Torturing the Image of God

The UN Convention Against Torture states that torture should be abolished because it violates "human dignity." From your perspective, what is wrong with torture? Should perpetrators be prosecuted? What does your faith tradition have to say about torture?

One of the central teachings of Torah is that all human beings are made in the Image of God. That teaching and what flows from it are at the heart of Jewish prohibitions on the use of torture.

Indeed, the Rabbis - living under the Roman Empire - enrich that teaching as a direct challenge to the power of Rome, the Imperial fount of torture. One of them asks, "What does this mean, 'In God's image?'" And another answers, "When Caesar puts his image on a coin, all the coins come out identical. When that One who is beyond all rulers puts the divine image on a 'coin,' all the coins come out unique."

Torture tries to destroy the Image of God and replace it with Caesar's image on the human soul and body. In the experience of the Rabbis, it was Imperial Rome that used torture.

To this very day, the liturgy for Yom Kippur, when more Jews are in the synagogue than at any other time, and in a more deeply devotional and covenantal place than at any other time, includes the graphic and horrific descriptions of Rome's torturing to death ten of the greatest rabbis of that or any age.

I think this understanding of the Image of God casts a profound light on the story in three of the Christian Gospels in which two troublemakers come up to Jesus and ask him a question: "Should we pay taxes with this coin?"

They evidently hoped to trap him into violating either Jewish or Roman law. For the coin had on it an image of Caesar, marked "Caesar, imperator, divus: Emperor, God." If Jesus said to use the coin, he might be violating the Jewish law against idolatry. If he said not to, he would surely be violating Roman law. So, Jesus, in a totally Jewish fashion, answers the question with a question. He asks "Whose image is on the coin?" They respond, more or less -- "Caesar's, dummy, that's the point."

So Jesus says, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's," and Christians have been arguing about what that means for 2,000 years.

But now take into account the Rabbinic teaching that Caesar puts his rigid uniformity upon his coins, whereas the Infinite God puts uniqueness into God's coins: every human being. Surely Jesus, the radical rabbi from the Galilee, knew this teaching. So I believe there is a missing line in the Gospel story -- either Jesus didn't need to say it, or it was censored out because it was so radical: "Whose image is on that coin?" he said, and they answered: "Caesar's."

And then I think he said, "And whose image is on this coin?" putting his hand on the shoulders of the troublemakers. Only then did he say, "So give to Caesar what is Caesar's -- and give to God what is God's!"

And just as Jewish tradition insists that on Yom Kippur the community relive the torture of ten rabbis by Rome, so Christianity insists that on Good Friday the community relive the torture of Jesus by Rome.

That is what empires do: they torture, as did the U.S. in the Philippines a century ago, and as in Iraq and Afghanistan today. No empire can survive without resorting to torture against those who refuse to bow to its power -- by act or even by omission or even by sheer accident of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Those who get in the way of its demand that human beings abandon their uniqueness and bow to uniformity, as Caesar presses his own image onto every human body, drowning the Image of God in a flood of agony.

So what does this teach us about America today? That we have a choice more basic than whether we close Guantanamo or - as is now being done by the Obama Administration -- we double the size of Bagram, a similar prison in Afghanistan.

The choice is whether America is to celebrate the Infinite God or the tyrannical Caesar. To affirm the Image of God in every human being, or to fall at the feet of Empire. Torture is both a grave sin and a major crime. Refusing to "look back" at the use of torture in the past, refusing to try as criminals those who committed the crime, failing to excommunicate those who committed the sin, means refusing to heal the future.

It would be the same as ripping the crucifixion out of Good Friday or the torture of the ten rabbis out of Yom Kippur. After all, it merely happened long ago. Under a long-gone Empire. What is the point of remembering?

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The accomplishment of ANY desired end - no matter how laudable - is NEVER justified when the means employed to accomplish that end are questionable at best. I am a christian and I am sickened to learn, according to a recent Pew Research Poll, that there are many American christians who apparently deem the use of torture appropriate in some instances. It is the torturer who loses his/her own soul and it is an indictment of any society that supports its use as an instrument of public policy. This president has got it exactly right: the use of torture has a corrosive effect on the soul of a nation. Democracy is frequently a messy and inconvenient enterprise. But Lincoln was exactly right, for all time and forever, when he said: " Let us strive to learn that it is right that makes for might." God help us all, if we succumb to the temptation to take some convenient "short cuts" in the search for the "evil doers" and attempts to bring them before the bar of justice. For in the doing, we will have become just like them! The moral high ground is the only viable position for us to take as a nation, seeing as how we have been crowing about our own exceptionalism for a very long time.

Posted by: lewaml | May 1, 2009 11:56 AM
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R. Waskow

On a somewhat different note, I think it would be useful if, in a future, essay, you posted about the "ten rabbis," the Tannaim, etc.

Many Christians are unaware of what Judaism was up to during the period in which Christ lived, know nothing of Judaism, in fact, equate it with the "OT," that is, with their reading of said "OT."

One sees the same sort of thing in introductory textbooks on world religions. I know. I did a survey of them these texts a few years ago.

It is, at times, almost impossible to get through to some on this blog that Judaism is inherently interpretive, a very different religion from Christianity, not creedal, etc.

Some are actually very interested, happily!

Posted by: Farnaz1Mansouri1 | April 30, 2009 11:01 PM
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"Yes, well, of course. What Jew would have created an "image" of God? How could an image of God appear on a coin? Or appear anywhere for that matter?"

Well, that gets kind of circular, doesn't it? If man is the image of God, but the image of a man is therefore notan image of God, what standards of reproduction are we talking about here? :) (teasing) :)

Posted by: Paganplace | April 29, 2009 7:30 PM
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Yes, well, of course. What Jew would have created an "image" of God? How could an image of God appear on a coin? Or appear anywhere for that matter?

However, I can't imagine Jewish ethics accepting rendering that which is not do Caesar unto him. The concern for material life, justice (economic justice), etc....

Posted by: Farnaz1Mansouri1 | April 29, 2009 7:15 PM
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That's an interesting one, Rabbi, though maybe you're laying it on a little thick making cookie-cutter villains out of 'Rome,' (Not to say I approve of empires, but torture was pretty routine in a lot of places, including in the Hebrew society of the time... I seem to remember a tale about people throwing rocks... not a rock, rocks, at a woman for some taboo violation.)

Certainly, the image of Jesus didn't stop the torture in Rome, or even the Coliseum, ...it went on for a *long* time both in Rome and in later Europe and even touched base here in the 'Colonies.'

It's certainly about the *difference* between a Republic and an Empire, as we know these things... and a word of warning for all, particularly since we just *happen* to live in a Republic that just *barely* has stepped back from an 'Imperial Presidency' ...while still dealing with the notions that the Senate and House are either corrupt or ineffective and rife with complications of patronage.

The thing about torture and other expressions of absolutism is that they are based in *fear,* ...and people giving up too much of what *makes* us free and civilized and even pious in our many ways.

Looking for easy, and ever-more-forceful, if ever-more, actually, impotent answers, to what are essentially problems of a) Humanity and b) Management.

Whether that's packaged in the name of a 'God-king' or a 'King-God' ...no one's exempt from the fact we're all still working on this civilization thing. :)

Posted by: Paganplace | April 29, 2009 3:22 PM
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Arthur Waskow

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Torturing the Image of God

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