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does not exist separately from its own most basic principle. I take the kelal gadol to mean “that for which all the rest exists,” the animating principle behind our entire Jewish life. Then any Judaism that veers from the ongoing work of helping us allow every human being to become and be seen as God's image in the fullest way possible is a distortion of Judaism. That ongoing challenge requires us in each generation to widen the circle of those seen by us as fully human, as bearing God's image, as we seek to expand the bounds of the holy. As we find God's image in ever more of humanity, we open ourselves to ever more of God's presence. To find God in every human being is no small task. We could spend a lifetime at this art and still not perfect it. How much we have to learn about it from those who work daily with the suffering, with the dying, and especially with those so degraded by shame or societal status that they are unable to see the divine image in themselves! The greatest gift we can give to another human being is that of treating him or her as one who embodies God's presence. The greatest harm we can do is to rob a person of that sense.

Later Perspectives, Contemporary Transformations

As notions of God evolved in the course of history, so too did the concept of what it means to be “in God's image.” The ancient understanding was that human beings somehow looked like God. You had to respect each person because that person reminded you of God, quite physically. The early sage Hillel, encountered by his students on his way to the bathhouse, told them that he was about to fulfill a divine precept. When questioned, he offered a parable of an emperor who set up statues of himself around the empire. Wouldn't he expect, Hillel asked his students, that his subjects should wash those statues and keep them clean?14 Here it is clearly the bodily form that represents God's image, a notion found widely in early rabbinic teaching. God commands us not to leave the body of an executed criminal hanging overnight, because that body looks too much like its Maker (indeed, like His twin, suggests RaShI),15 and God will be belittled by the desecration of that look-alike corpse. The death penalty is almost totally eliminated from practice by the sages because they do not want to be involved in shedding blood, something too close to the “lessening of divine image.” On the other hand, the divine imperative to “be fruitful and multiply” is explained precisely as an attempt to make ever more of the divine image come into being in the world.16

Once Judaism and philosophy were wedded in the Middle Ages, it became clear that some other understanding of the “image” was essential. If God was to be conceived in strictly noncorporeal form, God's image had to be interpreted outside the realm of physical appearance. The simplest move was to turn to the soul, already analogized to God in older tradition. “Just as God fills all the world, so does the soul fill the entire body…. Just as no one knows God's place, so does no one know the location of the soul,” and so forth.17 But intellect and capacity for moral choice were also brought into the redefinition of ways in which man was uniquely to be likened to the incorporeal Deity. In all of these, of course, God was Creator and man His willfully designed creature.

The mystical tradition modified this tendency in two important ways. The Kabbalists were not so sure that “body” could not be ascribed to God,18 even though they did not mean that in a completely physical sense. They retained the ancient awareness that the bodily form of the human being was sacred and refused to explain away the Scriptural passages that spoke about the hand, eyes, or face of God. These referred to some unknowable mystical essence, but one witnessed in the most basic symbol structure of Kabbalistic teaching. The casting of the ten sefirot or channels of divine energy in the form of a human body was a transformation of Judaism, or maybe a reclamation of its ancient truth in a new form of expression. In sefirotic symbolism,