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The Dignity of Difference

links | March 02, 2003

Weeks ago, I started reading the fascinating book by Britain’s Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “The Dignity of Difference.” Here’s an excerpt of a phenomenal essay, sort of a synopsis of the book.

In the Bible you don’t have to be Jewish to be a man or woman of God. Melchizedek, Abraham’s contemporary, was not a member of the covenantal family, but the Bible calls him “a priest of God Most High.” Moses’; father–in–law, Jethro, a Midianite, gives Israel its first system of governance. And one of the most courageous heroines of the Exodus — the one who gives Moses his name and rescues him — is an Egyptian princess. We call her Batya or Bithiah, the Daughter of God.

Melchizedek, Jethro, and Pharaoh’s daughter are not part of the Abrahamic covenant, yet God is with them and they are with God. As the rabbis put it two thousand years ago, “The righteous of every faith, of every nation, have a share in the world to come.” Why, if God is the God of all humanity, is there not one faith, one truth, one way for all humanity?

My reading is this: that after the collapse of Babel, the first global project, God calls on one person, Abraham, one woman, Sarah, and says “Be different.” In fact, the word “holy” in the Hebrew Bible, kadosh, actually means “different, distinctive, set apart.” Why did God tell Abraham and Sarah to be different? To teach all of us the dignity of difference. That God is to be found in someone who is different from us. As the great rabbis observed some 1,800 years ago, when a human being makes many coins in the same mint, they all come out the same. God makes every human being in the same mint, in the same image, his own, and yet we all come out differently. The religious challenge is to find God’s image in someone who is not in our image, in someone whose color is different, whose culture is different, who speaks a different language, tells a different story, and worships God in a different way.

Source: FPRI Wire: The Dignity of Difference: Avoiding the Clash of Civilizations

Posted March 2, 2003 10:55 PM