Destruction, Rebuilding and the Image of God

Vaethanan 5780 (Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11)

Hebrew

In the covenant between God and Israel, hardly any transgression is as serious as idolatry, as Moses warns repeatedly in his predictions of what will come to pass after he is no longer on the scene; for example:

Do not to act wickedly and make for yourselves a sculptured image in any likeness whatever: the form of a man or a woman... (Deuteronomy 4:16 and others following)

And also in the Ten Commandments:

You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters below the earth. (Deuteronomy 5:8).

In the Haftara, Isaiah addresses the issue from a different angle, and emphasizes that the very effort to depict God using inanimate materials is doomed to failure (quoted below). The gap is too wide to be bridged.

Does this mean that God has no representation on earth?

In an article “Religion and Race”(reprinted in Insecurity of Freedom) first published in 1963, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel cries out against the violence directed at the family of James Meredith (the first Black student at the University of Mississippi), quotes the Ten Commandments and continues:

And yet there is something in the world that the Bible does regard as a symbol of God. It is not a temple or a tree, it is not a statue or a star. The symbol of God is man, every man. How significant is the fact that the term tselem, which is frequently used in a damnatory sense for a man-made image of God, as well as the term demuth, likeness—of which Isaiah [in this week's Hafatara] claims (40:18), no demuth can be applied to God—are employed in denoting man as an image and likeness of God. Man, every man, must be treated with the honor due to a likeness representing the King of kings.

When I returned to this passage this week, following the funeral of the tireless leader of the Civil Rights Movement, Rep. John Lewis on Tisha B'av, I had thought: this is a key to destruction and rebuilding.

Why was the First Temple destroyed? Due to three sins: Idol worship, forbidden sexual relations, and bloodshed (Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 9b)

Following Rabbi Heschel's train of thought, forbidden sexual relations (in which I would include all sexual and gender-based violence) and bloodshed are crude, violent acts of desecration. The baseless hatred for which the Second Temple was destroyed, moves the desecration from external violence into the human heart.

That is the destruction. How do we rebuild? By internalizing that every human is an image of God. Just imagine what could happen if the people on both sides of the barricades on Balfour Street, in the house, those whom they represent and those not represented there, treated each other as if they were images of God. The substance of the dispute would remain unchanged, but the path towards resolving it would be transformed.

The change depends on us. The effort is enormous, but also essential to ensure our continued existence in the Land of Israel.