c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ The successful cloning of a lamb in Scotland has produced cries of alarm from many religious and political leaders who fear a cloned human may soon be in the offing.

It’s always the same whenever there is a scientific breakthrough that challenges old assumptions and beliefs. President Clinton solemnly warns”we are playing God,”and clergy express devout hopes that over-zealous scientists will”hold back”and not create a human being.

But these totally predictable reactions completely miss the point and avoid facing a fundamental lesson of history: Whatever can be created _ for good or evil _ will be created.

Human cloning, a bewildering new reality in our already complex lives, will happen. As my daughters like to say when encountering perplexing matters:”Deal with it!” Nor are spiritual and temporal leaders alone in their sure-to-fail strategy of denial. Comedians nervously amuse us with jokes about cloning in a futile attempt to escape the fact that humans will be created without benefit of sexually involved parents.

Doomsday prophets warn that”multiple Hitlers”are on the not-so-distant horizon. And class conscious ethicists foresee”selfish upper-middle-class parents”seeking perfect children by cloning the best genetic material money can buy. And futurists (remember them?) tell us we are on the”brink”of a brave new world. As if we hadn’t already noticed.

Clearly, I am in the minority because I realistically accept the inevitability of human cloning. And my feelings are not linked to the promised medical benefits of cloning. Nor are they based on the poignant hope expressed by a listener on a recent radio call-in show in which I participated:”Cloning will allow the Jewish people to replace the 6 million murdered Holocaust victims.”Would that it were so!

If we believe God is the creator of the universe, then all works of creation, however achieved, stem from God _ the wheel, dynamite, atomic bombs, gas chambers, antibiotics, heart by-pass surgery, organ transplants, love, hate, mercy, justice, greed, and, yes, cloned humans.

We cannot credit God with only the good and the easy. God also created the evil and the difficult. Everything, including cloning, is part of God’s creation.

The argument about the problems of creation is hardly new. Over 2,000 years ago, rabbis intensely debated whether God should or should not have created humans. Some rabbis vigorously argued that because the righteous and the wicked would both inhabit the Earth, God should not have created the world. Without creation, there would be no wickedness; certainly an effective, if bleak, way to achieve ethical purity.

Other rabbis, however, argued that without creation, righteous people would not be able to perform the acts of justice and mercy commanded by God. The rabbis further asserted that God does not desire a world without people. Indeed, they believed the creation of a single life is equal to the creation of the entire universe, and the destruction of even one life is akin to the destruction of that same universe.

Righteous men and women are requirements to satisfy the high ethical purpose of God’s universe. While there would be neither evil nor injustice without creation, there would also be a total absence of goodness and righteousness. Fortunately, God favored the second rabbinic position, and there was the divine act of creation _ including human beings _ that is so magnificently described in the Book of Genesis.

But how men and women will use or abuse their lives and the lives of others does not stem from God. That is truly our personal role in creation. The answer to that eternal question lies within each one of us and not within the starry heavens nor in a hi-tech genetics laboratory.

Of course, human cloning will be an extraordinarily difficult challenge. Clones will force us to ponder the ultimate meaning of life and existence in dramatic new ways.

While clones may carry our identical genes, they will have to develop their own unique values, collect their own set of memories, and establish their own individual relationships with other human beings and with God.

When clones arrive in our midst, as they surely will, we will need to always remember that they are but another expression of God’s wondrous creation. And clones will face precisely the same profound ethical choices that have constantly confronted the human family.

And, hey, maybe clones will do better than we have up to now.

MJP END RUDIN