36 | SEPTEMBER 30 • 2021

T

here are words that change the
world, none more so than two sen-
tences that appear in the first chap-
ter of the Torah:
Then God said, “Let us make mankind
in our image, in our likeness, so that they
may rule over the fish in the
sea and the birds in the sky,
over the livestock and all the
wild animals, and over all the
creatures that move along the
ground.
“So, God created mankind
in His own image, in the
image of God He created
them; male and female He
created them.
”
The idea set forth here is perhaps the
most transformative in the entire history
of moral and political thought. It is the
basis of the civilization of the West with its
unique emphasis on the individual and on
equality.
It lies behind Thomas Jefferson’s words
in the Declaration of Independence, “We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that
all men are created equal and are endowed
by their Creator with certain unalienable
rights …”
These truths are anything but self-evident.
They would have been regarded as absurd
by Plato who held that society should be
based on the myth that humans are divided
into people of gold, silver and bronze, and it
is this that determines their status in society.

Aristotle believed that some are born to rule
and others to be ruled.

ENDING SLAVERY
Revolutionary utterances do not work their
magic overnight. As Rambam explained in
The Guide for the Perplexed, it takes people
a long time to change. The Torah works
in the medium of time. It did not abolish
slavery, but it set in motion a series of devel-
opments — most notably Shabbat when all
hierarchies of power were suspended and
slaves had a day a week of freedom — that
were bound to lead to its abolition in the
course of time.
People are slow to understand the impli-
cations of ideas. Thomas Jefferson, cham-
pion of equality, was a slave owner. Slavery
was not abolished in the United States until
the 1860s and not without a civil war. And
as Abraham Lincoln pointed out, slavery’s
defenders as well as its critics cited the Bible
in their cause. But eventually people change,
and they do so because of the power of
ideas, planted long ago in the Western
mind.
What exactly is being said in the first
chapter of the Torah? The first thing to note
is that it is not a stand-alone utterance, an
account without a context. It is, in fact, a
polemic, a protest, against a certain way of
understanding the universe.
In all ancient myth, the world was
explained in terms of battles of the gods in
their struggle for dominance. The Torah

dismisses this way of thinking totally and
utterly. God speaks and the universe comes
into being. This, according to the great
19th-century sociologist Max Weber, was
the end of myth and the birth of Western
rationalism.

‘IT WAS GOOD’
More significantly, it created a new way of
thinking about the universe. Central to both
the ancient world of myth and the modern
world of science is the idea of power, force,
energy. That is what is significantly absent
from Genesis 1. God says, “Let there be,
”
and there is.
There is nothing here about power,
resistance, conquest or the play of forces.
Instead, the key word of the narrative,
appearing seven times, is utterly unexpect-
ed. It is the word tov, good.
Tov is a moral word. The Torah in
Genesis 1 is telling us something radical.
The reality to which Torah is a guide (the
word “Torah” itself means “guide, instruc-
tion, law”) is moral and ethical. The ques-
tion Genesis seeks to answer is not “How
did the universe come into being?” but
“How then shall we live?”
This is the Torah’s most significant para-
digm shift. The universe God made and we
inhabit is not about power or dominance
but about tov and ra, good and evil. For the
first time, religion was ethicized. God cares
about justice, compassion, faithfulness, lov-
ingkindness, the dignity of the individual

Rabbi
Jonathan
Sacks

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH

Created in the Image