If the heathen of the old story, who wished to learn the whole _Torah_ standing on one leg,[170] had come to me, I should have told him: “‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness’—that is the whole _Torah_, and the rest is commentary.” The essential characteristic of Judaism, which distinguishes it from other religions, is its absolute determination to make the religious and moral consciousness independent of any definite human form, and to attach it _immediately_ to an _abstract_ ideal which has “no likeness.” We cannot conceive Christianity without Jesus, or even Islam without Mohammed. Christianity made a god of Jesus, but that is not the important fact. Even if Jesus had remained the “son of man,” had been only a prophet, as Mohammed is to the Mussulmans, that would not have affected the thing that really matters—the attachment of the religious and moral consciousness to the figure of a particular man, who is regarded as the ideal of absolute perfection, and the goal of men’s vision; to believe in whom is an essential part of a religion inconceivable without him. Judaism, and Judaism alone, depends on no such human “likeness.” God is the only idea of absolute perfection, and He only must be kept always before the eye of man’s inner consciousness, in order that many may “cleave to his attributes.” The best of men is not free from shortcomings and sins, and cannot serve as an ideal for the religious sentiment, which strives after union with the source of perfection. Moses died in his sin, like any other man. He was simply God’s messenger, charged with the giving of His Law; his image was not worked into the very fabric of the religion, as an essential part of it. Thus the Jewish teachers of a later period found nothing to shock them in the words of one who said in all simplicity: “Ezra was worthy to be the bearer of the Law to Israel, had not Moses come before him” (_Sanhedrin_, 21_a_). Could it enter a Christian mind, let us say, to conceive the idea that Paul was worthy to be the bearer of the “message,” had not Jesus come before him? And it need scarcely be said that the individual figures of the other Prophets are not an essential part of the fabric of Judaism. Of the greatest of them—Hosea, Amos, Isaiah, and others—we do not even know who or what they were; their personalities have vanished like a shadow, and only their words have been preserved and handed down from generation to generation, because they were not _their_ words, but “the word of the Lord that came unto them.”