44 | OCTOBER 31 • 2024 

A

re we naturally good or 
naturally bad? On this, 
great minds have argued 
for a very long time indeed. Hobbes 
believed that we have naturally 
“a perpetual and restless desire of 
power after power, 
that ceaseth only in 
Death.” We are bad, 
but governments 
and police can help 
limit the harm we 
do. Rousseau, to the 
contrary, believed that 
naturally we are good. 
It is society and its institutions that 
make us bad.
The argument continues today 
among the neo-Darwinians. Some 
believe that natural selection and 
the struggle for survival make 
us, genetically, hawks rather than 
doves. As Michael T. Ghiselin puts 
it, “Scratch an ‘altruist’ and watch 
a ‘hypocrite’ bleed.” By contrast, 
naturalist Frans de Waal in a series 
of delightful books about primates, 
including his favorite, the bonobos, 
shows that they can be empathic, 
caring, even altruistic and so, by 
nature, are we.

E. Hulme called this the 
fundamental divide between 
Romantics and Classicists 
throughout history. Romantics 
believed that “man was by nature 
good, that it was only bad laws and 
customs that had suppressed him. 
Remove all these and the infinite 
possibilities of man would have a 
chance.”
Classicists believed the opposite, 
that “Man is an extraordinarily 
fixed and limited animal whose 
nature is absolutely constant. It is 
only by tradition and organization 
that anything decent can be got out 
of him.”
In Judaism, according to the 
Sages, this was the argument 
between the angels when God 
consulted them as to whether or 
not He should create humans. 
The angels were the “us” in 
“Let us make mankind.” (Gen. 1:26) 
A Midrash tells us that the angels 
of chessed and tzedek said, “Let him 
be created because humans do acts 
of kindness and righteousness.” 
The angels of shalom and emet said, 
“Let him not be created because 
he tells lies and fights wars.” 

What did God do? He created 
humans anyway and had faith 
that we would gradually become 
better and less destructive. That, 
in secular terms, is what Harvard 
neuroscientist Steven Pinker 
argues, too. Taken as a whole and 
with obvious exceptions, we have 
become less violent over time.

DUAL NATURES
The Torah suggests we are both 
destructive and constructive, and 
evolutionary psychology tells us 
why. We are born to compete and 
cooperate. On the one hand, life is 
a competitive struggle for scarce 
resources — so we fight and kill. 
On the other hand, we survive only 
by forming groups. Without habits 
of cooperation, altruism and trust, 
we would have no groups, and we 
would not survive. That is part 
of what the Torah means when it 
says, “It is not good for man to be 
alone.” (Gen. 2:18) So we are both 
aggressive and altruistic: aggressive 
to strangers, altruistic toward 
members of our group.
But the Torah is far too profound 
to leave it at the level of the old 

joke of the rabbi who, hearing 
both sides of a domestic argument, 
tells the husband, “You are right,” 
and the wife, “You are right,” and 
when his disciple says, “They can’t 
both be right,” replies, “You are 
also right.” The Torah states the 
problem, but it also supplies a non-
obvious answer. This is the clue 
that helps us decode a very subtle 
argument running through last 
week’s parshah and this one.
The basic structure of the story 
that begins with Creation and 
ends with Noah is this: First God 
created a universe of order. He then 
created human beings who created 
a universe of chaos: “The land was 
filled with violence.” So, God, as it 
were, deleted creation by bringing 
a Flood, returning the earth to as 
it was at the very beginning when 
“the earth was formless and empty, 
darkness was over the surface of 
the deep, and the spirit of God 
hovered over the waters.” (Gen. 1:2) 
He then began again with Noah 
and his family as the new Adam 
and Eve and their children.
Genesis 8-9 is thus a kind of 
second version of Genesis 1-3, with 
two significant distinctions. The 
first is that in both accounts a key 
word appears seven times, but it is 
a different word. In Genesis 1, the 
word is “good.” In Genesis 9, it is 
“covenant.” The second is that in 
both cases, reference is made to the 
fact that humans are in the image 
of God, but the two sentences have 
different implications. In Genesis 
1, we are told that “God created 
humanity in His own image, in 
the image of God He created 
them, male and female He created 
them.” (Gen. 1:27) In Genesis 9, we 
read, “Whoever sheds the blood 
of man, by man shall his blood be 
shed, for in the image of God has 
God made humanity” (Gen. 9:6).
The difference is striking. Genesis 
1 tells me that “I” am in the image 

Beyond Nature

Rabbi Lord 
Jonathan 
Sacks

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH

