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requires cherut, the positive freedom 
that only comes when people internalize 
the habits of self-restraint so that my 
freedom is not bought at the expense of 
yours, or yours at the cost of mine.
“That is why I have taught you all 
these laws, judgments and statutes. None 
of them is arbitrary. None of them exists 
because God likes giving laws. God gave 
laws to the very structures of matter — 
laws that generated a vast, wondrous, 
almost unfathomable universe. If God 
were only interested in giving laws, He 
would have confined himself to the 
things that obey those laws, namely 
matter without mind and life-forms that 
know not liberty.
“The laws God gave me and I gave 
you exist not for God’s sake but for ours. 
God gave us freedom — the most rare, 
precious, unfathomable thing of all other 
than life itself. But with freedom comes 
responsibility. That means that we must 
take the risk of action. God gave us the 
land, but we must conquer it. God gave 
us the fields, but we must plough, sow 
and reap them. God gave us bodies, but 
we must tend and heal them. God is our 
father; He made us and established us. 
But parents cannot live their children’s 
lives. They can only show them by 
instruction and love how to live.
“So when things go wrong, don’t 
blame God. He is not corrupt; we are. He 
is straight; it is we who are sometimes 
warped and twisted.” 
That is the Torah’s ethic of 
responsibility. No higher estimate has 
ever been given of the human condition. 
No higher vocation was ever entrusted 
to mortal creatures of flesh and blood.

MADE IN GOD’S IMAGE
Judaism does not see human beings, 
as some religions do, as irretrievably 
corrupt, stained by original sin, 
incapable of good without God’s grace. 
That is a form of faith, but it is not ours. 
Nor do we see religion as a matter of 
blind submission to God’s will. That, too, 
is a form of faith but not ours.
We do not see human beings, as 
the pagans did, as the playthings of 
capricious gods. Nor do we see them, 

as some scientists do, as mere matter, 
a gene’s way of producing another 
gene, a collection of chemicals driven 
by electrical impulses in the brain, 
without any special dignity or sanctity, 
temporary residents in a universe devoid 
of meaning that came into existence for 
no reason and will one day, equally for 
no reason, cease to be.
We believe that we are God’s image, 
free as He is free, creative as He is 
creative, on an infinitely smaller and 
more limited scale to be sure, but, still, 
we are the one point in all the echoing 
expanse of space where the universe 
becomes conscious of itself, the one life 
form capable of shaping its own destiny: 
choosing, therefore free, therefore 
responsible. Judaism is God’s call to 
responsibility.
Which means: Thou shalt not see 
thyself as a victim. Do not believe as 
the Greeks did that fate is blind and 
inexorable, that our fate once disclosed 
by the Delphic oracle, has already been 
sealed before we were born, that like 
Laius and Oedipus we are fated, however 
hard we try, to escape the bonds of 
fate. That is a tragic view of the human 
condition. To some extent it was shared 
in different ways by Spinoza, Marx and 
Freud, the great triumvirate of Jews-by-
descent who rejected Judaism and all its 
works.
Instead, like Viktor Frankl, survivor 
of Auschwitz, and Aaron T. Beck, 
co-founder of cognitive behavioral 
therapy, we believe we are not defined 
by what happens to us but rather by how 
we respond to what happens to us. That 
itself is determined by how we interpret 
what happens to us. If we change the 
way we think — which we can, because 
of the plasticity of the brain — then we 
can change the way we feel and the way 
we act. Fate is never final. There may 
be such a thing as an evil decree, but 
penitence, prayer and charity can avert 
it. And what we cannot do alone we 
can do together, for we believe “it is not 
good for man to be alone.”
So Jews developed a morality of 
guilt in place of what the Greeks had, a 
morality of shame. A morality of guilt 

makes a sharp distinction between the 
person and the act, between the sinner 
and the sin. Because we are not wholly 
defined by what we do, there is a core 
within us that remains intact — “My 
God, the soul you gave me is pure” — 
so that whatever wrong we may have 
done, we can repent and be forgiven. 
That creates a language of hope, the only 
force strong enough to defeat a culture 
of despair.
It is that power of hope, born 
whenever God’s love and forgiveness 
gives rise to human freedom and 
responsibility, that has made Judaism the 
moral force it has always been to those 
whose minds and hearts are open. But 
that hope, says Moses with a passion that 
still sears us whenever we read it afresh, 
does not just happen. It has to be worked 
for and won. The only way it is achieved 
is by not blaming God. He is not 
corrupt. The defect is in us, His children. 
If we seek a better world, we must make 
it. God teaches us, inspires us, forgives 
us when we fail and lifts us when we fall, 
but we must make it. It is not what God 
does for us that transforms us; it is what 
we do for God.
The first humans lost paradise when 
they sought to hide from responsibility. 
We will only ever regain it if we accept 
responsibility and become a nation of 
leaders, each respecting and making 
space for those not like us. People do 
not like people who remind them of 
their responsibility. That is one of the 
reasons (not the only one, to be sure) for 
Judeophobia through the ages. But we 
are not defined by those who do not like 
us. To be a Jew is to be defined by the 
One who loves us.
The deepest mystery of all is not our 
faith in God but God’s faith in us. May 
that faith sustain us as we heed the call 
to responsibility and take the risk of 
healing some of the needless wounds of 
an injured but still wondrous world. 

The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks served as the 

chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of 

the Commonwealth, 1991-2013. His teachings have 

been made available to all. This essay was first 

published in September 2014.

