Shabbat shalom.
So we begin again. As Phil likes to say – it’s déjà vu all over again. Bereshit. At the beginning. And before the first chapter is even over, God says something God did not say about anything else, not light, nor sea, nor stars. Na’aseh adam. Let us make a human.
Let us. The rabbis hear that plural and they ask: who is God talking to? In Bereshit Rabbah, Rabbi Shimon answers with a great story: at the moment the Holy One came to create the first human being, the angels divided into two camps. Some said: let’s create! Some said: let us not create!
Rabbi Shimon’s midrash hears the whole argument inside just one verse of Psalms: chesed ve-emet nifgashu, tzedek ve-shalom nashaku. Kindness and Truth met; Justice and Peace kissed. So here are the angels –
Kindness said: yes, let’s create humans, because they will do acts of kindness.
Truth said: no, let us not create them, because they are all lies.
Justice said: yes, let’s create them, because they will do what is just.
Peace said: no, let us not create them, because they are all quarrels.
So there is a tied vote in heaven. And what did God do? God took Truth and threw truth into the ground – and then created human beings.
Now, we should admit something. Truth was not wrong. Truth looked at us and saw exactly what we would do with our words, to each other, and to ourselves. Everything Truth said about us was true.
And we have never been very fond of Truth either. A Greek philosopher, Democritus, said that truth lies in the depths, at the bottom of a well, where nobody has to look at it. And the Maggid of Duvno told of Truth walking through town with nothing on. Every door closed. People crossed the street. Until Truth met Mashal, the Parable, dressed in beautiful colors and welcome in every house. And Parable said: “It isn’t you they are running from. It’s that you walk around with nothing on. Here, take my coat.” Since that day, said the Maggid, Truth travels dressed in a story, and people open the door.
The naked truth is hard to look at, whether it is about the world, about those we love, and especially about ourselves.
So we could read this midrash as a sad story. God wanted us more than God wanted truth, and so truth had to go. But that is not how the midrash ends.
The angels cry out: Master of the universe, how can You shame Your own seal? Let Truth rise from the earth! And the midrash answers with the very next verse of the psalm: emet me-eretz titzmach. Truth will sprout from the earth.
Titzmach. Sprout. I love that word because it implies that there is a garden. Nobody says that about something they just threw away. We say it about something that we planted.
There are two reasons to put something in the ground. We bury what is finished. And we plant what is only beginning. God did not bury Truth. God planted it.
And we know that God formed the human being out of dust from the earth – the text is explicit and says min haadamah. From the earth. From the same ground to where Truth was thrown, and from the same soil, the same humus, that gives us the name Adam and the word human.
So truth is not far away, at the bottom of a well. Truth is in what we are made of. In every one of us, under everything we have piled on top, there is truth in the ground, waiting to come up.
And then God breathes into that humus, into that soil, a soul, a neshamah. Where does the soul come from? The Torah told us in that same chapter that “a river goes out of Eden to water the garden”. The Zohar reads that river and says: kol nishmatin, all souls, come out of the river that flows from Eden.
All souls. Not just the souls of the righteous. Not just the souls of the people who agree with us. Not just the souls of Jews.
And the Zohar adds one more thing. When neshamah and ruach, soul and spirit, join together in a person, they shine with a higher light, and together they receive a new name: ner. A candle. Ner Adonai nishmat adam. The candle of God is the human soul. And the verse goes on: chofes kol chadrei vaten. Searching all the inner rooms.
Add to that that every morning our very first prayer is Elokai neshamah she-natata bi, tehorah hi. The soul You gave me is pure. Every person we will meet this week carries water from that same river.
So this is what a human being is. Primordial soil, with truth planted in it. Pure water, from a river that begins in Eden. And a lamp to search with.
That is why digging for what is true about us does not have to frighten us. If we believed that under the surface of a person there were only lies all the way down, nobody would ever dig. We would stay politely on the surface and call it peace. But the Torah tells us what is down there. Under the lies there is truth. And under the truth there is Eden.
So we dig the way a gardener digs. A gardener does not dig to expose. A gardener digs so that something can grow. Back to our the midrash, Kindness and Truth stood on opposite sides in heaven. But here on earth, they can meet. They can meet in us. A true word said with kindness is Truth wearing a coat, like in a parable, a story, an illustration: those come from the heart and enter in the heart.
And the midrash has one last line. Rav Huna says: while the angels were still arguing, God went ahead and created us. And then God turned to them and said: What are you arguing about? The human being is already made.
We are here in this world. Whether we should exist is no longer the question. The only question still open is the one the angels left behind: will Truth rise from the earth? And that one is ours to answer.
Tonight we lit the nerot, the Shabbat candles. Ner Adonai nishmat adam. Shabbat gives us one day when we do not have to produce, or perform, or pretend. Tonight we sang in Lecha Dodi: hitna’ari me-afar kumi. Shake off the dust and rise.
So this week, let us enable one small shoot. One true word, said with kindness. One true thing we finally admit to ourselves. One person who, when we look at them, we remember that we all come from the same river.
Emet me-eretz titzmach. May truth grow from this soil, from this existence, from this room, from each of us.
Shabbat shalom.
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Bereshit is the first parsha of the Torah. In the book it is about 5 chapters, with a few verses from chapter 6. A lot happens, and about 1500 years pass from the time we can count days and years as we do, using the sun and the moon. If you are counting the age of the universe from these verses, I want to remind us that Itzchak of Acco, a Kabbalist of the 14th century, said that back then that the universe is 15.3 billion years. Everyone thought that he was a little cuckoo. But who is laughing now? Just a reminder that we tend to think that these are stories for kids, which is not how the tradition sees it at all.
Morning:
We are in the second triennial. We read what is arguably the most consequential story for the relations between men and women. As usual, there are many ways to read this story – take it as a story for adults, not for children.
~ Look closely at the story, take your time: what gender seems to be the very first human, the one naming the animals?
~ What happens after the naming, and how do you understand this?
~ How do you understand the words between the woman and the snake? What is the voice of the narrator doing?
~ Finally, look at the exit from the garden. What is God angry at? What sits at the entrance of the garden, now?