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.