It is not a hardware problem that we’re facing
There were a lot of iterations of this dvar Torah before this one. I wrote out a whole idea, took a walk, and somewhere in the middle of that walk realized it did not work. I came home, hit control A, hit delete, and started over.
That is nowhere near as dramatic as what happens at the end of Parshas Bereishis — “Vayinachem Hashem ki asah es ha’adam ba’aretz (Hashem regretted having made man on the earth).”
The parsha opens with Hashem calling His world good, then very good, with Adam arriving as the climax, formed b’tzelem Elokim (in the image of G-d). And before the parsha even ends, Hashem seems to regret having made him.
Yet unlike my first draft, Hashem does not hit delete. Noach survives. Humanity continues. If the project had truly failed, why rebuild the world from the very species that caused the problem in the first place?
Maybe there are two kinds of things that go wrong. Hardware problems mean something fundamental is broken and the only answer is replacement. Fry the motherboard of your computer and there is not much left to repair. Software problems are different. The machine still has everything it needs, but something about how it is running has gone wrong.
Humanity did not have a hardware problem. Hashem had made man b’tzelem Elokim, and that had not changed. The problem was that man had forgotten what being b’tzelem Elokim was supposed to mean.
• • •
Look at how Creation unfolds. Six days of preparation — light, sky, sea, land, sun and moon, fish, birds, animals, and only then Adam.
The Gemara in Sanhedrin (38a) explains that Adam was created last so he would enter the world the way a guest enters a banquet only after everything has already been prepared for him. But there is a danger buried inside that honor. Adam never watches anything get made. He opens his eyes and the world is simply there, finished and running. Even Chavah appears while he sleeps.
The Midrash tells us that Adam looks among the animals and he cannot find a companion. The fact that Adam is looking among the animals for a companion tells us something about how he sees his relationship with them. Humanity enters a finished world surrounded by living creatures, and somewhere along the way begins to see itself as one more creature living inside it.
Hashem tells Adam otherwise. Fill the earth, subdue it, rule over the fish and the birds and the animals. You are not simply one more creature among them.
Yet look at what follows. Chavah sees that the tree is good for food, desirable to the eyes, and takes it. Kayin turns on his own brother. By the time we reach “vatimalei ha’aretz chamas, (the whole earth is filled with chamas),” which Rashi defines with one word, gezel, robbery. I see. I want. I take.
The Torah even describes the generation with the words “ki hishchis kol basar es darko (all flesh had corrupted its way),” and Rashi says even the animals had joined in.
• • •
Man was created in the image of G-d, but the line between human being and animal had blurred. Maybe that is what the Torah means when it says that G-d regretted making man on the land. The problem was not that Hashem had created man. The problem was what man had become ba’aretz, on the earth. Maybe the problem began with the very way man entered the world, created last, entering a world already filled with animals, and eventually coming to look at himself as one of them.
Which is why Hashem does not throw the project away. He changes how humanity relates to the world.
The Mabul almost undoes Creation itself, the dry land disappearing back beneath the water. But when the world begins again, something is different. The first time, Hashem built an entire world and placed Adam inside it. This time, Noach has to keep a world alive himself. For an entire year inside the teivah, he feeds every creature, cares for every creature, and keeps them alive with his own hands.
Adam woke up to a finished world. Noach had to learn what it meant to be responsible for one.
When Noach finally steps outside, Hashem changes the relationship. The Gemara in Sanhedrin (59b) discusses whether Adam himself had been permitted to eat meat, and according to the view that he was not, the children of Noach are now told plainly that they are. At that same moment, Hashem draws an absolute line around human life, “ki b’tzelem Elokim asah es ha’adam.” Animals may now be eaten, but a human being can never be treated as simply another animal.
And then something fascinating happens. Noach plants a vineyard and turns grapes into something nature never made on its own. Wine. Generations later, the builders of Bavel bake bricks out of dirt and try to raise a tower into the heavens. Man is no longer simply living inside nature. He is beginning to transform it. The failures do continue. Noach drinks too much. Bavel ends in disaster. But even the failures have changed shape. Before the Mabul, humanity sinks into animalistic desire and taking. After it, humanity builds. Sometimes disastrously, but it builds. They are no longer disappearing into the world Hashem made. They are trying to make something out of it.
Maybe that is why Hashem does not hit delete. The thing that made humanity worth creating was never destroyed. It was still there, waiting to be used properly. Being made b’tzelem Elokim was never only a description of what we are. It was always a bet on what we might still build.
Rabbi Benny Berlin is spiritual leader of BACH in Long Beach. www.bachlongbeach.com.
