In the Bible, the
foundational verse that defines the relationship between God and humanity is
found in the Torah from last week; “Let us make humankind in our image (b’tzelem), after
our likeness (d’mot)” from Genesis 1:26. There is another
word similar to image and likeness that we
need to dismiss and that is shape (tay’ayr), as we read in Genesis
39:6, “Now Joseph was well shaped (tay’ayr) and handsome.” The
idea of image and likeness in Jewish
tradition is not physical (i.e. Gen. 36:9), so we call on the teaching of
Maimonides from his “Guide of the Perplexed.” Maimonides teaches
that “no other creature on earth possesses” the divine image, further
adding that people have the “intellectual perception, in the exercise of
which is employed via the senses, [something that is “similar” to the
likeness of the] Divine Intellect with which humans have been endowed.” All that to say that God fashioned humanity to be in the likeness of the Divine and humanity
has the free-will to inculcate the inner divine likeness into
how life is lived.
Turning to the late
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, z''l, he points to the failures in the lives of Adam and
Eve, Cain and Abel, and this week Noah, in connection to their own divine
image. In this case when Adam and Eve met God in the garden after they ate the
forbidden fruit, they failed in their personal responsibility; more
so for their denials (Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the snake) of what they
did wrong, resulting in the consequences of being removed from the
garden. When Cain was upset that his sacrifice was not accepted by
God and Abel’s was, Cain killed his brother Able and failed in his moral
responsibility since murder is not an emanation of the divine image
within. Can you only imagine how the course of humankind might be different if
Cain was happy for his brothers blessing and rejoiced with him (and we did that
with each other?). Instead, like his father and mother who were
banished from the garden Cain was banished to a foreign land forever apart from
his family and friends.
We see this with Noah as
well. In Noah’s case it was about collective responsibility,
something that he did not achieve and therefore failed in doing
so. When Abraham stood before God over Sodom and Gomorrah he bargained
for the lives in those cities, asking God to spare them from destruction even
if there were as little as only 10 righteous people, something that
Noah did not do. Noah failed because he only worried about his
immediate family given the ensuing flood as opposed to saving others who
perhaps did not deserve their fate. The Kabbalah address this
failure of Noah, not as failure, but as process to assume the image and likeness of God. You see
Abraham had ascended to a level of connection with the Divine that endowed him
with the importance of collective responsibility whereas Noah
had not reached that level of righteousness yet. One of my teachers,
Cantor Lee Greenberg, calls upon a teaching by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin who notes
that the rainbow here in parasha Noach is only half a circle, like half a
picture and requires another half to complete its image or story. In
this case while God promised not to destroy humanity as
evidenced with the sign of the rainbow, seen with the human eye, God did
not guarantee that humanity would not destroy itself, the part that we do not
see. Collective responsibility is a way to make that
circle whole, something that people do, not God.
While I would prefer
saying “divine character traits” as opposed to “responsibility,”
per Rabbi Sacks, looking at Noah I want pose the following question: how much better would our lives be, not to mention the world, if the
collective concern for the whole that is birthed out of our “divine
character traits” operated more than it does? You just cannot
escape the social, political and even religious discord that is all around us,
the anti-Semitism and senseless killings and hate, just to name a
few. Our systemic lack of concern for our “fellow” stands directly
opposed for Torah to the divine image within. You know it’s a hard pill to
swallow, but since we are fashioned according to the divine image, our “divine
character traits” can transcend the brokenness around us - if choose to do
so - each doing our part to help in what Rabbi Sacks calls the “collective
responsibility.” Let’s all strive to make this world a little
better today than it was yesterday.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Adam
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