IB World Religions 1.5.2. the Human Condition: the Image of God, Free Will and the Two Inclinations Notes

1.5.2. The Human Condition: The Image of God, Free Will and the Two Inclinations

Created in God's image

1. The Jewish account of the human condition begins with a claim about origin. Genesis states that God created humankind b'tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, male and female.
2. Jewish teachers do not read the image as physical likeness. They take it to name capacities that reflect God: reason, speech, moral judgement and the power to create.
3. Jews describe a person as body and soul together rather than as a soul trapped in a body. The neshamah (soul) is held to be given by God and returned to God, while the body is treated as good and its appetites as legitimate.
4. The claim is made about every human being and not about Jews alone. The Mishnah draws the inference that God began the race from one ancestor so that nobody could say my father was greater than yours.
5. The same passage grounds the worth of a single life. It teaches that whoever saves one life is counted as having saved an entire world.
6. Law follows from the claim. Pikuach nefesh, the duty to save a life, sets aside almost every other commandment, the laws of Shabbat included, because a person in danger outranks the ritual.
7. Being made in the image also carries a job. Genesis places the first humans in the garden to work it and keep it, and Jewish teachers read that as making people responsible for the world rather than merely resident in it.

Free will and responsibility

1. Jews hold that human beings are genuinely free to choose. Nothing in a person's make-up compels them towards good or evil, which is what makes it possible to command anything at all.
2. Deuteronomy puts the choice plainly. Life and death are set before the people, and they are told to choose life.
3. The rabbis held this together with God's knowledge without pretending the tension disappears. Rabbi Akiva taught that everything is foreseen, and freedom of choice is given.
4. Freedom brings accountability with it. Jews teach that God judges actions, that a person answers for what they do rather than for what they are, and that this is what makes judgement just.
5. Maimonides, the twelfth century philosopher and legal authority, called this a pillar of the Torah. On his account nobody is born virtuous or wicked, and a person becomes either by their own repeated acts.

The two inclinations

1. The rabbis describe that choice as a pull between two inclinations. The yetzer ha-tov is the inclination towards good, and the yetzer ha-ra is the inclination that turns a person towards appetite and self.
2. Yetzer ha-ra is usually translated as the evil inclination, but the rabbis do not treat it as evil in itself. It is the drive for food, sex, wealth and recognition, and it becomes destructive only when nothing restrains it.
3. Genesis Rabbah makes the point sharply. Without the yetzer ha-ra, it says, no one would build a house, marry, have children or do business.
4. Jewish teaching therefore aims at directing the drive rather than at destroying it. The rabbis read the command to love God with all your heart as meaning with both inclinations, the difficult one included.
5. The Talmud offers training rather than escape. God is quoted as saying I created the yetzer ha-ra and I created the Torah as its remedy, so study and observance are presented as what keeps the drive in proportion.

Sin and teshuvah

1. Jews call a wrong act chet, a word taken from archery that means missing the mark. The image treats sin as a shot that went wide rather than as a stain on the person's nature.
2. Because sin is an act, it can be repaired. Teshuvah means return, and names the process of turning back to God after wrongdoing.
3. Maimonides set out its steps: recognising the wrong, regretting it, stopping, confessing it to God and resolving not to repeat it. He held that teshuvah is complete only when a person meets the same temptation again and acts differently.
4. Wrongs against people are treated differently from wrongs against God. Jews hold that Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) does not atone for an offence against another person until the offender has put it right with them.
5. The cycle is built into the year. The month of Elul and the days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur are given to self-examination, apology and restitution.

Readings across the movements

1. The movements share the framework and differ over how literally to take its parts. All of them hold that humans are made in God's image and are free to choose.
2. Orthodox teaching keeps the classical picture. The inclinations are real forces inside a person, and the daily discipline of halakhah (Jewish law) is what trains them.
3. Reform Judaism stresses the image of God as the ground of human dignity and moral autonomy. It reads the struggle between the inclinations as a description of moral life, and many Reform Jews express the resulting duty as tikkun olam (repair of the world).
4. Hasidic teaching, above all in the Tanya of Shneur Zalman of Liadi, describes two souls in every person, an animal soul and a divine soul, and treats their conflict as the ordinary business of religious life.
5. Conservative and Reconstructionist teachers often present the inclinations in psychological terms, as drives to be integrated, while keeping the traditional demand that a person answers for what they do with them.
6. The practical conclusion is shared across the movements. Jews are not asked to escape the human condition but to act well inside it, which is why the tradition puts its weight on conduct.