Commenting on
the imitatio Dei in Judaism, Menachem
Kellner (at the time of writing, a lecturer in the Department of Jewish History
and Thought in the University of Haifa) wrote:
Since human beings are created in the image
of God, it is obvious that one achieve the highest possible level of perfection
or self-realization by becoming as similar to God as humanly possible. This is
the basis for what may be the single most important ethical doctrine of the
Hebrew Bible, that of imitatio Dei,
the imitation of God . . . the biblical doctrine of imitatio Dei finds expression in verses such as the following: ‘Ye
shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy’ (Lev. 19:2); ‘And now, Israel,
what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to fear the Lord the God, to
walk in all His ways, and to love Him, and to serve the Lord thy God with all
thy heart and with all thy soul’ (Deut. 10:12); and ‘The Lord will establish
thee for a holy people unto Himself, as He hath sworn unto thee; if thou shalt
keep the commandments of the Lord thy God, and walk in His ways’ (Deut. 28:9).
For our purposes here, these verses involve two explicit commandments to be
holy, because God is holy, and to walk in the ways of God. How does one make
oneself holy and thus God-like? The Bible couldn’t be clearer. Leviticus 19:2
is parents, charity, justice, honesty, kindness to the disadvantaged, etc.),
ritual (Sabbath observance, sacrifices, etc.), and theological (not taking the
name of the Lord in vain). One achieves holiness, that is, by obeying God’s
commandments, or, in the words quoted above from Deuteronomy, by walking in his
ways.
It should come as no surprise that when
Judaism, which so clearly emphasizes the practical over the metaphysical,
introduces a doctrine which seems so clearly to beg for a metaphysical
interpretation, it immediately insists on interpreting it in practical terms.
The imitation of God, that is, is not a metaphysical issue in Judaism but a
practical, moral one. Jews are not commanded (and it must not be forgotten that
the imitation of God, as the verses adduced above clearly show, is a commandment of the Torah and was no
construed by most later authorities) literally and actually to transcend their
normal selves and become in some sense like
God: rather, they are commanded to act in certain ways. It is through the achievement
of practical, moral perfection, that Jews imitate God and thus fulfil their
destiny as individuals created in the image of God. (Menachem Kellner,
"Jewish Ethics" in Peter Singer, ed. A Companion to Ethics [Blackwell Companions to Philosophy; Malden,
Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1991, 1993], 82-90, here, pp. 84-85, italics in
original)