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Image of God

God, Creator of all things, including a billion or so galaxies and the trillions of stars of the Universe (and, perhaps, other universes, if there are any), has no image. He is absolutely one, the Torah teaches, with a oneness, or togetherness, and inherent integrity beyond that of any of His creations: He is “spirit,” not matter, and –while He sustains every particle and atom of Creation – is both imminent (always present) and transcendent (above everything) in relation to them.

So, what “image” could He have? Even as Moses – who taught us everything we  know about the Nature of God – teaches us that God puts all humankind on notice (Genesis 1:26, 1:27, and 5:1) that each and every individual human being is sacred, since He (God, HaShem, sole Creator and Sovereign of the Universe), Himself created, made and fashioned us “in His image”?

This refers to the unique nature of human beings who, while obviously partly of the animal world and not that distantly related to cattle, say, and mammals generally, and particularly the rest the family of apes - tailless, two-legged, thumb-equipped, and remarkably intelligent big-brained beings -  have free will. That is, apart from all the rest of the animal kingdom, we each come equipped with a moral sense, the capability of distinguishing between good and evil, and the capacity, beyond the dictates of mere instinct, to choose between them. We come into the world possessed of the capacity to acquire vast stores of new knowledge, to think about our circumstances logically, to communicate with great fluency, to remember, to laugh, to pity, to plan, to design, to realize our designs, and – of course - to guide ourselves not based just on instinct but on our moral sense and logic.


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