we turn first to the universal questions, to ask: “Who are we? Why are we here? What does it mean to be a human being?” Today's universal human challenges are too great for us to allow ourselves to consider them only as Jews. How does seeing ourselves as religious human beings help us to respond to those questions? How is a God-seeking person supposed to live in a world threatened by destruction? Life in the early twenty-first century addresses these questions to every thinking person, whether or not that person uses the word “God.” The “Where are you?” challenge calls to us all, bringing forth our shared fragile existence on this beautiful but threatened planet. Only as we face this reality, seeking out terms in which to respond, can we begin to ask: How do my humanity and my Jewishness speak to each other? What does being linked to the covenant of Sinai have to do with my self-understanding as a person and my role in the world? How do we construct a religious community (or build a mishkan) for our generation that embraces the best response we have to the great challenge ever before us? Because the first questions are always universal, we have to go back not just to Sinai but indeed to the first revelation, to bereshit, “In the beginning,” and specifically to the creation of humans. We then will have to ask how such thinking works in the age of the new “Creation” story, that with which we began this inquiry. Only in this context can we address the specific questions of Jewish identity and continued Jewish existence within the “global village” culture of this new century. In doing so, we will have to complement our discussions of God and Torah with a full discussion of the term “Israel” and all that it implies, in both classical and contemporary contexts. God, Torah, and Israel are the classical Jewish trinity, the three poles around which any Jewish religious self-understanding is constructed. Dealing with each, as well as the interrelation between them, cannot be avoided. But in our day we can only get to the particularism of “Israel” by opening with the universal question: “What does it mean to be human?”2
Judaism's moral voice begins with Creation. Our most essential teaching, that for the sake of which Judaism still needs to exist, is our insistence that each human being is the unique image of God. “Why was Adam created singly?” asks the Mishnah. “So that no person might say: ‘My father was greater than yours.’ “ “How great is the Creator! A human king has coins stamped out in a press and they all look alike. But God stamps each of us out in the imprint of Adam, and no two human beings are the same!” Each of us humans is needed as God's image and can be replaced by no other. It's as simple as that.3
“Why are graven images forbidden by the Torah?” I once heard Abraham Joshua Heschel ask. Why is the Torah so concerned with idolatry? You might think (with the Maimonideans) that it is because God has no image, and any image of God is therefore a distortion. But Heschel read the commandment differently. “No,” he said, “it is precisely because God has an image that idols are forbidden. You are the image of God. But the only medium in which you can shape that image is that of your entire life. To take anything less than a full, living, breathing human being and try to create God's image out of it — that diminishes the divine and is considered idolatry.”4 You can't make God's image; you can only be God's image.
The Genesis account begins with two words for what we call “the image of God.” Tselem is “image” in a representational sense, and it originally referred to the human form, both body and face.5 Some versions of the early Aramaic translation of the Torah occasionally render tselem by the Greek loan-word “icon;” every human being is God's icon.6 The icon was well known in the Christian art that by the fourth century was part of the dominant culture amid which Jews lived. The icon is a depiction of God, a saint, or a holy scene that comes to bear within it the presence of that holy being, and hence is revered in itself.