Are we God’s favorites?

Given all the different kinds of animals that creep, crawl, climb, and stampede upon our Planet Earth – that thrive and survive within our rivers, lakes, and seas – that soar and dance within our spacious skies, has God singled out us human beings to be His Chosen Animal?? The author of Psalm 8 has presumed to answer this question with a resounding YES: “God has made us human beings a little lower than the angels; You have crowned us with honor and glory. You have given us dominion over the works of Your hands; You have put everything at our feet.” (verses 6-7)

In his Oct. 9, 2025, article in The New York Review of Books, “Such Flexible Intensity of Life,” Verlyn Klinkenborg suggests an unlikely animal, not human and not even a mammal, as an appropriate subject for the Psalmist’s praise: the octopus.

In his review of five different books about octopuses, the author begins with “some comparative anatomy: you and I have bones. An octopus doesn’t. It has three hearts…Instead of gills we have lungs, and our lone heart pumps iron-based red blood. Bony skulls protect our large, unified brains. An octopus’s brain is distributed throughout its soft amorphous body: nine brain-like nerve clusters, one at the base of each arm and another in its head.” (actually, a mantle)

So, from an octopus’ point of view, what makes us humans so peculiar? We do not and cannot live in water without an external source of oxygen, whereas an octopus can only “breathe” in water. Moreover, while our bony skeletons make it extremely difficult for us to change our bodily shape, the boneless octopus is the ultimate shape shifter. In addition, that same boneless octopus seems to be able to change color as easily as it changes shape. A master of camouflage…now you see it, now you don’t.

Nevertheless, despite our extreme differences in external appearance and internal physiology, we are bound to the octopus by the fact that both of us are animals of high intelligence, though our intelligences are of profoundly different types. Nevertheless, both human intelligence and octopus intelligence share a core of curiosity.

Throughout his essay Klinkenborg continues to struggle to find the precise words to describe the human’s relationship to an octopus; should a person happen to come across one in the wild, “an octopus doesn’t just look at you. It considers you…you meet a gaze with surprising depth. To encounter an octopus is to be implicated in a question about being that engulfs you both.” As absurd as it might seem, to encounter an octopus is, for some individuals, a religious experience.

Of the five books about octopuses that Klinkenborg reviews in his article, three of them are written by the same author, Peter Godfrey-Smith, to whom Klinkenborg refers in the following paragraph: “We infer that octopuses are intelligent because they display ‘an anarchic bodily embrace of novelty’ (curiosity), writes Godfrey-Smith. ‘They’re behaviorally ‘open.’ In other words, ‘an octopus can readily manipulate objects that no octopus has ever manipulated before.’”

A final fact about the life of an octopus: it’s very short – just a year or two for most species. It doesn’t help their survival that our world’s human population annually eats more than 350,000 tons of octopus. The octopus has so very little time to develop its native intelligence, while we Americans, according to recently released data, on average have almost 80 years to cultivate our native intelligence.

The last paragraph of Klinkenborg’s essay includes these words: “It’s worth remembering that the intelligence that we recognize in an octopus is not the kind we possess. To overlook or minimize the differences is to miss how strange life really is…(octopuses) unsettle ourselves.”

A thought experiment: “Hamlet,” (Act I, Scene II). Here I have changed just two words from Hamlet’s comments to his fellow university student friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: “What a piece of work is an octopus, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express, how admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god – the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!”

Question: Why should God prefer Homo sapiens to the gentle octopus, who never even “thinks” of marching off to war?

JAMES B. ROSENBERG is a rabbi emeritus at Temple Habonim is Barrington. Contact him at rabbiemeritus@templehabonim.org.