46 | OCTOBER 6 • 2022 

NO TWO PEOPLE ARE ALIKE
This is a point emphasized by 
Maimonides in Guide for the Perplexed: 
“Man is, as you know, the highest form in 
creation, and he, therefore, includes the 
largest number of constituent elements. 
This is why the human race contains 
so great a variety of individuals that we 
cannot discover two persons exactly 
alike in any moral quality or in external 
appearance… 
 “This great variety and the necessity of 
social life are essential elements in man’s 
nature. But the well-being of society 
demands that there should be a leader 
able to regulate the actions of man. 
He must complete every shortcoming, 
remove every excess and prescribe for 
the conduct of all, so that the natural 
variety should be counterbalanced by the 
uniformity of legislation, so that social 
order be well established.” 
The political problem, as Maimonides 
sees it, is how to regulate the affairs of 
human beings in such a way as to respect 
their individuality while not creating 
chaos. 
A similar point emerges from a 
surprising rabbinic teaching: “Our 
Rabbis taught: If one sees a crowd of 
Israelites, one says: Blessed be He who 
discerns secrets — because the mind of 
each is different from that of another, 
just as the face of each is different from 
another” (Brachot 58a). 
 We would have expected a blessing 
over a crowd to emphasize its size, its 
mass: human beings in their collectivity. 
A crowd is a group large enough for 
the individuality of the faces to be lost. 
Yet the blessing stresses the opposite 
— that each member of a crowd is still 
an individual with distinctive thoughts, 
hopes, fears and aspirations.
The same was true for the relationship 
between the Sages. A Mishnah states: 
“When R. Meir died, the composers of 
fables ceased. When Ben Azzai died, 
assiduous students ceased. When Ben 
Zoma died, the expositors ceased. When 

R. Akiva died, the glory of the Torah 
ceased. When R. Chanina died, men 
of deed ceased. When R. Yose Ketanta 
died, the pious men ceased. When R. 
Yochanan b. Zakai died, the lustre of 
wisdom ceased. … When Rabbi died, 
humility and the fear of sin ceased.” 
Mishnah Sotah 9:15

EVERYONE HAS 
INSIGHTS TO BRING
There was no single template of the Sage. 
Each had his own distinctive merits, his 
unique contribution to the collective 
heritage. In this respect, the Sages were 
merely continuing the tradition of the 
Torah itself. There is no single role 
model of the religious hero or heroine in 
Tanach. The patriarchs and matriarchs 
each had their own unmistakable 
character. Moses, Aaron and Miriam 
each emerge as different personality 
types. Kings, priests and prophets 
had different roles to play in Israelite 
society. Even among the Prophets, “No 

two prophesy in the same style,” said 
the Sages (Sanhedrin 89a). Elijah was 
zealous, Elisha gentle. Hosea speaks of 
love, Amos speaks of justice. Isaiah’s 
visions are simpler and less opaque than 
those of Ezekiel.
The same applies to even to the 
revelation at Sinai itself. Each individual 
heard, in the same words, a different 
inflection: “The voice of the Lord is 
with power (Ps. 29:4): that is, according 
to the power of each individual, the 
young, the old and the very small 
ones, each according to their power [of 
understanding].” 
God said to Israel, “Do not believe that 
there are many gods in Heaven because 
you heard many voices. Know that I 
alone am the Lord your God.” 
According to Maharsha, there are 
600,000 interpretations of Torah. Each 
individual is theoretically capable of a 
unique insight into its meaning. The 
French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas 
commented: “The Revelation has a 
particular way of producing meaning, 
which lies in its calling upon the unique 
within me. It is as if a multiplicity of 
persons … were the condition for the 
plenitude of ‘absolute truth,’ as if each 
person, by virtue of his own uniqueness, 
were able to guarantee the revelation 
of one unique aspect of the truth, so 
that some of its facets would never have 
been revealed if certain people had been 
absent from mankind.”
Judaism, in short, emphasizes the 
other side of the maxim E pluribus unum 
(“Out of the many, one”). It says: “Out of 
the One, many.”
The miracle of creation is that unity 
in Heaven produces diversity on Earth. 
Torah is the rain that feeds this diversity, 
allowing each of us to become what only 
we can 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 at rabbisacks.org. This 

essay was written in 2008.

 POINTS FOR DISCUSSION

• What Jewish values and 
ideas are contained in the idea 
of respecting that everyone is 
different? 
• What message can we learn if 
even the Sages were all different 
and saw the world differently? 
• How could it be that every 
person that heard the same words 
of Torah on Mount Sinai takes 
away something different? What 
does that mean for us? 

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH

continued from page 45

