1WE ARE LOVED
WE ARE LOVED. We are loved, Judaism teaches, because God loves us. Not because of anything we have done or accomplished, but simply because we are created in God’s image. As the Talmudic sage Rabbi Akiva puts it, “Beloved is the human being, for he was created in the image of God.”1
God’s love is not something we earn but rather something we (ought to) strive to live up to. This is a good definition of Judaism’s vision of the spiritual life: the attempt to live up to God’s love.
R. Akiva adds: “Even more beloved is [the human being], for it was made known to him that he was created in the image of God, as Scripture says, ‘For in God’s image did God make the human being’ (Genesis 9:6).” In other words, God did not just create us in God’s image and leave it at that. Instead, in the book of Genesis, God told us that God did so. God wants us to know that God created us in God’s image.2 Having this truth made known to us, Maimonides explains, is an additional act of kindness over and above the fact of having been created in God’s image. “Sometimes one does good for someone out of pity for them and, because one disrespects them, one doesn’t [bother to] inform them of what one did.” Here, in contrast, God makes God’s gift known—an obvious sign of respect, Maimonides suggests.3
Some Jewish thinkers go further. When you love someone, says Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague (Maharal, 1525?–1609), you don’t tell them unless you want to enter into relationship with them. God makes it known to us that God loves us because God hopes that we in turn will reciprocate that love.4 This is the core structure of the twice-daily recitation of the Shema in Jewish prayer: we attest to God’s vast love for us, and then take upon ourselves the charge to reciprocate that love.5
Portraying God’s love for the Jewish people along the same lines, the prophet Hosea presents God as a parent6 filled with love for his or her children: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called [him?] My son” (Hosea 11:1).”7 With these few words, Hosea makes two subtle but essential points. First, he teaches that God loves the people before God asks or demands anything of them. Second, Hosea does not attribute God’s love to this attribute of the people or that. God’s love for Israel is a function of divine grace rather than human merit. In other words, Israel does not earn God’s love; it receives it as a gift from God. “Love comes first. Before anything else happens, God loves Israel. No reasons are given why God should feel that way about Israel. It is simply stated as a fact. Everything else flows from that basic statement of feeling.”8 The Jewish people are called upon not to earn God’s love but to live up to it.
To be sure, divine love comes with expectations, and love does not preclude disappointment. The fact that God loves us no matter what does not mean that God is indifferent to the decisions we make and the paths we take. (I have often wondered whether the Bible would be more aptly named The Book of Divine Disappointment.) On the contrary, as any parent can understand, because God loves us so deeply, the choices we make matter profoundly. But even when we fail, God does not stop loving us.
Many of us struggle with ambivalence and uncertainty about ourselves, about our worth and lovability. God doesn’t share our ambivalence; God loves us more than we love ourselves.9 This is part of why self-loathing is so religiously problematic: we ought not hate what God loves.
God’s love is a gift, but it is also an invitation. God loves in the hopes that we ourselves will become lovers too. We are called to love God, but also to love one another—the neighbor, the stranger, and, at moments at least, all of humanity and creation.
We are created with love, for love.
WE ARE INFINITELY VALUABLE
We matter, and matter ultimately.
According to my teacher Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, all human beings are endowed with three “intrinsic dignities”: infinite worth, equality, and uniqueness.10
A mishnah‡ wonders why God chose to begin by creating one human being—why not a dozen, or a hundred?11 “Therefore was Adam created singly [, it declares]: ‘to teach you that if anyone destroys a single life, Scripture charges him as though he had destroyed an entire world, and if anyone saves a single life, Scripture credits him as though he had saved an entire world.’”12 In its original context, the meaning of this statement was that in killing a human being, we not only bring her life to an end, we also prevent countless of her would-be descendants from coming into being.13 In killing (or saving) a single human being, then, we kill (or save) an entire world. But over the past half century, R. Greenberg has used the mishnah to make a different, more radical claim. Since all human beings on earth are images of God, we are each infinitely valuable in and of ourselves. To extinguish a single life is therefore akin to destroying an entire world. The value of human life is utterly incalculable; from a theological perspective, the very thought of placing a number on a human life is an abomination.
Many years ago, a close friend of mine, a promising young rabbinical student named Matthew Eisenfeld, was murdered in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem. His parents eventually sued the Iranian government, which had funded Hamas, the terrorist organization that had carried out the killing. To his credit, the judge in the case insisted on hearing from Matt’s friends about his life and the kind of person he was. I will never forget the shock I felt when I entered the courtroom. An actuary had constructed an elaborate chart spelling out in great detail just how much Matt was likely to have earned over the course of a career as a rabbi—and there it was, intended to be exact down to dollars and cents, a number attached to my friend’s life. Appended to that number were punitive damages so steep that they effectively rendered that first estimate irrelevant. But all these years later the horror of that first number still startles and repels me. A human being is not a commodity. What it means to have dignity—what it means to be a person, in other words—is to be “exalted above any price.”14 Now, on one level, it may well be that in a less-than-perfect world, where bloodshed is rampant and human life is frequently debased, such calculations are necessary. But on a deeper level, the very idea of attaching a number to a human life is a sacrilege. What may be legally unavoidable nevertheless remains theologically unbearable.15
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A single person, we are taught, is worth as much as an entire world. But maybe we’ll tell ourselves, whether consciously or not, “Okay, fine, every human being is infinitely valuable, but let’s be honest: I’m a little more infinitely valuable than anyone else. After all, I’m me.” It is perhaps understandable that people so often fall into this trap: because we perceive and experience the world through our own consciousness, we can easily come to believe that our consciousness is the center of the universe. (Few of us would defend this as a truth about the way the world really is, but many of us live much of the time as if it were true; it becomes a psychological-experiential truth for us.) I find it striking that so many different religious traditions work to expose this sense that “I am the center of the universe” as a dangerous illusion. My consciousness is no more the center of the universe than yours is, and reminding myself of that is a first step toward remembering that you matter no less than I do.
We matter, but so too does everybody else—without exception.
WE ALL COME FROM THE SAME PLACE
The mishnah continues: “And [Adam was created singly] for the sake of peace in the human race, so that no one might say to his fellow, ‘My ancestor was greater than your ancestor.’” Push far enough up our respective family trees, the mishnah says, and you and I will discover that, lo and behold, we’re family.16 Discrimination based on origins is thus not just reprehensible, it’s also incoherent. The history of humanity is overrun by examples of people appealing to racial or ethnic origins to bolster their feelings of superiority—and worse, to legitimate horrific abuse and degradation of others. The mishnah seeks to nip this possibility in the bud.
Building on the mishnah, R. Greenberg notes that every image of God has the dignity of equality.17 There is no preferred image of God; to claim that one “image of God” is superior to another, he insists, is to succumb to the temptation of idolatry.
The mishnah then adds what might at first appear to be a non sequitur: “And [Adam was created singly] so that the heretics should not say, ‘There are many powers in heaven.’” In this context, I think, the text is less interested in mounting a metaphysical defense of monotheism than in spelling out what it takes to be the moral and political consequences of monotheism: since every human being is created by the same God (in the mishnah’s language, there is only one power in heaven), we must avoid the trap of insisting that some people (“us”) are the children of light, while others (“them”) are the children of darkness. This may sound outlandish to some modern readers, but there have been many moments in history when such distinctions were common: not only are we biologically superior to others, some claimed, but we are also ontologically different (and better) than they are.18 (This raises potentially thorny questions about what the chosenness of the Jewish people does—and doesn’t—means in Jewish thought, an issue we’ll consider at length in chapter 14.) The mishnah therefore reminds us that we are—all of us, every last one of us—children of the same one God. With apologies for using highly gendered theological language, the sages insist that arguments for the superiority of some over others fail both because we are descended from the same father (Adam) and because we were created by the same Father (God).
To be absolutely clear: what the mishnah is presenting is not an empirical history of what religion has all too often been, but rather a theological argument about what it ought to be. The argument is not that religious people are never racists—we know, sadly, how false that is—but that at the deepest levels religion and racism are mutually incompatible. At its core, racism is a denial of God. According to the mishnah’s logic, to believe in one God who brings all of humanity into being is to affirm that we all come from the same place and that on some level we are therefore all equal.
There is another version of this text in which a crucial word is added. The variant of our text reads: “If anyone destroys a single life from Israel, Scripture charges him as though he had destroyed an entire world, and if anyone saves a single life from Israel, Scripture credits him as though he had saved an entire world.” In other words, according to this version, it is Jews in particular, and not human beings in general, who are the subjects of this Rabbinic exploration of human value. Jewish life is infinitely valuable; human life is simply not the subject at hand. Two things ought to be kept in mind in considering these two very different versions of our text. First, historically speaking, scholars have shown that the original version does not include the words “from Israel”—this is a text about human dignity and value, not (just) Jewish dignity and value.19 But even without historical evidence, the internal logic of the mishnah makes it obvious that we are talking about human beings rather than just Jews. Adam, after all, is the father of humanity as a whole, not (just) of the Jewish people. In other words, there are two paths the mishnah could have taken. One path is the one we’ve been discussing: “Therefore was Adam created singly: to teach you that if anyone destroys a single life, Scripture charges him as though he had destroyed an entire world, and if anyone saves a single life, Scripture credits him as though he had saved an entire world.” An alternative path would have been: “Therefore was Abraham elected (or chosen) singly: to teach you that if anyone destroys a single life from Israel, Scripture charges him as though he had destroyed an entire world, and if anyone saves a single life from Israel, Scripture credits him as though he had saved an entire world.” But appealing to the creation of Adam, who was not Jewish, to derive a lesson about the value of Jewish life in particular would have made no sense. This foundational Jewish text, then, is a dramatic affirmation of the value of all (and each) human life.20
WE MATTER IN ALL OUR UNIQUENESS
Sometimes people assume that equality somehow effaces difference. If we’re all equal, we must all be the same. The mishnah disagrees: “And [Adam was created singly] to proclaim the greatness of the Blessed Holy One, for a human being stamps many coins with one die and they are all alike one with the other, but the King of the kings of kings, the Blessed Holy One, has stamped all of humanity with the die of the first man, and yet not one of them is like his fellow.” The mishnah’s message is startlingly powerful: never before in the history of the cosmos has there ever been, and never again in the history of the cosmos will there ever be, another human being just like you. And that simple fact testifies to the glory of God. As R. Greenberg observes, not only are we all absolutely valuable, we are all also distinctive and unique; that fact, the mishnah reminds us, is to be cherished and celebrated.
According to Jewish theology, then, some of our most primal emotional experiences actually tap into elemental truths about the universe. When a parent looks at their child and thinks, “Nothing could possibly be more precious than you,” they are not just expressing the depths of their own love; they are giving voice to the profound Jewish conviction that the child in front of them, like every child everywhere, is infinitely valuable. And when a grieving parent wails, insisting that “nothing can ever make up for the loss of this child,” the unspeakable pain they convey actually discloses something that Judaism considers a foundational truth: because each and every life is genuinely unique, each and every life is utterly irreplaceable. With the death of a human being, something inestimably valuable is gone forever.
We do not matter, in other words, simply because we are examples of a privileged species. We matter, rather, in all our singularity and uniqueness. Before God, we are never anonymous or faceless.
TRUE SELF-WORTH
The mishnah ends on a somewhat surprising, and, for many, even a jarring note: “Therefore each and every person is obligated to say, ‘For my sake was the world created.’” When I teach this text, there are usually at least a few students who are troubled, and even offended, by this conclusion. Why, they demand to know, would the text end by asking us to say something that seems so narcissistic, and thus so antithetical to everything we have just been taught? Doesn’t a teaching like this really just surrender to the impulse to place our consciousness at the center of the universe? The question becomes even stronger when we note that the mishnah does not just permit us to say these words; it actively requires us to do so.21
The mandate to say—and by implication, to think and feel—that the world was created for my sake is not a license to affirm my own superiority to other people, a possibility the mishnah explicitly rules out (“that no one might say…”). Affirming our significance is decidedly not the same thing as asserting our superiority over others. Our text may actually want to jolt us, to prod us to think more deeply about what a true sense of self-worth looks like. If I am willing to reflect upon why I am obligated to affirm my own value, I quickly realize that the basis of my self-affirmation actively requires me to affirm others—all others—as well, since we are all infinitely valuable images of God. I matter, and so do you—and for precisely the same reason.
To return to where we started: the mishnah subtly makes the revolutionary claim that our ultimate worth as human beings is a function not of what we achieve in the world, but of the simple fact that we have been created by God. This radical insight turns many of our conventional assumptions about self-worth on their head. As I’ve said, our worth is not something that we earn, but something that we strive to live up to. We matter, and matter ultimately, not because of what we do, but because of what we (always already) are: creatures created in the image of God.22 To sit with this stark claim can at first seem frightening—it is not easy to let go of the illusion that our worth is something we work for—but it is also potentially extraordinarily liberating: we no longer have to compete with others in order to gain the confidence that we matter.
Imagine I am walking down the street, mired in a pit of self-loathing; I feel worthless and unloved. Or maybe, less dramatically, I am alternating, as so many of us do, between telling myself I’m wonderful and wondering whether I’m worthless. But then I start to look around, and I think to myself, “Well, I may be worthless, but I am smarter than she is, better-looking than he is, more successful than that other guy,” and so on.23 Depending on just how badly I am feeling about myself and how desperate I am to build myself up, I can go on like this all day—or my whole life, for that matter. In the face of all this, Jewish theology insists that genuine self-worth is never competitive or comparative, never purchased at the expense of others. The source of my value, and theirs, is ultimately one and the same: we are all created in the image of God.24
The sad truth is that comparison with other people offers only fool’s gold. After all, the rich sometimes get poorer, the beautiful inevitably get older, and the smart often encounter people they suspect are just a little bit smarter (this is why the culture of academia can so often be so utterly competitive and brutal).25 So our sense of self-worth feels shaky and tenuous. The more threatened our sense of ourselves becomes, of course, the more ferocious our need to put others down becomes.26 Comparing ourselves with others doesn’t heal our insecurities, it merely papers over them. Worse, it frequently amplifies and exacerbates them.
Even more damaging, our lives become animated by schadenfreude, pleasure derived from other people’s failures or misfortunes: if my sense of self depends on my being richer, smarter, more attractive, or more successful than you, then your rising must entail my falling, and almost inevitably, I grow invested in your failure. At a certain point, I cease to see you at all—your successes and failures matter only because of how they reflect on me. Needless to say, this is not a prescription for emotional health and interpersonal connection. If I am truly going to love others, it helps a lot to feel confident that I, too, am loved; if I am going to affirm the worth of others, it helps to feel sure that I, too, have worth. Judaism understands this and teaches us: we are always already loved and always already “worthful.”27 If we can internalize this, we can love and honor others more fully and deeply.28
Over the course of my career, I have counseled countless students whose lives were poisoned to one extent or another by a frantic, desperate pursuit of the sense that they were valuable. The culture of competition and ranking that so pervades our schools only intensified their desperation. (How deep does this pathology run? Not long ago a friend reported to me of visiting a preschool where the head of school boasted that her school was “a feeder for the Ivy League.” Really.) Offering us a theological antidote to all this, the sages invite us to stop chasing our worth and to know—to really know, emotionally and existentially, not just cognitively—that we already have it.
Copyright © 2024 by Shai Held
