34 | OCTOBER 24 • 2024 J
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here is a deep question at the
heart of Jewish faith, and it is
very rarely asked. As the Torah
begins, we see God creating the uni-
verse day by day, bringing order out
of chaos, life out of inanimate matter,
flora and fauna in all their wondrous
diversity. At each stage, God sees
what He has made and
declares it good.
What then went
wrong? How did evil
enter the picture, setting
in motion the drama of
which the Torah — in a
sense, the whole of his-
tory — is a record? The
short answer is: man, Homo sapiens,
us. We alone of the lifeforms thus far
known to us to have free will, choice
and moral responsibility. Cats do
not debate the ethics of killing mice.
Vampire bats do not become vegetar-
ians. Cows do not worry about global
warming.
It is this complex capacity to speak,
think and choose between alternative
courses of action that is at once our
glory, our burden and our shame.
When we do good, we are little lower
than the angels. When we do evil, we
fall lower than the beasts. Why then
did God take the risk of creating the
one form of life capable of destroy-
ing the very order He had made and
declared good?
Why did God create us?
That is the question posed by the
Gemara in Sanhedrin:
When the Holy One, blessed be
He, came to create man, He created a
group of ministering angels and asked
them, “Do you agree that we should
make man in our image?”
They replied, “Sovereign of the
Universe, what will be his deeds?”
God showed them the whole future
of humankind.
The angels replied, “What is man
that You are mindful of him?” [i.e. Let
man not be created].
God destroyed the angels.
He created a second group, and
asked them the same question, and
they gave the same answer.
God destroyed them.
He created a third group of angels,
and they replied, “Sovereign of the
Universe, the first and second group
of angels told You not to create man,
and it did not avail them. You did not
listen. What then can we say but this:
The universe is Yours. Do with it as
You wish.
”
And God created man.
But when it came to the generation
of the Flood, and then to the generation
of those who built the Tower of Babel,
the angels said to God, “Were not the
first angels right? See how great the cor-
ruption of humankind is.
”
And God replied, “Even to old age I
will not change, and even to gray hair,
I will still be patient” (Isaiah 46:4).
Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 38b
FREEDOM OF CHOICE
Technically, the Gemara is addressing
a stylistic challenge in the text. For
every other act of creation in Genesis
1, the Torah tells us, “God said, ‘Let
there be’ … And there was.” In the
case of the creation of humankind
alone, there is a preface, a prelude.
“Then God said, ‘Let us make human-
ity in our image, in our likeness …’”
Who is the “us”? And why the pre-
amble?
In their seemingly innocent and
childlike (but in actuality, subtle and
profound) way, the Sages answered
both questions by saying (to quote
Hamlet) that with an enterprise of this
pith and moment, God consulted with
the angels. They were the “us.”
But now, the question becomes very
deep indeed. For in creating humans,
God brought into existence the one
life form with the sole exception of
Himself, capable of freedom and
choice. That is what the phrase means
when it says, “Let us make humanity
in our image after our likeness.” The
salient fact is that God has no image.
To make an image of God is the
archetypal act of idolatry.
This means not just the obvious
fact that God is invisible. He cannot
be seen. He cannot be identified with
anything in nature: not the sun, the
moon, thunder, lightning, the ocean
or any of the other objects or forces
people worshipped in those days. In
this superficial sense, God has no
image. That, wrote Sigmund Freud in
his last book, Moses and Monotheism,
was Judaism’s greatest contribution.
By worshiping an invisible God, Jews
tilted the balance of civilization from
the physical to the spiritual.
But the idea that God has no image
goes far deeper than this. It means
that we cannot conceptualize God,
understand Him or predict Him.
God is not an abstract essence; He is
a living presence. That is the mean-
ing of God’s own self-definition to
Moses at the Burning Bush: “I will be
what I will be” — meaning, “I will be
what I choose to be.” I am the God of
freedom, who endowed humankind
with freedom, and I am about to lead
the Children of Israel from slavery to
freedom.
When God made humanity in His
image, it means that He gave humans
the freedom to choose, so that you
can never fully predict what they will
do. They too — within the limits of
SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH
Rabbi Lord
Jonathan
Sacks