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"The Most Important Verse in the Bible"
THEME: Creation. Genesis. Beginnings. Three important words, and each very much like the other. And each of these words is firmly rooted in the theme of today’s message.

Once after service at our synagogue as I was greeting congregants, someone came up to me, and grasping my hand with great fervor said, “Rabbi, I think your message today was simply superfluous.” “Oh,” said I, “perhaps I should have it published posthumously.” “Oh yes,” said this person, “and the sooner the better!”

Anyone called to speak from this distinguished forum must feel a great sense of obligation to bring something of at least some weight and moment, and of current relevance.

It may surprise you then, that I should begin my message by referring to a discussion among a group of rabbis that took place about two thousand years ago, and over a question, to boot, which to those of us of a practical turn of mind might seem anything but relevant, or of moment; indeed, perhaps even superfluous. They were discussing the question: “What is the most important verse in the Bible?” by which of course they meant the Hebrew Bible, on which both Judaism and Christianity are founded, and on which Islam, going back to Abraham, bases itself as well.

But that discussion over “the most important verse in the Bible”, was not a mere afternoon or evening entertainment. The ancient rabbis were responsible for the civil and juridical life, the very future of the people as well as its religious and spiritual wellbeing, and had little time for trivia. Further, under the cruel Roman oppression, it was a time of upheaval and suffering. We can better grasp the moment and the weight of their question: “What is the most important verse?” if we understand that it was one of the ways in which they were trying for a people at the beginning of a long dispersion full of challenges and pain to sum up the essence of religion, the heart of religion, so that the people could take their faith with them in their mental hip pockets, as it were, in a simple, concentrated form.

Viewed in this light, of what essential verse might we, any one of us, make a choice?

One of the great teachers of that time (later to be martyred in a hideous way by the Romans simply for continuing to teach Judaism), Rabbi Akiba chose a verse to which many of you might have turned: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” “That,” said Akiba, “is the great principle of Torah,” the teaching. “The rest,” as someone else said, “is commentary.” A younger person, Rabbi Meir, chose the verse from the Prophet Micah, “It has already been told you of humankind what is good and what God does require of you, only to do justice and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” Another chose a verse perhaps for its brevity, “Seek ye me, and live!”

There appears, besides these, a choice by a certain Rabbi Ben-Azzai, which after all the other exalted statements, so quintessential to our shared spirituality, a verse which once seemed at least to me, so flat and downright disappointing that I wondered why it was even suggested or included in the record to begin with, a bland, an innocuous-appearing verse from the book of Genesis; in Hebrew brief enough, Zeh sefer tol dot Adam: “This is the book of the generations of Adam,” or “This book is about the story of the generations of humankind.” “The story of humanity” we might say. Notwithstanding that the verse goes on to say that humankind was created in the image of God, still I used to wonder: what kind of choice was that as compared to the others?

Only after much study and some thought and experience, I have come to understand the brilliance of that choice. And considering its relevance to our time of hopes and fears, the prophetic genius of that certain ancient rabbi, Ben Azzai, who chose it — and all I want to do is to tell you why.

First of all, he chose a verse that introduced an idea, at that time, truly revolutionary, and one still alas, as we see every day in the news, tragically far from fulfillment in our own times. He chose a verse that contained the idea of one humankind, one humanity, expressed in the word, Adam. Adam was not only the father of all of the generations equally, of humanity, the very word Adam means humankind. The word Adam implies that, in reality, in principle there is only one humanity, whatever the apparent divisions among us; this is the concept that is basic to all teachings of equity, of equality, the idea of one law for all, of everything humane. So many of the other ideas of the Bible which we might have chosen: “You shall love your neighbor,” “ ... do justice, love mercy,” are actually based on this idea. The Prophet Malachi caught it when he said: “Have we not all one father? Hath not one God created us all? Why do we deal treacherously, brother against brother?”

Until the emergence of the concept of one humanity, all peoples everywhere thought of not one humanity but of at least two categories of beings, firstly themselves, and then — the “others”. Each people thought of themselves as the true humans, the noble humans, the real humans and then there were the other. Another category of being altogether, lesser beings, inferior, almost another species, to be disdained and feared, fit for conquest, subject to enslavement, abuse, exploitation, even destruction. Among many examples that I could cite, both the word “Aryan” and the word “Hottentot” mean TRUE human beings, implying that every other so-called humans are something else, something lesser. The word “Barbarian” meaning savage, is the same as the Latin word meaning “people other than Romans”. All others, this implies, are barbarians, savages. Even into the time of the great civilizations, even into the time of our vaunted western civilization, even down to our own days, this idea of two types of human beings exists in the world.

One of my early heroes in college was Aristotle. But I began to doubt when I read that he considered slaves to be a different form of life than other human beings, as he puts it: “Slaves are animated tools”. Even into our own time during the period of western Anglo-Saxon exploitation of Africa and Asia by England, and Germany, and France, and Belgium, and by our own country, the plundering of the land and the riches of these peoples of these continents, the deliberate policy which prohibited their industrial development, using them as cheap labor, and as markets for western manufactured goods, all of this inequity, exploitation, oppression, was supported by the ideology that this was only natural; because those peoples, those savages, those barbarians, were inferior and needed the guidance of the superior white, western people who bore, as one poet of imperialism put it, “The white man’s burden” to bring the law to the lesser breeds. On one occasion in this country, we officially referred to Blacks in a pronouncement of the Supreme Court (in the case of Scott vs. Sanford) as an “inferior order of beings, who had no rights, other than that which government chose to give to them”.

All of this is in fundamental contradiction to this concept imbedded in the verse chosen by Ben-Azzai: “This book is about the generation of Adam, one Adam, one humankind.”

The great historian of religion, Houston Smith, in his marvelous book, a kind of classic, The Religions of Man, tells us that among all the races can be found a similar story of the creation of human beings by a creator — God taking soil, modeling it into a human form and cooking it until it was properly done. But the story is told differently by the different races. Among black people it is told that the creator God took soil from the earth, fashioned it into a human being and got ready to cook it, to make it finished, and whole, and right. But since this creator God was new at his work, anxious and insecure, this creator did what any inexperienced baker might do in similar circumstances. The God took it out too soon! Too anxious! And the first “try” came out all raw and undone, unfinished. This is the white race! When the God tried again it was a little better (a little more experience): the so-called yellow races! But still, somehow, not quite finished. But finally, with experience, the third time (the charm) humankind was done to a turn, perfect, right, complete, whole: the black race! But when peoples of the white race tell this story, it turns out just the opposite, first time overdone; second time, better; third time, just right (you might call it rare), and you can imagine how people of the yellow race tell the story. First time underdone; the second time overdone; the third time, just right.

Now the name Adam interestingly, comes from the word “Adama” which in Hebrew also means soil, earth. And the ancient rabbis, commenting on Ben-Azzai’s verse about the creation of Adam, say that God took soil from ALL the different lands of the earth, and mixed it all together to create ONE human being, the source of all humanity, so that no one could say rather, we are the REAL people, the TRUE people, the ONES who are really complete and whole and right. We are all descended, we are all the generations, of one Adam, the family of humankind. And this is meant also to apply to our spiritual capacities as well. The rabbis go on to say that when the divine word was revealed at Sinai, the basis of BIBLICAL revelation, God also gave revelations in the seventy languages of the world. This means that every people has heard the word of God in their own way.

When Paul, the apostle of Christianity, says in the New Testament, “In Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew, man nor woman, free man nor slave,” he was adapting to his new understanding of faith that was to become Christianity a teaching he heard from the rabbis with whom he studied in Jerusalem: “It does not matter whether one is a gentile, a Jew, a man or a woman, rich or poor, servant or master: according to the deeds that a person does, does the spirit of God rest upon him.”

“This is the gate of the Lord,” says the psalmist, “the righteous shall enter into it.” It does not say Jews shall enter into it; it does not say Christians, it does not say Moslems shall enter into it. It says the RIGHTEOUS shall enter into it. It does not even say “the churched”. It says the RIGHTEOUS.

Well, we should remember that the greatest tragedies of all the ages have come about because of the desecration of this principle, of one humankind, the book of the generations of Adam, including the holocaust of World War II, the destruction of six million Jews — men, women, innocent children — and millions upon millions of all nations or ideologies which refused to be tyrannized by the racist ideology of the Fascists. And Hitler’s plan to make of all other people than the so-called Aryans, to make of all the Slavic peoples, to make of the Poles, and Ukrainians, and Russians, and the Czechs, and the south Slavs — slave peoples — because according to the Nazis they were lesser beings.

And in the struggle today against apartheid in South Africa is the struggle for the fulfillment of the teaching of this ideal of one humankind. And we are part of that struggle, on one side or the other. We are involved in the struggle against such racism as that of Louis Farrakhan, which is such a menace, not only to the civil fabric of our society, of any decent society, but the black people most of all, who have suffered so much from his brand of racism, which cannot help but boomerang against their own interests. And it is no strange thing that Farrakhan has found common cause with those white racists who are wrapping themselves in the American flag and in the rhetoric of scripture while arming themselves to destroy blacks and to destroy Jews, and to destroy liberals, and to destroy the American Constitution, which in this respect of one commonality of human beings is based on the teaching: “This is the book of the generations of Adam.”

And the vast majority of the Jewish people too struggle against the hate-mongering and the anti-Arabism, anti-Islamism of a Meir Kahane who disgraces the very people and religion he so hideously misrepresents.

In our country we say, E PLURIBUS UNUM, “Out of the many, one”. We emphasize our commonality. But in that motto is one other idea also found in the verse chosen by Ben-Azzai: the value of the individual, the value of the plural. This too is in the Biblical verse, because God created ONE man (Adam), ONE woman, each singly. While God created everything else in multiples, God created the human single, ONE man, ONE woman, say the ancient rabbis in order to show the sanctity of each individual and each individual life, the importance of their individuality, created in the image of God, who is single, one, unique.

We do not want to do away with this pluralism of views, of beliefs, of color, and the texture of our various ethnic, religious, cultural groups. We welcome it. Even within the great religions, within Catholicism, within Protestantism, and within Judaism, we have learned not only to be tolerant, but gradually to value and to cherish pluralism.

When people mint coins said the rabbis, they all come out the same, but when God mints humans they all come out individually, and we should cherish that. Sometimes I say to children: “What is the measure of what is the most precious thing in the world?” The answer is very often: “If it is rare.” Then I say: “Then each of you is the most precious thing in the whole world, because there has never been, and there never will be, anyone like you. You are entirely different than any other human being that ever existed. And God must have had some special purpose in making you individual, different, and one of your religious tasks is to find out who you are, to be yourself, to fulfill yourself.”

That is the task of all, not in Tom Wolfe’s sense of the “me” generation from which we all suffer so much, but to find, as my own spirituality teaches, that call within us, that urge within us to fulfill our individuality, which is, at the same time, to bring what is unique in ourselves to the service of the community, of humankind, of God.

In this teaching, we Americans have to lead the way. At times we have not lived up to the ideal of one humanity or the ideal of individuality and pluralism. But they are basic to our principles. Not only have Americans never been divided into aristocrat and peasant, or bourgeois and proletarian, but we were constituted a people by solemnly dedicating ourselves to the proposition that all are created equal and that there is one justice for all. The rights that we have, rights for all, are based on the idea of one Adam, one humankind, created singly by God. We are not equally strong, intelligent, handsome, beautiful, not equally white or Anglo-Saxon, not equally Protestant or Christian, or religious even in the nominal sense, but equally human. And in the thought that inspired and guided the authors of the Declaration of Independence, Americans did not have to introduce, or invent, a sense of sanctity of the human person and the rights of man. We have only to reaffirm what we have been saying since our beginning as a people, that which was in the minds of the framers of the Constitution, the source of which is our shared scripture.

I end in the spirit of my message, in which I was trying to represent something for us all out of my own Judaic heritage. In that spirit I end, with the thought that at the heart of Judaic worship is what we call “the watchword of our faith,” another Biblical verse: “Hear oh Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is one.” We proclaim this during our worship. And yet at the very end of our service, in a prayer called “The Adoration” we say, “Some day God will be one, and God’s name will be one,” implying that God is not yet one somehow! When will God be “one”? “When all created in God’s image will recognize that they are brethren, so that one in spirit and one in fellowship, they may be united before thee. Then shall thy kingdom be established on earth. Then the word of thine ancient seer be fulfilled, then thou shalt be one and thy name shall be one.”

Fervently we pray that that day may come. Amen.    

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