On November 14, close to 300,000 Jews and non-Jews rallied on the National Mall in Washington to voice their support for Israel. While an array of speakers took to the platform, not one of them was a rabbi.
Why? The easy answer is to say that the organizers wanted to avoid divisiveness, denominational or otherwise. But that’s too easy. When former Obama advisor Van Jones called for an end to Israel’s bombing of Gaza, he was met with boos.
Could it be that rabbis were excluded because they were seen as having nothing to offer but empty pieties?
Take that religious chestnut: “We’re all created in God’s image.” What does that actually mean? It’s drawn from Genesis 1:26-27, where on the sixth day of creation, God says, “Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness.” From Philo and Augustine to Maimonides and Aquinas, various philosophers and theologians have emphasized that what makes us like God is our capacity to reason. But instead of giving us an image of God drawn from Scripture, these figures seem only to have given us a self-image based on their own preeminent talent — namely, the capacity for abstract thinking.
But what about those who are not philosophers or theologians, especially those with mental impairments? In my novel, Zieglitz’s Blessing, the eponymous title character is preparing a Down Syndrome child, Becca, for her bat mitzvah. Near the end of her last lesson with him, she says, “There’s one more thing I want to ask you. In my Torah portion, it says we’re created ‘in God’s image.’ So does that mean God looks like I do?”
“. . . What makes you ask that?” Zieglitz replies.
“I look funny, and so do other kids like me . . . ,” Becca answers quietly.
“Not to me you don’t,” Zieglitz responds. “When the Torah says we’re created in God’s image, Becca, it doesn’t mean we’re little ‘God statues.’ What the Torah’s teaching us is that we’re like God in what we can do.”
“But God can do everything, and I can’t!” says Becca.
“Look at your Torah portion again, Becca. What is it that God keeps doing over and over at the world’s beginning?”
“. . . Making things?”
“And what kind of things does God keep making?”
“Bright things in the sky, and everywhere else, things that are alive.”
Zieglitz tells Becca, “And that’s how we’re all in God’s image. It’s when we create something new that makes the world more lively.”
In short, we conform to God’s image when we act to bring more life to the world. So, then, are the genocidal terrorists of Hamas still reflections of God’s image? If so, how? And the same question arises for a former head of Israel’s National Security Council who’s advocated war crimes. To take the God’s-image lazy lingo to its logical conclusion — the ever-popular reductio ad Hitler — are we to see Hitler as being in God’s image? If not, why not?
Lots of rabbis, along with a host of other liberal clergy (and laity), have another linguistic hobby horse: Tikkun Olam or “Repairing the World.” Without some broader explanatory context, though, Tikkun Olam is as much of a verbal throwaway as “God’s image.” Fortunately, Jewish liturgy provides just such a context. Tikkun Olam has its roots in the Alenu prayer, which closes every service. In the Alenu, Jews pray that “the world will be perfected(!) under God’s sovereignty,” a time when “all the world will accept the yoke of the Dominion of Heaven” — traditional rabbinic shorthand for the acceptance of all of Judaism’s 613 commandments. So how does that apply to Hamas? Are we to convert its members (along with the whole world) to Judaism? Or are we to observe those commandments which justify self-defense to rid the world of Hamas? Without answers to such questions, a potentially powerful idea is reduced to a hollow platitude. Perceived as lacking anything but bromides, it’s no wonder rabbis weren’t given a platform at the DC rally. Could their absence be a reflection that they’re viewed as having nothing much important to say in their pulpits, either? Long before the war with Hamas, too many rabbis, liberal and Orthodox alike, shied away from anything “controversial” and instead spoon-fed their congregants religious pablum like “God’s image” and “Tikkun Olam.”
After WWI, the portrayal of English vicars in literature and film became (type)cast as a comic figure, largely because they had nothing religiously serious to say about the Great War’s carnage. Will American rabbis suffer the same fate in the aftermath of Israel’s war with Hamas? Will they, too, become nothing but a joke?
Rabbi Michael, I did not think about no rabbi's being present on the platform for the huge rally in DC. You pose many questions about profoundly evil people as being made in God's image. Did they start that way, but then become twisted? You don't offer answers, of course, just questions. Challenges. Not pieties.