Ma k'lal hatorah?

At the end of his book describing his conversion to Catholicism (see previous post), Karl Stern includes a letter to his brother, a leader in the Kibbutzim movement in the early days of the state of Israel. One remarkable passage in the letter always sticks with me, and I want to share it.

"People who do not believe in Revelation are irked by the idea of a God as represented in the Bible. They say that He is anthropomorphic. They want a philosophical God, if any. However, the specifically Jewish idea is not so much that God is anthropomorphic but that Man is theomorphic. There is an ancient discussion of the Rabbonim, I believe it is Talmudic, in which the question under consideration is: 'Ma k'lal hatorah?' ('What is the fundamental principle of the law?') One Rabbi says: 'Love thy neighbour as thyself,' but another counters: 'There is a more fundamental one -- He created Man in His image.' This means that Man in the original idea of creation is God-like. If that is true there must be in God something to which the idea of Man is analogous. The Christian idea is a little more specific, and calls the something in God of which Man is, in a mysterious fashion, an image, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. But she is only a little more specific about it than the Jews. Just meditate for a moment on that rabbinic discussion and you come quite logically to that explicitly Christian notion of God. The idea of the Incarnation is nothing alien grafted upon the tree of Jewish tradition. The Jewish spirit is profoundly incarnational."

"Man is theomorphic". I have never seen the idea expressed quite so simply and powerfully before. Of course, the same thing was said in a different way, by St. Irenaeus, I think, when he said, "God became man so that man could become God" or words to that effect. And there is also that passage in John's Gospel (10:34) where Jesus says: "Is it not written in your law: I said you are gods?" It gives me a certain amount of pleasure to think how close we really are in our beliefs to our Jewish brothers and sisters (whether most of them know it or not).