Created in God’s Image: Where Human Greatness Lies

The Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, was this last weekend. This year, I felt its cleansing power palpably. 

My reacquaintance with the power of Yom Kippur came decades ago. I see it as part of the providential nature of this country that I was inspired to reconsider my Jewishness by a Christian novelist writing about religion. In one of his articles, he wrote about his own decision to mark Yom Kippur one year, whose name, translated into English, he parsed as the Day of At-one-ment. That playful decoding of the word I would discover, was a typical move of the rabbis of old, who knew that what came from God always had infinite depth if we only would leap in and explore.

In this fractious political season, in this fractious time when nearly everything is politicized, at-one-ment is what we are missing. Its lack can be described in King David’s words: My soul thirsts for You, my body yearns for You, as one in a dry and thirsty land without water.

The best politicians — and they are rare — are able to evoke a sense of oneness and peoplehood that makes sense of the often violent-tempered thrust and parry of democratic politics in modern nation states. Ronald Reagan’s evocation of morning in America was no empty slogan. It spoke to millions and powered one of the greatest election landslides in American history. It culminated in the end of the Soviet Union.

Winston Churchill evoked a sense of a grand alliance for civilization that united many nations and led them united through grave peril to victory.

There is a sense of civilizational decay today, much as there was in the ’30s. Then, it seemed that the constitutional idea had run aground, and that the new barbarisms of the dictators would take over from the floundering, befuddled, and timorous democracies. Today, it is more the sense of cultural bankruptcy. This is what the ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood and the mullahs accuse us of and try to exploit.

From the number of our young who join themselves to the terrorist cause, it seems that there is some truth to that accusation. These young clearly do not see that those accusations can be dismissed out of hand. They have become convinced of America’s moral bankruptcy.  

We must say that they see something real. To some significant degree, we have followed the trajectory of great empires of the past, transitioning from power to decadence, spurning the republic for a new imperial aristocracy, and developing a culture that, as Federico Fellini already saw decades ago, is ripe for an updated version of Petronius’ Satyricon. We owe the zealots thanks for pointing out to us the valid question: have we rid ourselves the moral bearings that guided our path to greatness, and chosen decadence in its place? 

For here is the crucial point. The key is that we have a choice. A great civilization is not one that is perfect but one that continually corrects its errors. It knows that humans are limited in nature, and so must be resilient by letting go of what proves to be unworthy and rededicating itself to the deepest understanding it has of the great Oneness from which we and all the universe have as our eternal context.

Our religious tradition has been the core of our American resilience, enabling us to face our own mistakes, own up to them, and shoulder the responsibility for fixing them. Eisenhower’s choice of religious terminology in his own book about the war, Crusade in Europe, was not accidental or off point.

Nor was Lincoln’s starkly theological language a mistake in leading the nation to cleanse itself of slavery through a ghastly, bloody civil war. Churchill spoke of saving Western and Christian civilization and wrote in his histories of how religion is the deepest motivator, whether used for good or ill.

One of the great themes in these last days in the Jewish calendar is remembrance. It is a major theme in the Hebrew Bible, used to characterize God and taught as a quality that humans ought to emulate. 

This remembrance is not a retreat into a past viewed through the lens of nostalgia. It is something deeper. Wendell Berry pointed towards that meaning in noting that the word breaks down to “re-member,” to make something once again a part of something larger, of which it was constituent.

Thus, when Genesis tells us that God remembered Noah, it is not saying that God had forgotten all about him, but that now Noah was to be joined to his purpose as it had been from the start — to rescue God’s project of Creation. This is the turning point in the story, which up till then had been a tale of human failure so all-pervading that it cried out for complete erasure.

The point of remembrance is the point at which the story turns to how the Noah came safely back into a cleansed world. The human story of which he was a part is now re-membered, once again embodied and connecting the past with the future, the human with the divine, the failures with their redemption, and sin with sacrificial return to oneness — at-one-ment- with who we have ever been in the mind of God.

How much are we dis-membered? Surely, we have allowed ourselves to become so alienated from each other that people on all sides of our troubled politics see this election in starkest terms. Such rare bipartisanship indicates a truth that for which we must assume responsibility and not worsen by merely blaming others.

Not that others are without blame, but the path towards healing illnesses of the soul requires first that we see ourselves as part of what was whole and what can again be made whole — re-membering all the dismembered parts into a nation united into a comprehensive strength.

The West discovered that the path to oneness is the path of freedom. There is no greater power than the power to become a servant to a great cause freely chosen. It far exceeds the uniformity that dictators establish by fear and force, whether Nazi, Communist, or Islamist. A rabbi of antiquity pointed out this Scriptural message:

Rabbi Yochanan said, “Wherever you find mention of the greatness of the Holy One, blessed be He, there you find mention of His humility. This is written in the Torah, repeated in the Prophets, and stated a third time in the Writings.

It is written in the Torah: For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, mighty and awe-inspiring God, who shows no favoritism and accepts no bribe [Deut. 10:17]. Immediately afterwards it is written, He upholds the cause of the orphan and widow, and loves the stranger, giving him food and clothing.”

God Gives Us the Freedom

The supreme power of the universe finds its greatness in affording and upholding our freedom. God teaches how to serve Oneness through His own humble example.

The late Chief Rabbi of the U.K., Jonathan Sacks, pointed out how truly powerful people can exemplify this trait. He wrote of how the late Queen Elizabeth met with a group of sixty or so Holocaust survivors. The Queen was always punctilious about her schedule, but not that day. She stayed far beyond what had been planned so that she could hear out the story each one had to tell. Rabbi Sacks, as Chief Rabbi, was there, and he wrote:

One after another, the survivors were coming to me in a kind of trance, saying, “Sixty years ago I did not know whether I would be alive tomorrow, and here I am today talking to the Queen.” It brought a kind of blessed closure into deeply lacerated lives.

Sixty years earlier they had been treated, in Germany, Austria, Poland, in fact in most of Europe, as subhuman, yet now the Queen was treating them as if each were a visiting Head of State. That was humility: not holding yourself low but holding others high. And where you find humility, there you find greatness.

This is real aristocracy, the sort of thing Lincoln did, the sort of thing that Churchill did. Those who are the greatest hold themselves the servants of those who accept their power, making vivid the great wholeness of which they all are equally a part.

In God’s great wholeness, humility and power are united. Created in God’s image, that is where our human greatness lies. Let us rouse ourselves to that true greatness and use our freedom as its Author intended — in service to each and every fellow member of His Great Commonwealth.

READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:

For Israel and Civilization, Vote Trump

The Real Choice in This Election

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