Bereisheet: Caught Between Dust and Spirit

Welcome to 5775! The new Jewish year has begun, we're still over 3,700 years ahead of the secular calendar (they are NEVER gonna catch up...), and our annual cycle of Torah readings has started over yet again. And so, we return to the 

creation of the world. I like to reiterate, every year, that the Creation story in the Torah is NOT meant to compete with Darwinism or science. I think that is a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of this story in Genesis. I firmly believe it is a poetic rendition of the origin of human beings - with special emphasis on our rights and responsibilities on this earth - and is in NO WAY trying to compete with Big Bangs or the evolution of the species.

And if you agree with me about the real purpose of the Torah's description of Creation, then you actually witness, in the very first MOMENT of God forming Adam, our rights and responsibilities 

laid out before us in the text. Nothing that God makes is created from something ELSE. God says "Let there be light," and POOF! Light. God decides to make great sea monsters; they appear. Ex nihilo - creating something out of nothing. That is, until God fashions the first human being in Genesis, 2:7. The text informs us, surprisingly, that God: "formed man from the dust of the earth. God blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being." All of a sudden, God CHOOSES to produce a being, a human, out of something else. And it IS a choice, because we know God has no trouble creating anything and everything out of thin air (or less). So what does this teach us?

It can be, for us, a source of great pride or great humility. The Biblical scholar Nahum Sarna declares that: "solely in the case of man is the material from which he is made explicitly mentioned, [which] implies emphasis upon a unique position for man among created things and a special relationship with God." 

We have the Breath of Life, God's spirit, exhaled into us, unlike all other animals, which makes us really, really special. And yet, we are also formed of dust, NOT simply by Divine Word like the rest of creation, so perhaps we're not so impressive after all. The medieval commentator Rashi says: "The human being is a combination of the earthly and the Divine," which is why our bodies are buried in the ground, returning to their source, and our spirits return to God. However you want to view us, it is clear that the Torah purposely separates us out from all other creatures. Ours is a special and complicated relationship with God, and our task on this earth requires some serious contemplation.

I would also like to add that our being formed FROM the earth gives us some responsibility towards it. Back in Genesis 1:28, God said that human beings were meant to "fill the earth and master it." The word for "master it" in Hebrew is "kiv-shu-ha." For most of human history, people understood that word to mean "do with it as you please," and 

we certainly did just that. And yet, in recent decades we've learned that our actions had (and have) lasting repercussions, not just for the land itself, but for us, living on it, as well! Perhaps we should have understood kiv-shu-ha to mean "stewardship" or "guardianship" instead? After all, we were created from this very earth, we are a part of it, and our fate is intertwined with its survival. The Divine Spirit breathed into us undoubtedly makes us unique. But it does not only give us special rights; it demands of us certain responsibilities as well. For we were also formed from the dust of this planet. The name "Adam," comes from the Hebrew word for "earth," "Adamah." We are literally OF this earth. The Torah may not be competing with science, but its lessons should surely bring us closer to a partnership WITH science, to do everything we can to be better stewards of our world. That, to me, is what God had in mind when we were created. It's time to take that message to heart.

Photos in this blog post:
1. CC image courtesy of VectorOpenStock on Wikimedia Commons
2. CC image courtesy of Chixoy on Wikimedia Commons
3. CC image courtesy of Afrank99 on Wikimedia Commons
4. CC image courtesy of Nanoworld on Wikimedia Commons