Page 119 - Eclipse of God

92 Chapter 6

told the people who had then arisen that He was “the Judge of
the whole earth,” who had now chosen just this people as His
immediate following in order that it might begin to fulfil His
righteousness. This righteousness, the confirmation, namely, of
what is just and the overcoming of what is unjust, was here not
already embodied in a heavenly society that should serve as a
model for the human one. It was not the cosmic order which
was decisive but its sovereign, the Lord of heaven and earth,
who taught the human creature formed by His hand to distin-
guish in their souls between good and evil as He Himself, cre-
ating the world, had distinguished between light and darkness.
It is customary to see the connection between the ethical
and the religious in Israel exclusively in the form of a heavenly
command accompanied by a threat of punishment. To do this
is to miss what is essential. For the giving of the law at Sinai
is properly understood as the body of rules which the divine
Ruler conferred upon His people in the hour of His ascension
to the throne. All the prescriptions of this body of rules, both
the ritual and the ethical, are intended to lead beyond them-
selves into the sphere of the “holy.” The people’s goal was set
not by their being bidden to become a “good” people but a
“holy” one. Thus every moral demand is set forth as one that
shall raise man, the human people, to the sphere where the
ethical merges into the religious, or rather where the differ-
ence between the ethical and the religious is suspended in the
breathing- space of the divine. This is expressed with unsur-
passable clarity in the reason given for the goal that is set. Is-
rael shall become holy, “for I am holy.” The imitation of God by
man, the “following in His way,” can be fulfilled naturally only
in those divine attributes turned towards the human ethos, in
justice and love, and all the attributes are transparent into the
Holiness above the attributes, to be reproduced in the radi-