The Blogs: Bereshit: Beginning Again, Together

Last year, as we began a new cycle of Torah, the unspeakable was happening. In moments where we were celebrating the joyous, perpetuating Jewish life through our people and traditions, others were revelling in Jewish death. The year-long aftermath of that day has been filled with unbearable grief, fear, uncertainty, pain and a persistent pride in our people’s fight to exist. It has also brought a deep sense of unity across the Jewish world; all over Israel posters proclaim יחד ננצח, ‘together we will win’. But to stand united, we must know, on some level, our fellows. In the context of this war, we have come to know each other through our shared grief and disbelief at the course our collective lives have taken. We have come to know each other through names, through individual stories of tragedy and survival. As we begin the Torah again once more, we can see in the dual creation narratives of Bereshit how Torah gives us the tools through which we can truly know each other.

Academia has long been fascinated by the two creation narratives in Bereshit. Scholars since the 11^th Century have posited that the two different names for G-d used in these chapters – Elokim and HaShem Elokim – are evidence of different scribal authors. Scholars like Friedrich Schwally hold that the Torah as we know it is ‘the result of the literary fusion of two originally independent and even contradictory versions of the creation story’.[1] In academic thinking, several potential authors of Torah have emerged, including the Priestly and Deuteronomistic redactors, among others. But from a Jewish perspective, this approach doesn’t quite fit with the belief that the Torah is the word of G-d as written down by Moshe Rabbeinu. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik Z’L addresses this disparity in The Lonely Man of Faith (1965), stating that Jews have long been ‘aware of the theory suggested by Bible critics [which attributes] these two accounts to two different traditions and sources’.[2] He writes that Jewish thought ‘unreservedly accept[s] the unity and integrity of the Scriptures and their divine characters’, rejecting modern literary categories which ‘ignore completely the [vivid] content of the Biblical story’.[3] R’ Soloveitchik points out that the ‘sages of old [including Talmudic and rabbinic commentators] were aware of […] this incongruity’, promoting the Jewish idea that, rather than indicating differing authors of differing traditions, the two creation narratives in this week’s parasha in fact indicate two different views of the same story, two approaches and lenses through which to view the creation of humankind.[4]

R’ Soloveitchik’s answer to this puzzling duality is that the first two perakim of Bereshit present ‘two [different] Adams, two men, two fathers of mankind, two types, two representatives of humanity’.[5] In the first narrative (Gen. 1), Adam is created ‘בצלם א-לקים’, ‘in the image of G-d’ (Gen. 1:26), without much detail of his actual creation. Man and woman are created simultaneously, the verse using the words ‘זכר ונקבה’, ‘male and female’ (Gen 1:27) to indicate that two different beings have been created at the same time. Here, the Torah uses rather clinical terminology which refers to their sexes rather than their humanity; they are inseparable from each other because they are created in the same divine moment. They are given dominion over Earth and all that which is contained within, the Biblical Hebrew suffixes of הם and וּ (‘them’) suggesting that this power is given to both equally. They are created in G-d’s image in the sense that they, too, can create, and in R’ Soloveitchik’s thinking Adam’s objective is to ‘discover his identity’.[6] He is ‘aggressive, bold and victory-minded’ as he pursues the construction of ‘his own world [by] manipulating his own mathematical constructs and creations’ in order to fulfil G-d’s command of mastering that which has been given to him.[7] For R’ Soloveitchik, in this first chapter, Adam is functional, practical, a basic biological organism rather than a fully-fleshed out human being. He emerges whole with his ready-made partner; he does not have the experience of being alone in the world and therefore cannot experience the depth of knowledge which comes with experiencing another person.

Perek Bet directly contrasts this simultaneous creation, with Adam emerging ‘alone, with Eve appearing subsequently as his helpmate and complement’.[8] This second, solitary iteration of Adam is formed from the dust of the ground, moulded into shape as life is breathed into his body by G-d (Gen 2:7). The Torah uses the words נשמת חיים, ‘breath of life’, to describe this moment, this phraseology closely relating to the Hebrew word for the soul, נשמה. Unlike in the first narrative where he is merely functional, here Adam is given much more depth, becoming נפש חיה, a ‘living soul’. He asks the metaphysical questions of ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘who’, looking beyond the ‘how’ of how humanity has come to be to understand life’s deeper meanings.[9] He is relational, part of a ‘covenantal community’ in which G-d is ‘leader, teacher, and shepherd’.[10] This relationality is the first step to knowing another human being: if one recognises another person as more than their biology it brings forth the possibility of a relationship by wondering ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘who’ they are. For R’ Soloveitchik, this second Adam explores the ‘irresistibly fascinating qualitative world where he establishes an intimate relation with G-d’ as well as his fellow human beings, beginning with woman.[11]

Curiously, there are a few verses discussing vegetation between man’s creation and placement in Gan Eden and the recognition that man is lonely without a partner. It can be inferred that during these verses Adam can function at the beginning purely practically, but soon he becomes more aware that he is isolated, G-d eventually pronouncing that ‘it is not good for man to be alone’ (Gen 2:18). Adam searches for his partner through the existing animals through the intimate process of naming each one, assigning character and identity to each being. Yet at the end of this process, he remains alone. It is only then that G-d creates woman, fashioning her from Adam’s side (Gen. 2:21-22), a response to what R’ Soloveitchik terms man’s ‘existential loneliness [and need for] covenant and connection’ and relationships.[12] Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Z’L’s explores this understanding of Bereshit’s duality in I Believe (2023), which focuses instead on the duality of relationships. He writes that whilst the first creation ‘involves no effort on the part of G-d [since he] simply speaks, […] in the second He is actively engaged’, something which reflects the beginning of man’s relationship with G-d.[13]

Before He creates woman, R’ Sacks writes that ‘G-d feels the existential isolation of the first man [by] entering the human mind’ and relationally experiencing man’s loneliness.[14] He subsequently creates a being with which man can have a relationship on the material plane. The Torah refers to these creations as ‘איש’ and ‘אשה’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’, the linguistic similarities drawing attention to the shared connection of these two iterations of humanity. Like in the first perek’s narrative, however, man and woman are presented as categories, with woman appearing dependent since she is taken from man and created later. This separation is contradicted by the text itself, however; Adam’s words that woman is הפעם עצם מעצמי ובשר מבשרי, ‘bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh’ show a deep internal connection between them despite being created separately. It is only once Adam gives woman a name in the third perek, after their encounter with the snake and the Tree of Knowledge, that she is fully recognised as a whole human being, an individual with the name חוה (Gen. 3:20). R’ Sacks writes that it is this moment in the parasha where Adam recognises ‘for the first time that she is different from him and that she can do something he will never do’ and bring life into the world.[15] Her naming can be viewed as the final part of humanity’s creation, the moment she truly becomes an individual. Her actions have proven her human fallibility, yet Adam loves his partner enough to recognise her creation as an individual separate from himself. Because he has created a relationship with her, he is able to see her in her all her complexity, the grey between the ‘good’ of having a partner and the ‘bad’ of her disobedience of G-d’s word. Adam and Chava prove the value of pursuing knowledge of another person through a meaningful relationship. In a moving end to his analysis of Bereshit, R’ Sacks reflects this idea, writing that ‘we have to create relationships before we encounter the G-d of relationship’, imploring his readers to ‘never think of people as types: they are individuals’ and to ‘never be content with creating systems: care for relationships’.[16]

Instead of wondering about the potential of individual scribes behind the two creation narratives, both R’ Soloveitchik and R’ Sacks’s works explore the parasha as a singular, divine unit which centres on human inter-relationality. It is in the development of humanity in the first three chapters of Bereshit that we can see a blueprint by which to know another human being. In a beautiful parallel to the layers of the creation story – biological, typological and individual – there are layers to knowing another person. First, you meet them as a member of your species; then you know them as a category of a person, before meeting them for who they are, an individual with depth and soul. It is no wonder, then, that the parasha’s second chapter ends by discussing the relationship of marriage, sometimes considered the most intimate relationship of all. Rather than presenting a potentially divisive disconnect between two possible authors and traditions, in Judaism Bereshit’s two creation narratives conceivably teach us how to view people through different lenses and different layers of knowing; it recognises that people are whole, with many experiences and facets. As the many members of the Jewish people experience some of the most difficult and painful moments in our history, it is vital, now more than ever, that we come to know one another’s individualities and stories. It is in this knowing that we can be truly united and begin again, together.

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[1] Julian Morgenstern, ‘The Sources of the Creation Story – Genesis 1:1-2:4’ in The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, Vol.36, No.3 (1920), pp.169-212, pg.170

[2] Joseph B. Soloveitchik, ‘The Lonely Man of Faith’ in Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought, Vol.7 No.2 (1965), pp.5-67, pg.10

[3] Soloveitchik, ‘The Lonely Man of Faith’, pg.10

[4] Soloveitchik, ‘The Lonely Man of Faith’, pg.10

[5] Soloveitchik, ‘The Lonely Man of Faith’, pg.10

[6] Soloveitchik, ‘The Lonely Man of Faith’, pg.13

[7] Soloveitchik, ‘The Lonely Man of Faith’, pg.15

[8] Soloveitchik, ‘The Lonely Man of Faith’, pg.11

[9] Soloveitchik, ‘The Lonely Man of Faith’, pg.16

[10] Soloveitchik, ‘The Lonely Man of Faith’, pg.28

[11] Soloveitchik, ‘The Lonely Man of Faith’, pg.17

[12] Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, I Believe, (2023), pg.3

[13] Sacks, I Believe, pg.5