OCTOBER 31 • 2024 | 45

of God. Genesis 9 tells me that 
“You,” my potential victim, are in 
the image of God. Genesis 1 tells 
us about human power. We are 
able, says the Torah, to “rule over 
the fish of the sea and the birds of 
the air.” Genesis 9 tells us about the 
moral limits of power. We can kill 
but we may not. We have the 
power, but not the permission.
Reading the story closely, 
it seems that God created 
humans in the faith that they 
would naturally choose the right 
and the good. They would not 
need to eat the fruit of “the Tree 
of Knowledge of Good and Evil,” 
because instinct would lead 
them to behave as they should. 
Calculation, reflection, decision 
— all the things we associate 
with knowledge — would not be 
necessary. They would act as God 
wanted them to act, because they 
had been created in His image.
It did not turn out that way. 
Adam and Eve sinned, Cain 
committed murder, and within 
a few generations the world was 
reduced to chaos. That is when 
we read that “The Lord saw 
how great the wickedness of the 
human race had become on the 
earth, and that every inclination of 
the thoughts of the human heart 
was only evil all the time. The 
Lord regretted that he had made 
man on the earth, and it grieved 
Him to His heart.” (Gen. 6:6) 
Everything else in the universe 
was tov, “good.” But humans are 
not naturally good. That is the 
problem. The answer, according to 
the Torah, is covenant.

A MORAL LAW
Covenant introduces the idea of a 
moral law. A moral law is not the 
same as a scientific law. Scientific 
laws are observed regularities 
in nature: Drop an object and it 
will fall. A moral law is a rule of 

conduct: Do not rob or steal or 
deceive. Scientific laws describe, 
whereas moral laws prescribe.
When a natural event does 
not accord with the current state 
of science, when it “breaks” the 
law, that is a sign that there is 
something wrong with the law. 
That is why Newton’s laws were 
replaced by those of Einstein. 
But when a human being breaks 
the law, when people rob or steal 
or deceive, the fault is not in the 
law but in the deed. So we must 
keep the law and condemn, and 
sometimes punish, the deed. 
Scientific laws allow us to 
predict. Moral laws help us to 
decide. Scientific laws apply to 
entities without freewill. Moral 
laws presuppose freewill. That is 
what makes humans qualitatively 
different from other forms of life.
So, according to the Torah, a 
new era began, centered not on the 
idea of natural goodness but on the 
concept of covenant, that is, moral 
law. Civilization began in the move 
from what the Greeks called physis, 
nature, to nomos, law. That is what 
makes the concept of being “in the 
image of God” completely different 
in Genesis 1 and Genesis 9. Genesis 
1 is about nature and biology. We 
are in the image of God in the 
sense that we can think, speak, 
plan, choose and dominate. Genesis 
9 is about law. Other people are 
also in God’s image. Therefore, 
we must respect them by banning 
murder and instituting justice. 
With this simple move, morality 
was born.
What is the Torah telling us 
about morality?
First, that it is universal. The Torah 
places God’s covenant with Noah and 
through him all humanity prior to 
His particular covenant with 
Abraham, and His later covenant 
with Abraham’s descendants at 
Mount Sinai. 

Our universal humanity precedes 
our religious differences. This is a 
truth we deeply need in the 21st 
century when so much violence has 
been given religious justification. 
Genesis tells us that our enemies are 
human, too.
This may well be the single 
most important contribution 
of monotheism to civilization. 
All societies, ancient and modern, 
have had some form of morality 
but usually they concern only 
relations within the group. Hostility 
to strangers is almost universal 
in both the animal and human 
kingdoms. Between strangers, 
power rules. As the Athenians said 
to the Melians, “The strong do 
what they want, while the weak do 
what they must.” 

‘LOVE THE STRANGER’
The idea that even the people not like 
us have rights, and that we should 
“love the stranger” (Deut. 10:19), 
would have been considered utterly 
strange by most people at most times. 
It took the recognition that there is 
one God sovereign over all human-
ity (“Do we not all have one father? 
Did not one God create us?”; (Mal. 
2:10) to create the momentous break-
through to the idea that there are 
moral universals, among them the 
sanctity of life, the pursuit of justice 
and the rule of law.
Second, God Himself recognizes 
that we are not naturally good. After 
the Flood, He says: “I will never 
again curse the ground because 
of humankind, even though the 
inclination of their minds is evil 
from childhood on.” (Gen. 8:21) 
The antidote to the yetzer, the 
inclination to evil, is covenant.
We now know the neuroscience 
behind this. Our brains contain 
a prefrontal cortex that evolved 
to allow humans to think and 
act reflectively, considering the 
consequences of their deeds. But 

this is slower and weaker than the 
amygdala (what Jewish mystics 
called the nefesh habehamit, the 
animal soul) which produces, even 
before we have had time to think, 
the fight-or-flight reactions without 
which humans before civilization 
would simply not have survived.
The problem is that these rapid 
reactions can be deeply destructive. 
Often, they lead to violence: not 
only the violence between species 
(predator and prey) that is part 
of nature, but also to the more 
gratuitous violence that is a feature 
of the life of most social animals. 
It is not that we only do evil. 
Empathy and compassion are 
as natural to us as are fear and 
aggression. The problem is that 
fear lies just beneath the surface 
of human interaction, and it can 
overwhelm all our other instincts.
Daniel Goleman calls this 
an amygdala hijack. “Emotions 
make us pay attention right 
now — this is urgent — and give 
us an immediate action plan 
without having to think twice. 
The emotional component evolved 
very early: Do I eat it, or does it 
eat me?” Impulsive action is often 
destructive because it is undertaken 
without thought of consequences. 
That is why Maimonides argued 
that many of the laws of the Torah 
constitute a training in virtue by 
making us think before we act. 
So, the Torah tells us that 
naturally we are neither good nor 
bad, but we have the capacity for 
both. We have a natural inclination 
to empathy and sympathy, but we 
have an even stronger instinct for 
fear, which can lead to violence. 
That is why, in the move 
from Adam to Noah, the Torah 
shifts from nature to covenant, 
from tov to brit, from power to 
the moral limits of power. Genes 
are not enough. We also need the 
moral law. 

