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

