SEPTEMBER 30 • 2021 | 37

and the sanctity of life.
This same principle, that
Genesis 1 is a polemic, part of an
argument with a background, is
essential to understanding the
idea that God created humanity
“in His image, after His like-
ness.
” This language would not
have been unfamiliar to the first
readers of the Torah. It was one
they knew well.
It was commonplace in the
first civilizations, Mesopotamia
and ancient Egypt. Certain
people were said to be in the
image of God. They were the
kings of the Mesopotamian
city states and the pharaohs
of Egypt. Nothing could have
been more radical than to say
that not just kings and rulers
are God’s image. We all are.
Even today the idea is daring:
how much more so in an age
of absolute rulers with absolute
power.
Understood thus, Genesis 1:
26-27 is not so much a meta-
physical statement about the
nature of the human person as
it is a political protest against the
very basis of hierarchical, class-
or caste-based societies, whether
in ancient or modern times.
That is what makes it the most
incendiary idea in the Torah. In
some fundamental sense, we are
all equal in dignity and ultimate
worth, for we are all in God’s
image regardless of color, cul-
ture or creed.

KINGDOM OF PRIESTS
A similar idea appears later in
the Torah, in relation to the
Jewish people, when God invit-
ed them to become a kingdom
of priests and a holy nation. All
nations in the ancient world
had priests, but none was “a
kingdom of priests.
” All reli-
gions have holy individuals, but
none claimed to be a nation
every one of whose members
was holy. This, too, took time to
materialize.
During the entire biblical era,
there were hierarchies. There
were priests and high priests, a
holy elite. But after the destruc-
tion of the Second Temple,
every prayer became a sacrifice,
every leader of prayer a priest,

and every synagogue a fragment
of the Temple. A profound egal-
itarianism is at work just below
the surface of the Torah, and the
rabbis knew it and lived it.
A second idea is contained
in the phrase, “and let him have
dominion over the fish in the
sea and the birds in the sky.
”
Note that there is no suggestion
that anyone has the right to
have dominion over any other
human being.
In Paradise Lost, Milton, like
the Midrash, states that this was
the sin of Nimrod, the first great
ruler of Assyria and by impli-
cation the builder of the Tower
of Babel (see Genesis 10: 8-11).
Milton writes that when Adam
was told that Nimrod would
“arrogate dominion unde-
served,
” he was horrified:

O execrable son so to aspire
Above his Brethren, to him-
self assuming
Authority usurped, from God
not given:
He gave us only over beast,
fish, fowl
Dominion absolute; that right
we hold
By his donation; but man
over men
He made not lord; such title
to himself
Reserving, human left from
human free.
(Paradise Lost, Book XII:
64-71)

To question the right of
humans to rule over other
humans, without their consent,
was at that time utterly unthink-
able. All advanced societies
were like this. How could they
be otherwise? Was this not the
very structure of the universe?
Did the sun not rule the day?
Did the moon not rule the
night? Was there not in heaven

itself a hierarchy of the gods?
Already implicit here is the deep
ambivalence the Torah would
ultimately show toward the very
institution of kingship, the rule
of “man over men.
”
The third implication lies in
the sheer paradox of God say-
ing, “Let us make man in our
image, after our likeness.
” We
sometimes forget, when reading
these words, that in Judaism
God has no image or likeness.
To make an image of God is
to transgress the second of the
Ten Commandments and to be
guilty of idolatry. Moses empha-
sized that at the revelation at
Sinai, “You saw no likeness, you
only heard the sound of words.
”
God has no image because
He is not physical. He tran-
scends the physical universe

because He created it. Therefore,
He is free, unconstrained by the
laws of matter. That is what God
means when He tells Moses
that His name is “I will be what
I will be,
” and later when, after
the sin of the golden calf, He
tells him, “I will have mercy on
who I will have mercy.
” God
is free, and by making us in
His image, He gave us also the
power to be free.

MISUSING FREEDOM
This, as the Torah makes clear,
was God’s most fateful gift.
Given freedom, humans mis-
use it. Adam and Eve disobey
God’s command. Cain murders
Abel. By the end of the parshah,
we find ourselves in the world
before the Flood, filled with
violence to the point where God
regretted that He had ever creat-
ed humanity.
This is the central drama
of Tanach and of Judaism as a
whole. Will we use our freedom
to respect order or misuse it to

create chaos? Will we honor or
dishonor the image of God that
lives within the human heart
and mind?
These are not ancient ques-
tions only. They are as alive
today as ever they were in the
past. The question raised by
serious thinkers, ever since
Nietzsche argued in favor of
abandoning both God and the
Judeo-Christian ethic, is wheth-
er justice, human rights and the
unconditional dignity of the
human person are capable of
surviving on secular grounds
alone? Nietzsche himself
thought not.
In 2008, Yale philosopher
Nicholas Woltersdorff published
a magisterial work arguing that
our Western concept of justice
rests on the belief that “all of
us have great and equal worth:
the worth of being made in
the image of God and of being
loved redemptively by God.
”
There is, he insists, no secular
rationale on which a similar
framework of justice can be
built. That is surely what John
F. Kennedy meant in his inau-
gural when he spoke of the
“revolutionary beliefs for which
our forebears fought,
” that “the
rights of man come not from
the generosity of the state, but
from the hand of God.
”
Momentous ideas made the
West what it is: human rights,
the abolition of slavery, the
equal worth of all and justice
based on the principle that right
is sovereign over might. All ulti-
mately derived from the state-
ment in the first chapter of the
Torah that we are made in God’s
image and likeness.
No other text has had a great-
er influence on moral thought,
nor has any other civilization
ever held a higher vision of
what we are called on to be.

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 October 2014.

GOD IS FREE, AND BY MAKING US
IN HIS IMAGE, HE GAVE US ALSO
THE POWER TO BE FREE.