Saturday, July 27, 2019

Menachem Kellner on Judaism and the "Imitatio Dei"


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)