20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Humanism

Huntanisnt Ernst Akiva Simon R eligious humanism comprises the boundless fullness of human life; as such, it is grounded in the freedom of man. Furthermore, like its secular analogue, religious humanism seeks to cultivate interhuman relations in the spirit of tolerance among individuals as well as between nations. Yet as religious humanism it judges the fullness of human life and deeds by the supreme criteria of moral good and evil, right and wrong, truth and falsehood. Finally, religious humanism establishes man's freedom on the rock of his peculiar dignity in being created in the image of God. This doctrine may be elucidated with illustrations from the varied sources of traditional judaism, including not only the Bible, which has become the common book of mankind, but also the oral tradition of legend, law, midrashic tales, and talmudic folklore, all of which have remained specifically jewish. Central to all these strands of jewish tradition is the concept of imago Dei. This ancient concept admits of two interpretations, one in the direction of man toward God, the other in the opposite direction, from God to man. The former was and remains the basis of all paganism from antiq- 424 HUMANISM uity to our own times. Its essence was first formulated by the Hellenistic philosopher Euhemerus of Messene, who in the third century B.C.E. suggested that man created his god in his own image. The modern way of suspecting ideas as ideologies by regarding every idea as the mere reflection of either warring instincts or the forces of production is nothing but Euhemerism . This does not diminish the value of the necessary and useful labor devoted to the critical task of unmasking special intellectual or economic forces that appear in the camouflage of ideological superstructures. With the peculiar horror vacui of the human soul, Euhemerism in its modern form often leads to an undesirable result. Man, thus cut off from absolute values, cannot endure such a vacuum, which he fills with new, vital air by turning relative values, such as state, soil, labor, or race, into absolute ones. These values are legitimate within their sphere, but their elevation to absolute height as deified idols annihilates them. Once raised to power they are bound to make man, who exalted them, their first victim. In this plight man seeks a last refuge in his own idolized image. Such thoughts are simply and convincingly expressed in a talmudic legend . According to the Bible, Abraham was the father of the faithful, the first man who knew the one and only God. His father, Teral;, is described by Jewish tradition as a dealer in idols. Once, we are told (Gen. R 38:13), being prevented from looking after his shop, he put his son Abraham in charge. There entered an old woman who demanded an idol in the shape of an old woman, a lame man who asked for a lame idol, a hunchback who would be content with nothing but a hunchback, and so forth. Thus, Abraham realized that man had created the idols in his own image. He seized a stick, smashed all the rest of his wares, left the shop in a hurry, and began to worship the formless God, who had, paradoxically, created man in his invisible image. The very absence of shape, form, and utterable name renders possible the creation in his image not of the individual but of Adam, the prototype of mankind. In this way the absence of pictorial representation, figures, and names comprises all the myriad human pictures, figures, and names. This is the fundamental position of religiOUS humanism in contradistinction to the modern worship of man's own mirrored image. Thus, the patriarch Jacob fails to wrest from the angel the divine name~ instead, his own name undergoes a theomorphic change: he is henceforth called Israel, which signifies "He who fought with God." Beholden to the image of God, man now realizes that his fullness as a human being recurrently requires a call for moral decision. Religious humanism acknowledges and underscores this call as absolute and unequivocal , and herein distinguishes itself from all other variants of humanism. In HUMANISM 425 a somewhat dialectical fashion, the distinctiveness of religious humanism may be illustrated by a famous example from the classical tradition: The small Aegean island of Melos, as Thucydides reports in his History of the Peloponnesian War 01,84-117), was engaged in a war for...