The Last Word
Sharing Our Humanityspeech for the campus community.
by Phil Cohen '74
December 30, 2008
Phil Cohen '74My four years at Dickinson College helped prepare me for my career as a rabbi and scholar of Judaism. I learned the importance of arguing about and understanding great ideas and the value of working through issues of daily living amidst an authentic community of students, faculty and staff who genuinely cared about each other. At Dickinson, I also learned the value of embracing a tradition of my own. The lens through which I grew to perceive the rest of the world was the Jewish tradition refracted through the American experience—a construct that would not be possible in any other country.
The place that religion occupies in America is unique in the history of humankind. The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees freedom of religion (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”), is an astonishing document. It’s even more remarkable that, as a nation, we take this law seriously. Religion in America is truly free and protected by law—a fact that influences American society in innumerable ways.
American freedom of religion leads to a peculiarly American spirituality, which I celebrate. America allows me to embrace my own spiritual tradition, and it permits me to carry that tradition into the marketplace of ideas. In this country I converse and interact as a Jew with every other member of society. I teach and experience our common divinity, as, together, we wrestle with our shared humanity.
One of my favorite biblical passages occurs at the end of the first chapter of the book of Genesis. As the creation process concludes, God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” In this way we humans are created—with a bit of the divine buried somewhere in this shared human essence.
Though I am uninterested in the biology and physics of how God’s utterance led to people walking the face of this planet, I am deeply interested in what I view as the very profound dogma embedded in the concept that every human being is created in God’s image. I tell my students of all ages that this assertion connects us in a way that defies the very human impulse to turn the other into something less than human.
Not only are we all individuals who share in the human genome, but we are God’s creatures, sharing a divine nature. People ought not dehumanize each other. It simply is not part of God’s intention for us. When we observe acts of dehumanization, whether it be the genocide in Darfur or a racist joke slipped into casual conversation, we are morally obligated to remind victimizers that they are like their victims in their shared godliness.
Would that things were so simple that a mere reminder of our shared divinity could bring oppression to an immediate end. In truth, our radical equality is more an aspiration than a contemporary reality. But accepting that we are equal through and through can provide us the best tool to move humanity toward the realization that we are all fundamentally, divinely, the same. Would that we all understood the inner greatness of every man and woman and what we have in common.
For me, an essential stop along the way to this realization transpired during my four formative years in Carlisle, Pa. Surrounded by books, ideas and people who took them seriously, I grew immensely. The most important single idea I carried away with me from those years, however, is the essential connection of the intellectual life to the moral and spiritual life. The link between books and meaningful human relationships is the greatest gift a liberal-arts education can bestow upon its recipient.
Rabbi Phil Cohen ’74 teaches Jewish studies at the American Hebrew Academy in Greensboro, N.C. He holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Judaic studies from Brandeis University and rabbinic ordination from Hebrew Union College. If interested in subscribing to his periodic e-newsletter, please contact him at Pmchai@aol.com.