Page 17 - SPRING 2024 News and Views

Genesis starts by telling a story about humanity as a whole, and their archetypes. After Adam and Eve,
Adam disobeys a command about eating a fruit; Cain was given a warning and became a murderer; Noah
lived in a violent world, and God regretted it – ‘His heart was filled with pain’ (Gen 6: 6). So after the
flood God made a covenant with all mankind, a moral code for everyone. However advancing technology,
by making bricks through drying clay, led to the ziggurat which was the first global project where the
builders planned to rule, not God. But the covenant had not ceased; and from here on the focus moves
to just one family, Abraham and Sarah.

It is a far from simple story thereafter, becoming a nation, who are different. That is what the word
kadosh means: literally ‘holy’ is distinctive, set apart. But ‘the pious of the nations have a share in the
world to come’ – a quotation from the Mishneh Torah, Teshuvah 3: 5 so there is a sense in which it is not
exclusive. The God of the Hebrew Bible loves each of his children for what they are: Isaac and Ishmael,
Jacob and Esau, Israel and the other nations, blessing each in their own particular way. ‘Our particularity
is our window onto universality, just as our language is the only way we have of understanding the world
we share with speakers of other languages. God no more wants all faiths and cultures to be the same than
a loving parent wants his or her children to be the same. That is the conceptural link between love,
creation and difference. We serve God, author of diversity, by respecting diversity’. J Sacks ‘The Dignity of
Difference’ p56 Sadly, this is not yet universally agreed!

Adobe Stock pictures

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