d his destiny; and only in association with the community and
under the guidance of the highest ideal of humanity can he attain true
perfection. Only mankind as a whole, in its cooeperation, as it extends
over the vast expanse of the earth, and in its succession which reaches
through the centuries of the world's history, can bring to full
development the divine image in man, his moral and religious nature with
all its varied potentialities. It is man collectively who in the first
chapter of Genesis receives the command to subject the earth with all its
creatures to his cultural purposes.(985) In whatever stage of culture we
meet man, his modes of thought and speech, his customs and moral views,
even his spiritual faculties are the result of a long historic process of
development, the product of an extremely complicated past, as well as the
basis of a future which expands in all directions. The ancients expressed
this in their suggestive way, remarking in connection with the verse of
the Psalm, "Thine eyes did see mine unformed substance, and in Thy book
they were all written,"(986) that at the creation of the first man God
recorded the succession of races with their sages, seers and leaders until
the end of time.(987) And when the Haggadists say that in creating man God
took dust from every part of the world, so that he would be everywhere at
home,(988) again they were thinking of mankind. Similarly in the passage
from the Psalms, "Thou hast hemmed me in behind and before," they explain
that God made the first man with two faces, one looking forward and the
other backward, that is, with a Janus head; and thus they regard man in
his relation to the past and the future, in his historic continuity.(989)
As both physically and spiritually he is the heir of innumerable ancestors
who have transmitted to him with their blood all their idiosyncrasies and
capacities in a peculiar combination, so will he transmit both consciously
and unconsciously the inherited possessions of mankind to future
generations for continued growth or for degeneration. He forms but a link
in the great chain of history, whose goal is the perfected ideal of
humanity, the completed idea of man. This was the underlying thought of
Ben Azzai in his dispute with R. Akiba, who held that the principal maxim
of Jewish teaching is "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." In
opposition to this Ben Azzai presented as the most important lesson of the
Bible the verse