead us closer to seeing the divine in every person? Might this interpretation of a Torah verse be an obstacle toward doing so? Is this regime acting in conformity with treating every person as the tselem elohim?

Here lies an inner Jewish basis for raising some important questions, one that should be more in use among those who shape Jewish law for our day. Jewish concern for human rights should not be seen as a matter of political liberalism, something we “just” discovered in the nineteenth or twentieth century. Judaism may indeed exist independently of such extraneous ideas as participatory democracy, egalitarianism, and feminism. But it does not exist separately from its own most basic principle.

Any Judaism that veers from the ongoing work of helping us allow every human being to become and be seen as God's image in the fullest way possible is a distortion of Judaism. That ongoing challenge requires us in each generation to widen the circle of those seen by us as fully human, as bearing God’s image, as we seek to expand the bounds of the holy, to open ourselves to ever more of God’s presence. To find God in every human being is no small task.

We could spend the rest of our lives at it and still not perfect this art. But it’s worth a try. Nothing else matters as much.