The 3000-Year-Old Idea That Shaped Modernity

Welcome to Madlik. I am praying and hoping that by the time we publish this podcast that the hostages are free. But I think if the Semel, the image of the hostage has been the guiding element of the last two years, it comes back in a very strong way to Tselem Elokim, to the image of God. And I think that we are with them. And it’s a wonderful metaphor for the whole community to be in the individual. And we hope and pray they come back. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at the Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform.

And now on YouTube and Substack, we also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show notes. This week, we start the Torah all over again and read Parashat Bereshit. We are also honored to be joined by Tomer Persico, author of “In God’s Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea,” published by NYU Press in July of this year. Dr. Persico is a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and a senior research scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Welcome, Tomer. Thanks for joining us.

Tomer Persico [2:43 – 2:44]: Thank you for having me.

Geoffrey Stern [2:45 – 3:01]: It’s wonderful to have you here and especially on the first episode of the new reading cycle of the Torah. What I would love to know is what caused you to pick this subject and write this book, and how many years did it take you to write it?

Tomer Persico [3:02 – 5:07]: Oh, Okay. I mean, I wrote it in about three years, but the research for it took me over a decade. I’ve been collecting material and researching this really for a long time. Because what I was interested in is a few questions. I’m answering a few questions first. Why do we now live in a world in which it is logical and moral for privileged or for the powerful to share their power or to give up their privilege? And a lot of contemporary voices answer that question by saying, well, privileged persons or powers will not give up their power unless you take it by force. And I thought that the answer was different. The answer was connected to morals and ethics and ideas.

Another question I wanted to answer was this super interesting but scandalous question, why the West? Why is the West today the hegemonic, most powerful cultural civilization in the world? And what I found out is that the thread that connects these two questions is connected itself with that idea, with that unbelievably revolutionary idea that happens to be mentioned in one verse in chapter I of Genesis. And that’s the idea that all persons were created in the image of God. And so I began to research it. I actually, when I began writing, I couldn’t believe such a book was not written, because you would think such an obvious, basic, fundamental idea. People must have written about it. But actually, no. And so I went to work. I wrote what I thought I wrote as an intellectual and cultural history of the West hinging on the seminal place of that idea. And the more I researched, the more I found out how much this idea is fundamental to the world we live in today.

Geoffrey Stern [5:07 – 6:26]: So, I mean, having read the book, it might be not only the most radical idea in the Torah itself. I think the knee-jerk reaction of most people would say it’s monotheism. That’s what Judaism gave to the world, that there’s one God. And here we are. This idea of the image of God, you trace in this amazing. It’s really a history of ideas book. That’s the genre. And there are too few books like that. It’s almost like a James Mitchner novel called “The Source.” You’re digging down. You’re starting at the very beginning, and you trace this idea all the way up to the present. It reads like a novel.

And I think many of the podcasts that you’ve been on or the articles written about the book focus on the ending about secularism. How do you attach secularism to a biblical text? But I enjoyed the journey so much that what we’re going to do today, with your permission, is we’re going to look at a few revelations that occur along the way that I think are as profound as the end destination. And maybe we’ll have you back, as there’s so much to talk about in this book. Rabbi, you read the book, what, in one sitting over the weekend?

Adam Mintz [6:26 – 7:11]: So it’s an amazing book. And I agree that we don’t have enough books on the history of ideas. I like the fact that you choose the image of God, which is not actually a Jewish idea. Or maybe it is. It’s something found in the Hebrew Bible. But it’s talking about the creation of humankind. And I felt that tension also. I mean, you say, Geoffrey, you said, what did Judaism give to the world? Judaism gave monotheism, but this is something that Judaism gives to the world through the Torah. Even though it’s talking not specifically about Jews versus other people.

Geoffrey Stern [7:12 – 7:13]: Absolutely.

Tomer Persico [7:13 – 7:38]: I just wanted to say, as I show in the book, Judaism or ancient Hebrew culture didn’t actually invent the actual idea of the image of God. But what the Bible does is that it implements this idea for everybody, for all people. Because until the Bible, the pharaoh was the image of God or some mythological hero was the image of God. And the Bible says everybody is the image of God. And that, of course, changes everything.

Geoffrey Stern [7:39 – 8:21]: Okay, well, what changed everything when I started reading the book. Cause I didn’t know really what to expect is this, as I said in the intro, where you make the point that actually we have no reason to believe that ancient Israelites thought that God did not have a body. Body was infinite. And all of the stuff that Greek philosophy fed us, and that it is actually very primary to the power of the concept that we take these words very literally. Could you explain that? Because I think that would be novel to a lot of people. We all think of the image of God as a metaphor. And you don’t take it as a metaphor in the eyes of the ancient Israelites that heard it for the first time?

Tomer Persico [8:22 – 10:36]: Yeah. I mean, I simply think that the Bible didn’t think it was a metaphor and that our sages Chazal didn’t think it was a metaphor. There is no place in the Bible that mentions that God doesn’t have a body or even mentions that you cannot see God. We learn from the Bible that it’s dangerous to see God. You can see God and die. It’s dangerous. But it’s actually possible to see God. And quite a few instances within the Bible, people see God, Moses on the mountain, and later, you know, in chapter 24, Moses and 70 of the elders of Israel see God, it says that and you know, in different places. So apparently God has a form that you can see. And what for the Bible and for our sages, the image of God was, was the form, the actual contours of the form of God.

Geoffrey Stern [0:00 – 10:37]: Now that has, on one hand, you know, it’s upsetting to us. We are, I would say, simply after the Maimonidean revolution. Maimonides really entrenched in Judaism the view that any thought about a body for God or a form of God is idolatry. That’s all nonsense, of course. God is infinite and totally abstract.

But before Maimonides and even in Maimonides’ time, people argued with that, didn’t think that was obvious. So we are already after that revolution. And for us, it’s strange, but what it does in a significant way is it changes the meaning of idolatry. Idolatry isn’t the foolish belief that some two foot statue of a, I don’t know, an elephant or a camel or whatever is God. Idolatry is substituting a two-foot statue as the idol of God for the real Tselem, the real presence of God, which is the human person.

That’s the idea. If you are an idolater, you’re missing out on the real presence of God which is in your interlocutor, in the person you meet in every human being. And you’re instead of that worshiping some stone or wooden statue.

Adam Mintz [10:37 – 11:07]: So Geoffrey, at the risk of, I know we’re having the conversation before we get to the sources, so obviously what you said is brilliant. I was bothered when I read the book by the following. So, we’re created in the image of God. Humans are created in the image of God. If that’s true, that if humans see God, they’re gonna die, why should there be such a, you know, a fear of seeing the image that we became?

Tomer Persico [11:10 – 12:01]: Yeah, interesting question. I think, you know, God has His wish of privacy and sort of transcendence. It’s undignified towards God if you simply are too close to Him, like a king. You know, in the past also, kings were not simply seen by commoners, right. I think it’s more of a distance thing than a metaphysical impossibility. And so, God wants us to keep our distance, except for, you know, special occasions. If there’s a prophet, sometimes He reveals Himself.

Ezekiel or Isaiah, they saw a certain, you know, a certain form of God, right? And of course Moses sees God, etc. So, it’s possible it’s simply kept for very special people in very special occasions.

Adam Mintz [12:01 – 12:29]: I’d just say one last thing, and that is, you know, in Anim Zemirot, we take that idea and we say kesher, Tefillin, hera, leannav, which means that Moses saw only the knot of God’s Tefillin on His head. He saw just the back of His head. And I always thought that’s like, you know, King Charles, that you only see King Charles when he’s dressed, you know, in his royal clothing, that God is only seen when He’s wearing His Tefillin.

Tomer Persico [12:30 – 12:30]: Yeah.

Geoffrey Stern [12:31 – 13:59]: So let me jump in for a second. You know, I’m trained in the philosophy of science and when you look at theories, you weigh two theories. It seems to me that the theory that we use, we moderns, is that God has no body, He’s infinite, He’s omnipotent and all that. And those are wonderful words, but as a being governed by the four, five senses that I have, they’re really meaningless words.

Do I really know what infinite is when I live in a finite world? So there are problems with that theory and there are few benefits. Then you have Tomer’s new way of looking at it, which is God is physical and God is identical to us. And it’s equally as problematic because how could this God, universal—and I wouldn’t even say, I’m not going to say universal—how could this all-powerful God be like me? I’m mortal, He’s not.

But you look at the theory and what are the takeaways? The takeaways are, and you bring this verse, Genesis 9:6: Whoever sheds human blood, by human hand shall that one’s blood be shed. For in the image of God was human created. Now we’re not talking about idolatry anymore, we’re not talking about metaphysics anymore. We are saying that God physical and making every human being identical to God means that human rights is born. And that’s one of the messages of this book.

Tomer Persico [13:59 – 15:59]: Exactly. What I try to convey through all through this book is that the way we think about a human person influences how we organize our society and how we legislate our laws. So the Bible is explicitly arguing with other lists of laws, other systems of legislation within ancient Mesopotamia and even Greece and Rome, who for them, substituting a person to be punished for another person’s crime was something that was done matter of factly.

Sometimes it was done in a way that was a sort of a measure for measure, logical within the legislative system. So if I kill your son, you kill my son. This sort of thing. Now, my son, of course, didn’t do anything wrong, but that’s logical if you don’t think that each and every person is a world unto themselves, special, unique, and dignified with the image of God. If so, yes, you can substitute people, or sometimes my son, or my wife, et cetera, are considered simply organs of my extended body.

So if you pluck out my eye, I pluck out your eye. If you kill my son, I kill your son. Simply organs of a whole organism. The Bible explicitly argues with that and says sons will not be punished for the sins of their fathers, nor fathers for the sins of their sons. Each will be punished for their own sin. Or the verse that you read right: Whoever spills a man’s blood, by man, their blood will be spilled. Because in the image of God, man was created. Their blood will be spilled and not anyone else’s, why? Because each and every person was created in the image of God.

Geoffrey Stern [16:01 – 17:27]: And it doesn’t stop there. We’re gonna move on to other subjects in the book, but here when we talk about the physicality of God’s image, is this human being. You quote rules about when you kill a convict for murder and you have to hang his body in public; you can’t leave it overnight. Why? Because it is an insult to God. And the Talmud explains because it is God hanging there. That’s almost a line from a book by Elie Wiesel in Auschwitz where he looked at that child hanging and he said, God is there hanging.

This goes back to our midrashim It becomes very, very powerful. And I will say later in the book, you start talking about philosophers like Saint Anselm and Descartes, and they prove that God exists because of the way we think of God. And the truth is, you and I and Rabbi know all they proved is that God exists in their mind. They didn’t prove he exists outside of their mind. But that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about a leap that changes the discussion from God and what’s out there to man becomes the Godhead. It’s a book by Erich Fromm, ‘You Shall Be as Gods.’ This is a very, very powerful, I think, paradigm shift.

Tomer Persico [17:28 – 17:59]: What happens is the minute Christianity is formed and basically adopts the Bible as its foundational text, of course it adds the New Testament, it also adopts the idea of the image of God. But it does something with it. Christianity has a trajectory of individualization and internalization; things become more individualized and more internalized. And the image of God also becomes internalized. It becomes for different Christian thinkers in different Christian times…

Tomer Persico [17:59 – 18:30]: It becomes the conscience or reason or the soul or the will, etc. Different things. In any way, it becomes an internal ability. So when it becomes reason, suddenly the image of God is our ability to think straight, to think in an orderly way, to think in a rational way, not to believe in anything, but to check things. And it gives us the certainty that if we think straight, we…

Tomer Persico [18:30 – 19:00]: Can actually discover what the world is about. We can actually. There’s some correspondence between what we think and the world. This is already the seeds of science.

Because if we didn’t have that understanding, why would we think that our investigation or examination of the world can discover anything real? We trust that God gave us reason. Reason is the image of God, and so we can discover the world. And what you mentioned before about secularism, what I show in the book, and this is many people are attached to that because there’s an ironic twist here.

What I show in the book is that the image of God at the end had an immense influence on the secularization process. Because if we believe that we are special, autonomous, conscious beings because we are made in the image of God, we can at first, of course, thank God, worship God, et cetera. But there is a way, there is a vector, in which that turns into our consecration of our autonomy.

We take a lot of interest and importance in our autonomy. This leads on one direction, to rights discourse. Please allow me to think what I want, to say what I want, to believe what I want. Allow me the freedom of movement and property, et cetera, et cetera. But in another trajectory, it leads to secularization because we say, my autonomy is so important to me. I don’t want anybody to interfere with it, including some divine judge or father up there.

If my autonomy is the most sacred thing, perhaps it’s even the image of God in me. I cannot have anyone boss over me, Lord over me. And so I will reject God for the sake of my autonomy. And that’s the way the image of God, in a way, twists. You know, it twists itself up and rejects God and rejects, of course, its own divinity. And we come into a secular world in which, you know, secular humanism basically posits that the most important thing for you is to, you know, protect your autonomy and your feelings and rationality and reject anything that is above you.

You know, it’s fascinating, in the Parsha, it says that God was afraid that man was going to usurp him. In Genesis 3:22, it says now that humankind has become like any of us. It was almost recognizing that the potential of making this being in the image of God was a threat to God itself. It all packed into the original idea.

I want to go back and I’m sure Rabbi Adam was as struck as I was the amount of time and pages spent on Christianity. And I thought in terms of, on the one hand, I’ve heard you in interviews, Tomer, saying that those right wingers, those religious nationalists who don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about Selim Elokim and human rights and all that, they need to know that it’s part of our tradition. And I assume the argument is based on. Because the original idea comes from us.

And you say they might argue that it’s a foreign idea, but certainly in your book itself, the fact that Christianity ran with this idea is very impressive. I think we can be chauvinistic about it and we can say like the father in Big Fat Greek Wedding, look what we created every idea, this amazing idea was invented by Jews, but we Jews didn’t run with it. Is that the implicit assumption that you make by spending so much time on Christianity?

I mean, in a way, yes. I mean, we have to admit first of all that we live today in a Christian world. We live in a world formed by Christianity. The West was formed by Christianity. And these are simple facts. I mean, the fact is that Christianity is the biggest religion in terms of numbers in the world. Obviously, it has influenced and indeed based whatever is built the West as it is.

So, of course, if my book wants to understand how the West was constructed according to a series of ideas developed from the image of God, Christianity has to play a very prominent part in it. But I will say I don’t think it’s totally a mistake to say that Judaism, first of all, of course, Judaism is at the root of this, right?

And I think Judaism not only contributed along the way, but something of its spirit is transcendent or given to Christianity. I think there really is a Jewish Christian tradition or a Judeo-Christian tradition, as sometimes it’s called. I know many people don’t like that expression and think it’s used manipulatively, etc. But I think it’s true.

There is a set of characteristics that characterizes Judaism and Christianity and differentiates them from Islam on one side and from the Eastern religions on the other. It concerns individuality, an emphasis on autonomy, it concerns a dialogical relationship with the divine. It even concerns a sort of rebelliousness against divine law and perhaps even against God itself. Remember, it’s already in the Bible that there’s fraught relations between man and God, and man sometimes rebels.

And Christianity itself, if you look at the history of Christianity, there is this dynamic, there is this spiral dynamics that always stresses more and more spirituality at the expense of divine law and institutions. So since Jesus and Paul, yeah, you know, they reject Jewish law in an effort to become more spiritual, more religious. And you can see it all through the Catholic Church’s history and of course, in the Reformation, the Protestant Reformation, what are they saying?

We don’t need the Church’s hierarchy and the Pope and the councils and all the credo, and we need only to read the Bible ourselves and to be autonomous in how we interpret God’s word. That’s what they’re saying. And that also, of course, develops and culminates in secularism. Secularism basically says we don’t even need Protestant churches or institutions and we don’t even need Jesus to be really spiritual. This is the whole contemporary spirituality, new age scene. Right. That’s what they’re saying. We can be spiritual by connecting to the God within.

So, and obviously, as you show in the book, it did affect Judaism. It affected Reformed Judaism, which was very influenced. But I would argue, and I’d love to know what Adam thinks about this, that it also affected the Mussar movement in terms of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, who focused on the internal life of the Jew. It focused on the Hasidic movement, where you have so many stories of arguing with God and rejecting the monopolization of our texts to the intelligentsia, that we all own it, like Luther said.

So these were ideas, I think, that reverberated throughout the culture. And I was not off put. I just noticed, and I think we live in a golden age. Many times in this podcast, we will quote a Christian scholar because they read our text and they come with it with their own insights. And if we can forget some of the baggage that we have with Christianity and Islam, we live in a golden age.

Today, people like Sy Held are writing books about Judaism as love, and they’re reclaiming ideas that Christianity ran with. And maybe part of what your book is doing is reclaiming this to its source.

Yes, yes. So, I mean, obviously I agree with Geoffrey. See what I find interesting, Tomer, to use a term that I think that the historian Jacob Katz introduced about neutral society, he said in the 1800s. So, of course, Protestantism led to secularism. Led to the reform movement. But what was interesting is once you came to that period in the 1800s, what was remarkable was that everybody interacted. Geoffrey. See, that was never true. It used to be that if you lived in. If you lived in Muncie or Bnei Brak, that you didn’t have any. You didn’t have any interaction with communities that were different than you were different religions. But starting in the 1800s, all the different religions interacted in what we call a neutral society. And I just wonder, Tomer, see, there you.

The autonomy reaches its ultimate because not only are you autonomous within your own religion, but you’re autonomous in a neutral society. You have to deal with other people from other religions who’ve chosen to be autonomous on their own for different reasons.

Tomer Persico [28:07 – 29:30]: Right? This is connected to the whole separation of church and state. At some point, Europeans realized that if they continue to force religion on each other, they’re going to exhaust themselves in wars and simply ruin themselves. This was the pragmatic reason for separating church and state. But there was also a principal reason, which was that the conscience, which became for many the image of God, needed to be free. If we are serious believers, we need to respect the image of God in others, right? In the person in front of us. Whatever they actually believe should be left to their own wishes.

We constructed this neutral society by giving importance and freedom to each and everyone’s autonomy—autonomy to believe as they wanted or not to believe. This is the process, right? And yes, because of that, of course, we live in a golden age in which we can argue and even share ideas with Christians without getting expelled or burned at a stake, et cetera.

Geoffrey Stern [29:30 – 31:47]: The last idea I want to discuss, given the time, is this idea that when we say the image of God, following your book, it’s not only the image of God, it’s also the mind of God. That, of course, affected science and discovery and curiosity. One of the thinkers, Marsilio Ficino, said worshiping the divine is as natural to men almost as neighing to horses or barking to dogs.

What he said is an idea that I’ve kind of come to on my own, where I believe—and that’s why I find religious texts, and in our case, Jewish religious texts, so fascinating—is that just as the human mind has a facility for music (and you can’t say, do I believe in music or do I not believe in music?), it’s something that we have a hush. We have an idea for the same about art. We have built into our DNA religion, and I would argue that even an atheist has the religion that he’s rejecting. Otherwise, we couldn’t “f” the ineffable.

The idea is that, as you bring it out in a whole section of the book, these thinkers started to look at this internalized mind of God that we have, and it has within it this ability, like Luther was saying, to come up with our own spiritual and religious ideas. But I will go so far as to say, Rabbi and Tomer, that as a result, there is this ability to look back at the history of religious ideas as something that is truly valid. That’s what your book is doing. What I mean to say is if we have built into our categories of our mind this concept of something transcending us, then the history of how man deals, is affected, and channels these ideas becomes a very important aspect of our humanity. That’s where the humanism of this original idea comes home.

Tomer Persico [31:48 – 33:02]: That’s amazing, Geoffrey. This is the first time we’re talking, and you use the word hush. This is exactly the word I use for the religious element in our life. I say this is a hush, like the sense of humor, like a musical sense, like an aesthetic sense. Some people have more of it than others, but everybody has some of it. You can appreciate something that is aesthetic, and in exactly that way, you can appreciate something that is holy, that has some presence. It’s there, and you just need to be sensitive enough to appreciate it.

And so, indeed, like you say, my book elaborates on different manifestations of that sense, on how people interpreted that sense at different times in different ways. It starts from Judaism to Christianity to the secular world today, even, in which we know there are instances of spirituality which is not connected to any religion, but simply as an expression of that wellspring inside us, that, like a dog barks, we do God, right?

Geoffrey Stern [33:02 – 33:02]: Yeah.

Tomer Persico [33:03 – 33:06]: And perhaps this is the real image of God inside us.

Geoffrey Stern [33:08 – 34:22]: Absolutely. Well, this has been an absolute pleasure. I am praying and hoping that by the time we publish this podcast, the hostages are free. If the Semel, the image of the hostage, has been the guiding element of the last two years, it comes back in a very strong way to Tselem Elokim, to the image of God. I think that we are with them, and it’s a wonderful metaphor for the whole community to be in the individual. We hope and pray they come back. Tomer, I hope you’ll come visit us again, and we can continue this discussion. I hope all of you will run out and buy this book. I’m going to put a link to the book in the show notes. It’s a fascinating resource. The sources in it are themselves amazing in God’s image. And as we start reading the Torah all over again, we’re really reading a book not so much about God, but about ourselves. I think that’s the takeaway. Hopefully, that makes it interesting to you as well as to Adam and I and Tomer, Shabbat Shalom.

Adam Mintz [34:22 – 34:24]: Thank you so much. Tomer, Shabbat Shalom.

Tomer Persico [34:24 – 34:26]: Thank you so much for having me. Yes, thank you.