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

