Sublime

Hence the significance of one remarkable feature of Judaism: its principled insistence – like no other civilisation before – on the dignity and integrity of the individual. We believe that every human being is in the image and likeness of God. The sages said that every life is like an entire universe (Mishna Sanhedrin 4:4). The Rambam says that

Somehow, Hildegard managed to balance equal dignity with meaningful difference, in a way I’d not yet encountered. I wish I’d followed that thread; perhaps it would have pulled me into the Christian cosmos earlier. Instead, I let it go and lost myself in the labyrinth of postmodern feminism for the next ten years.

Equality of personhood does not rule out differences in role. For moderns, the tension between these two truths (equality of personhood and differences in role) is nearly unbearable. For instance, the basic point of Rebecca Merrill Groothuis’s book Good News for Women is that one cannot logically posit both equality of personhood and differences in

parental constancy is, in a sense, the paradigmatic instance of human faithfulness and commitment. In all genuine relationships meant to endure over time, faithfulness constitutes the essential baseline.

But the passion comes from the beliefs not the facts. Facts always have to be interpreted, especially if they are the consequence of complicated human interventions stretching over many years.

Partiality to loved ones is justified because it is an essential ingredient in one of the highest of human goods.”

True belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.

The Hebrews surely had as strong a consciousness of themselves as a group as any other ancient people. Their striking collective history and their belief in a privileged knowledge of God would have made this inevitable. But the implied genealogies that structure the primordial tales in Genesis preclude the idea that differences between groups could