GEN722 [One of the features of the ethic of Torah that makes it transformative and uniquely sustainable over time …] is the principle set out in the Noahide covenant-the covenant God made with Noah after the Flood, and through him with all of humanity: [this verse]. Life is sacred. We are each in God’s image, His only image since making images is otherwise absolutely forbidden. Therefore murder is more than the crime. It is an act of sacrilege, a dishonouring of God Himself.  In general, the Torah is the protest against the use of violence to attain human ends. The human drama can be summed up as follows: God is free. God creates order. God gives man freedom. Man then creates chaos. Hence the question to which the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, and Judaism as a whole, are directed: can freedom and order coexist? The answer is the moral life as the Torah envisages it. The alternative to morality is violence. Violence is the attempt to satisfy my desires at the cost of yours. I want X; you have X; you stand in the way of my having X; therefore if I am to have what I desire, I must force you to relinquish X.  Violence is the imposition, by force, of my will on the world. Thus is born the rule of might. As the Athenians said to the Melians, “You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Thucydides,“The Melian Dialogue,” 5.84-116. Or as Thrasymachus says in Plato’s Republic, justice is whatever serves the interests of the stronger party. This is what Nietzsche saw as the fundamental principle of human existence: the will to power. Judaism is a sustained protest against this way of life. Even God Himself, creator of the universe, rules by right, not might. That is the meaning of the story of the Exodus and why it is central to the Torah. The supreme power intervenes in history to liberate the supremely powerless. The reason God sent plagues against Egypt, the most powerful empire of the ancient world, was to show Egypt that those who rule by power are defeated by power.  The reason God chose a tiny and otherwise inconsequential nation to be the bearers of His covenant was, at least in part, to show the power of the powerless when they have right, not might, on their side.  The alternative to power is law: law freely accepted and freely obeyed. Only by observing the rule of law -- law that applies equally to the rich and poor, the powerful and powerless -- do we escape the tragic cycle of freedom that begets conflict that leads to chaos, resulting in the use of force that generates tyranny, the freedom of the few and the enslavement of the many. God reveals Himself in the form of law, because law is the constitution of liberty.  SACKS xxiv-v