A Tidbit of Torah – B’reysheet 5786

And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”.
Breysheet / Genesis 1:26

This is one of the more enigmatic passages in the incredibly terse presentation of the story of Creation prompting many commentators to ask why God speak in the first-person plural. The Torah, and thus Judaism’s, absolute rejection of multiple gods coexisting with God or a multivalent godhead leaves us wondering to whom the one undivided and indivisible God is speaking.

Rav Saadia Gaon suggests this is a Hebrew form of the “imperial we,” asserting that Hebrew permits a great individual to use plural language. Saadia’s answer is unsatisfying as throughout the Torah and in the rest of the creation narrative here, God speaks in the first person singular.

Rashi opines that God was speaking to the angels, consulting with the angels to preclude their being jealous of human beings.

A group of sages in Midrash Rabbah assert that God was speaking to the Torah, which existed before creation and was used by God as the blueprint for creating the world. Other sages in the midrash offer the idea that God was speaking to the animals, a reflection of their teaching that human beings were created with some attributes of the animals and some attributes of the angels.

While each of these is an interesting attempt at resolving our linguistic oddity, perhaps the most intriguing suggestion presented is that when God says, “Let us make man,” the Holy One was speaking to us, the nascent creation. Existing in tandem with the rabbinic teaching that just as God created the world unfinished to provide human beings with a role to play, every human being is also unfinished.

We learn from the outset that each of us is a work in progress, growing and evolving – intellectually, morally, and spiritually, year by year. Reading these words of Torah again each year, “Let us make man” is a reminder to each of us, no matter how long we live, we never lose the ability to grow. None of us is ever finished.  None of us will ever attain perfection but with divine help and the Torah’s guidance, we remain in a lifelong task of making a human being.

Shabbat Shalom –

Rabbi David M. Eligberg