Mount Sinai was the culmination of a 400-year process that began when God selected our ancestor Abraham.
This revolutionary figure built a family that became a clan and ultimately developed into a nation. Our nation was enslaved in Egypt for two centuries and, through divine intervention, was liberated. Seven weeks later, God delivered His word in a singular moment of mass revelation. Mount Sinai eternally sealed the selection of our people.
However, Mount Sinai was not only the culmination of our national selection but also the beginning of a universal process extending beyond our people. We were not selected for privilege but to carry God’s presence and moral vision into a broader world. We were selected to model a life of covenant so that others might recognize the dignity of a life lived before God.
We yearn for the day when an entire world will live under the eye of God, in moral clarity and peace. Mount Sinai marked the beginning of that “long march of monotheism.”
The pagan world
Prior to Sinai, the world was immersed in darkness and confusion.
In a world of many gods, marriage held little sanctity. A religious universe crowded with competing deities naturally produced a human world of many wives and fractured loyalties.
Additionally, in a pagan world, moral accountability was fragile, as sinners could attempt to bribe one deity to escape the wrath of another.
Furthermore, the ancient world was violent and unforgiving, shaped in the image of gods who themselves appeared angry, jealous, and destructive.
Finally, pagan culture was deeply obsessed with death and death rituals in a manner that cheapened life rather than ennobling it.
Paganism, superstition, violence, and corruption formed a chaotic landscape. The day the Torah was delivered marked the beginning of a long process of reshaping that ancient world. Humanity slowly moved from a world perceived as random to a world governed by order and purpose, from magic and superstition to inquiry and science, from cruelty to compassion, and from a culture obsessed with death to a civilization committed to preserving and advancing life.
These transformations emerged from monotheism and from belief in one kind and moral God who fashioned an integrated world. Human beings, His greatest creation, were entrusted with the capacity to understand that world, develop it, and elevate it.
Monotheism was never intended to remain the private inheritance of a single nation. For this reason, our sages describe the Torah as having been offered to other nations before it was given to the Jewish people.
This does not mean that had other nations accepted God’s will, the Jewish people would not have received the Torah. Rather, it means that other nations could also have been exposed to divine will through another form of divine revelation. Had they accepted that opportunity, the spread of monotheism across the human landscape might have advanced more rapidly.
When the nations declined that invitation, the process was delayed but not canceled. The march of monotheism would continue through the Jews, even if the broader world was slower to embrace it.
It would take many hundreds of years, but eventually the ideas of monotheism would begin to stir humanity. None of the religious systems that eventually emerged were pure expressions of monotheism. Each retained elements of older religious traditions and carried remnants of the pagan world they sought to replace. Yet despite their imperfections, they still moved humanity beyond the paganism of the ancient world and closer to recognition of one God.
Around the time we left Jerusalem after the destruction of the Second Temple, Christianity emerged. It was not, and is not, pure monotheism, but it nevertheless represented a major advance in religious imagination. God was no longer seen merely as vengeful and unpredictable but as compassionate and morally demanding. Human beings were viewed not as playthings of warring gods but as God’s masterpiece creation, endowed with divine-like capacities, especially the power of reason, to better understand and improve the world around them.
About six centuries later, Islam emerged as a different blend of monotheism and spread across much of the world. Though it, too, was not a pure expression of monotheism, it further advanced humanity beyond the pagan imagination of the ancient world.
Taken together, these developments slowly transformed the religious consciousness of humanity. It took humanity nearly 2,000 years from Sinai to move from idol worship and the veneration of stone and metal images to an understanding that all existence emerges from one Creator. The transition was incomplete, but the religious map of humanity had been permanently transformed.
Neither of the [other two] major monotheistic religions represents complete monotheism. That stage will arrive only when God’s presence is revealed openly within human history. Nonetheless, both religions marked a major step beyond the pagan world of antiquity and helped draw humanity closer to recognition of one Creator.
Our views of Christianity and Islam have naturally been shaped, and often darkened, by the suffering inflicted on us by those religions and by the cultures surrounding them. The past millennium was saturated with Christian antisemitism, culminating in the darkest chapter of Jewish history – the Holocaust. The Holocaust was not directly driven by Christian doctrine, but it was undoubtedly enabled by centuries of hostility toward Jews embedded within European culture.
Muslim societies were, in many periods, more hospitable toward the Jewish people, but those relationships were also punctuated by episodes of forced conversion, persecution, humiliation, and expulsion.
Because these two religions and the civilizations shaped by them were responsible for so much suffering, Jewish attitudes toward them became deeply colored by historical memory and pain. After all we endured, it became difficult to recognize that despite their flaws and the terrible harm committed in their name, both religions nonetheless represented significant – though partial and incomplete – advances in humanity’s religious development.
Recognizing the historical role these religions played does not require theological acceptance of their beliefs. This broader historical perspective should shape the way we respond to other monotheistic religions even today.
Unfortunately, in recent weeks we have witnessed the desecration of Christian religious symbols by Israeli soldiers. These actions do not represent the majority of our soldiers, but it is still painful to witness such behavior even among a minority.
These acts are especially damaging at a moment when Israel is already absorbing heavy blows in the arena of international opinion and public perception.
However, these acts are deeply wrong, not merely because they damage Israel’s international standing. These religious symbols do not represent pure monotheism, and we recoil from any attempt to describe God in physical terms. However, the religion represented by these symbols helped move large parts of humanity toward belief in one God. We are not meant to honor these symbols or adopt these faiths, but desecrating them reflects a failure to appreciate the historical role these religions played in spreading monotheism throughout the world.
Finally, these acts of desecration undermine our mission of bringing God into this world. Part of that mission depends on the moral dignity of the Jewish people. We aspire to build a society that is respected and admired because the more the Jewish people embodies religious greatness, the more it can inspire humanity toward authentic monotheism.
We want the Jewish state not merely to survive but to model a society of moral and religious dignity. Acts such as these portray us as violent rather than tolerant, and deepen hostility toward our state. When the Jewish people is viewed with disgust rather than admiration, our ability to bring the knowledge of God to humanity is weakened.■
The writer, a rabbi at Yeshivat Har Etzion, was ordained by Yeshiva University. His latest book, Reclaiming Redemption, Vol. II: Faith, Identity, Peoplehood, and the Storms of War, is available at mtaraginbooks.com.