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By Root 405 0

To call each person an icon of God is to say that each human both resembles and contains the divine form. Each person is to be held aloft, revered, and kissed, as we have seen the Christians do with their icons. (No wonder we have no icons in the synagogue. The synagogue is filled with icons as soon as we walk in!) The second term, demut, is somewhat more subtle. “Likeness” is probably the right word for it. To be “like” something is to be comparable to it. But here we have a great problem. The prophet says quite clearly, speaking in God's name: “To whom will you compare Me, that I be likened?” and “To whom will you compare God? What likeness can you offer to Him?” (Is. 40:18, 25). Can we indeed be “like” God? Even if our form is theomorphic (the reversal of God as “anthropomorphic”), does that mean we are ipso facto Godlike beings?

Tselem refers to our hard wiring. We each embody a soul or a spark of inner divinity that is absolutely real and uncompromised. The entire macrocosm, the Self of the universe, is there within each human self, along with the ability to discover that truth, each in our own way. But demut is all about potential. To use computer imagery, it is the program we create on the basis of our hardware; it is the life we live. We are the tselem of God; we can choose to become God's demut as we work to live and fashion our lives in God's image. “I am Y-H-W-H your God who brought you out of Egypt to become your God” (Num. 15:41). We are both in process, somewhere along the path. Y-H-W-H is becoming our God; we are becoming God's image.

Our Most Basic Message

Rabbi Akiva and his friend Simeon Ben Azzai, sometime in the early second century, debated the question “What is the most basic principle of Torah?”7 What is the teaching for the sake of which all the rest of Judaism exists? Akiva had a ready answer: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev.10:18). Akiva was Judaism's greatest advocate for the path of love.8 He was the one who insisted that the Song of Songs was the “Holy of Holies” within Scripture, spoken by God and Israel at Sinai.9 The tale of Rabbi Akiva and his wife's love is one of the few truly romantic tales within the rabbinic corpus.10 So too the account of Akiva's death; when he was being tortured by the Romans, he supposedly said: “Now I understand the commandment to love God with all your soul — even if He takes your soul.”11 Thus it is no surprise that Akiva is depicted as considering love to be the most basic rule of Torah.

But Ben Azzai disagreed. He said: I have a greater principle than yours. “On the day when God made human beings, they were made in the likeness of God; male and female God created them” (Gen. 5:1-2) is Torah's most basic principle. Every human being is God's image, says Ben Azzai to Akiva. Some are easier to love, some are harder. Some days you can love them, some days you can't. But you still have to recognize and treat them all as the image of God. Love is too shaky a pedestal on which to position the entire Torah. Perhaps Ben Azzai also saw that Akiva's principle might be narrowed, conceived only in terms of your own community. “Your neighbor,” after all, might refer just to your fellow Jew. Or your fellow in piety, in good behavior. How about the stranger? The sinner? How about your enemy? Ben Azzai's principle leaves no room for exceptions, since it goes back to Creation itself. It's not just “your kind of people” who were created in God's image, but everyone.12

Once we have a basic principle, or even a set of basic principles, we have a standard by which to evaluate all other rules and practices, teachings and theological ideas. Does this particular practice lead us closer to seeing the divine in every person? Might this interpretation of a Torah verse be an obstacle toward doing so? Here lies an inner Jewish basis for raising some important questions, one that should be more in use among those who shape halakhah for our day.13 Judaism may indeed exist independently of such extraneous ideas as participatory democracy, egalitarianism, and feminism. But it