This is Edward Guthmann's capsule review of a new movie called Glass House which appeared in last Sunday's Chronicle.
"Trash on a big budget. A teenage girl and her younger brother are orphaned when their parents die in a car crash. They go to live in a posh Malibu showplace with the guardians from Hell. Stellan Skars and Diane Lane play the evil caretakers: he's a killer, she's a junkie and we know from Jump Street that the kids will emerge bloodied but triumphant. Given the general ethical void in Hollywood, Columbia Pictures is probably unembarrassed by this tawdry and violent thriller, or by the hideous judgment demonstrated in releasing it the week of the tragedy in New York and Washington, D.C. Rated PG-13."
Reading reviews like this, I often wonder that so many novelists, artists, filmmakers and composers seem to be fixated on the human capacity for evil. It's certainly not just a contemporary phenomenon. There's a long history of this going back to the patriarchal foundations of human culture. We see the tragedy of human iniquity in the Bible, the Iliad and the Mahabarata.
Of course, it is crucial to understand the human capacity for wickedness and how it can wreck the world. We cannot hide from the world we've created, pretending to live in innocence. We need to understand the moral darkness into which we are all capable of descending. But when so much of a society's creativity is devoted to the culture of cynicism -- as it is in our own time -- this cannot help but add to the rancidness of an already spoiled society. In these so-called works of art human motivation is reduced to a desire for power or domination or wealth or sex or violence. There is little or no possibility of self-transcendence; there is no reality beyond the individual self; there is nothing that could be characterized as spiritual.
My teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, was deeply troubled about this issue. In 1965 he wrote: "The tragedy of this creeping self-disparagement is in its cultivation of the doubt (as to) whether human beings are worthy of being saved. Massive defamation of man may spell the doom of all of us. Moral annihilation leads to physical extermination. If man is contemptible, why be upset about the extinction of the human species? The eclipse of humanity, the inability to sense our spiritual relevance, to sense our being involved in the moral task is itself a dreadful punishment." (Who Is Man?, p. 27)
I'd like to turn back to the Torah readings that were chanted on Rosh Hashanah morning, because I believe there are great riches to be mined from these texts. You will recall that our High Holy Day theme, "Kehilla as a Multi-cultural Synagogue," inspired us to choose for our initial reading the passage from the first chapter of Genesis about the creation of the first human being. This is how the biblical author defined the universal essence of our humanity:
"And Divinity created humankind in its own image; yes, in the very image of Divinity the first human was created; male and female were both created."
In describing all human beings as images of the Divine, the author of the biblical text was arguing against the prevailing elitist view held throughout the ancient Middle East. In Babylonia, kings were understood to be sons of the gods; in Egypt, kings were seen as divinities in their own right. The common people in both of these civilizations were valued only because they were servants or slaves of the king and the gods.
So the Biblical author took a major and radical step toward egalitarianism when he stated that every human being -- woman or man, Israelite or foreigner -- carries the mark of Divinity. As a result of his insight, no Israelite king could ever claim exclusive kinship with God. When King David sinned with Bathsheba, he was immediately confronted by the prophet Nathan, who labeled him a sinner. And David accepted Nathan's judgment.
"And Divinity created humankind in its own image..."
It was this very passage that, thousands of years later gave rise to the sentence in the Declaration of Independence that reads: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
How did the author of this creation story come up with the notion that human beings are images of God? A half century ago, the German biblical scholar Gerhard van Rad made a perceptive suggestion. He wrote that ancient kings of the Middle East would often have statues of themselves sculpted. Each of these images would then be transported to a different province of the king's realm and set up in the most prominent public center of the precinct. The idea was that since the king couldn't be in each of his provinces at the same time, these statues would represent his presence. When the king's subjects passed through that center, they would of necessity see the image of their monarch and remember to be reverent and obedient to him.
If Gerhard van Rad is correct, than the Israelite author of our creation myth borrowed his idea from the non-Jewish kingdoms in the Middle East, reformulating it to suit a new and radical anthropology: The earth is a province of God. But because God lives in heaven, she created humanity to represent Divinity on this particular province called Earth. Like the statues that symbolized the king, our purpose on the earth is to symbolize God. The riches of the planet are entrusted to us and we are to care for them as if we were God.
A true symbol points us toward that which it stands for; it also embodies that which it points us toward. So each of us is a microcosm, embodying the characteristics of God. In our story, the Creator is portrayed as mysterious, conscious, imaginative, powerful, decisive, creative and a unity of many diverse forces. Furthermore, God prefers creation and order to chaos and confusion. God possesses the quality of freedom which he uses as he chooses what he will create and when he will create it. God values diversity within a multiple universe. And last but not least, God can distinguish between good and evil. What a marvelous image of the human essence. Human beings possess all of these qualities and traits because we were created in the image of God.
Rabbi Arthur Green has written that the notion that every human being is an image of God is the singular basis of all Jewish morality and ethics. This is why murder was seen to be such a heinous and unforgivable crime in the Bible. The Mechilta, the earliest commentary written on the book of Exodus states that one who sheds the blood of a human being "it is accounted to him as though he diminished or destroyed the Divine Image."
I want to turn for a moment to some trenchant words written this past week by Rabbi Michael Lerner about the damage done to the Divine image two weeks ago in New York:
"When people have learned to de-sanctify each other, to treat each other as means to our own ends, to not feel the pain of those who are suffering, we end up creating a world in which these kinds of terrible acts of violence become more common. No one should use this as an excuse for these terrible acts of violence--the absolute quintessence of de-sanctification. I categorically reject any notion that violence is ever justified. It is always an act of de-sanctification, of not being able to see the divine in the other.
"We should pray for the victims and the families of those who have been hurt or murdered in these crazy acts. Yet we should also pray that America does not return to "business as usual," but rather turns to a period of repentance and atonement, a turn in direction of our society at every level, a return to the most basic Biblical ideal: that every human life is sacred, that "the bottom line" should be the creation of a world of love and caring, and that the best way to prevent these kinds of acts is not to turn ourselves into a police state, but turn ourselves into a society in which social justice, love, and compassion are so prevalent that violence becomes only a distant memory."
Each of us, then, is a tzelem Elohim -- which means that each one of you sitting in this room, as well as every person out there in the world -- each is a symbol of God -- whatever our particular personal, religious or cultural identities, whatever the color of our skin. You and I are microcosms, mirroring the mystery and depth of the universe itself. We are sacred holograms of the cosmos.
I'd like to conclude these reflections with a guided meditation. You may close your eyes if you wish...
What would the world be like if every person saw every other person as an image of God?... What would your life be like if throughout the year you remained aware of what you could do for the poor and the sick in third-world countries?...
If you experienced every person you met in the course of the day as an image of God-- the homeless, the drug addict, the insane...