There is perhaps no verse more centrally cited in all of Torah than a verse that shows up in its very first chapter. וַיִּבְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים ׀ אֶת־הָֽאָדָם֙ בְּצַלְמ֔וֹ בְּצֶ֥לֶם אֱלֹהִ֖ים בָּרָ֣א אֹת֑וֹ And God created humankind in the divine image, creating it — creating us — in the image of God. This verse reverberates throughout our teachings, and one rabbinic sage even says that it is the great principle in all of the Torah.
Most commonly, the way the text is cited is to underscore the sheer preciousness of human life. When we encounter another human being, we are encountering someone with nothing less inside them than the imprint of God, and to that end, we cherish human life above all else. To use a traditional example, all of the restrictions normally associated with Shabbat — no writing, no phone calls, no driving — are suspended on Shabbat if doing so has even a chance of contributing to saving a life — so sacred is our understanding of human life as created in the image of God.
Another way this text is cited is to observe that, while the Torah is a Jewish text, centering on the story and journeys of the Jewish people, the Torah starts more fundamentally than that: it starts with the beginning of the creation of the universe flowing quickly into the creation of all of humanity. We all descend from Adam and Eve, those first two humans, these teachings say, who were created in the image of God. This is a narrative that underscores for us that we all come from the same source, and no people is supreme over another. Those are two of the main features for which this verse is often cited.
But there is another feature implicit in the teaching that God created us in God’s own image that has always resonated for me and that I continue to mull over year after year, week after week, day after day. If we are created in God’s image, does that mean: all of us, the whole of us, everything about us? Does that mean our capacity for mistakes and for harm, our instincts toward the base and the self-serving? How about the torment we feel? The pain, the disappointment, the regret? Are we, in our entirety, created in the image of God, or are some parts of us not?
As Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi articulates it, without question, we are. “We are each creations and manifestations of godliness,” he writes. “We are each a wave in the ocean and a world unto ourselves. The infinite potential for creativity and love in the universe manifests in each of us and through each of us, as it does in and through each and every human being.”
Or, to share the language we say each morning in our liturgy, אֱלֹהַי נְשָׁמָה שֶׁנָּתַֽתָּ בִּי טְהוֹרָה הִיא — my God, the soul you have placed within me is pure. אַתָּה בְרָאתָהּ — You created it, You formed it, You breathed it into me וְאַתָּה מְשַׁמְּ֒רָהּ בְּקִרְבִּי and You guard it while it is within me. וְאַתָּה עָתִיד One day You will take it from me, and restore it in me in the time to come. But so long as the soul is within me, the liturgy says, I will give thanks to You.
So we hold firm to a Jewish belief that teaches us of our fundamental godliness and holiness.
And yet, it’s hard not to notice those other parts of ourselves: the voices that tell us we should feel guilty or ashamed, that we’ve missed the mark or come up short yet again.
The theological question that essentially flows from this is, what gives? How could it be that we are created in God’s image and yet have such capacity for shortcomings, such capacity for feeling pangs of hurt and regret and shame? What does that say about us, and, theologically speaking, what does it say about God? Does that mean that if we feel shame, God feels shame? If we feel regret, God feels regret? Does God feel wracked with a sense of failure if we feel wracked with a sense of failure?
On at least one level, the answer to this question is yes. Another of the most memorable verses in all of Torah is as follows: וַיַּ֗רְא וְהִנֵּ֤ה הַסְּנֶה֙ בֹּעֵ֣ר בָּאֵ֔שׁ וְהַסְּנֶ֖ה אֵינֶ֥נּוּ אֻכָּֽל׃ An angel of God appeared to Moses in a blazing fire out of a bush. Moses gazed, and there was a bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed.
Why is this relevant? From the bush, Rabbi Yannai teaches, “The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Moses: ‘Don’t you sense that I am suffering just as Israel is suffering? Notice the place from which I am speaking with you: from the thorns.’” And sure enough, Moses sees that the bush is filled with thorns. “I am experiencing the people’s suffering,” God is saying. “Just as it is with twins,” God continues, “if the head of one hurts, the other feels it.” “In all their trouble,” it says in the Book of Isaiah, “God was troubled” (Isaiah 63:9).
Jewish tradition imagines, effectively, an invisible string connecting us to God; our aches are God’s aches, our longings God’s longings, our yearnings God’s yearnings.
On one level, this is an invitation to feel comfort. It means that God, too, feels these aches and pains in our souls. God is present with us in our regrets, in our pangs of distress. We’re invited to feel this sense of accompaniment. We are not alone.
And yet, that is a slightly different question than “Does God experience God’s own regrets, God’s own consternation, God’s own shame?” Here, too, Jewish tradition answers in the affirmative.
In the midrash from Rabbi Eliezer, Pirkei Derabbi Eliezer, we learn more about the sacrificial offerings like those we read about in our Torah portion today, that were a means of bringing about atonement, repair for harms we’ve caused. Our ancient way of saying, we can’t go back in time, but we can signal the harm we’ve done, and the bridge we want to rebuild, a bridge that is indeed rebuilt through the offering.
One verse referencing these atonement offerings says the following: וּשְׂעִ֨יר עִזִּ֥ים אֶחָ֛ד לְחַטָּ֖את לַיהֹוָ֑ה And there shall be one goat לְחַטָּ֖את לַיהֹוָ֑ה as a sin offering לַיהֹוָ֑ה. The typical translation here is a sin offering la-Adonai, to God, a sin offering to God. But in Pirkei Derabbi Eliezer, we are reminded that the preposition lamed/la also means for, as in “on behalf of.” A sin offering on behalf of God.
Most sin offerings are brought from us to God to atone to God; this one is brought on behalf of God, to atone for God.
For what purpose? In our experience of the world today, its brokenness, we can imagine a lot of things that God might be taking accountability for. The midrash goes in perhaps an unexpected direction, at least at first glance, in articulating the following: “For what purpose was the sin offering?” the rabbis ask. When the Holy One created the world, we know, God created the sun and the moon. What the midrash teaches is that God created the sun and the moon initially to be the same size. In Bereshit, Genesis, chapter 1, it says, וַיַּ֣עַשׂ אֱלֹהִ֔ים אֶת־שְׁנֵ֥י הַמְּאֹרֹ֖ת הַגְּדֹלִ֑ים God made the two great lights. No suggestion about differences in size. But the moon complained. “Master of the Universe,” the moon said. “Is it possible for two kings to wear the same size crown?” So, the Holy One answered the moon what we might expect: “Go, then, and make yourself smaller.” Thus at the end of that same verse from Genesis, it says “וַיַּ֣עַשׂ אֱלֹהִ֔ים God made the two great lights, the greater light, the sun, to dominate the day and the lesser light, the moon, to dominate the night.”
The moon responded, “Master of the Universe, since I said a correct observation before You, must I diminish myself?” God said to her: All right. As compensation, go and rule both during the night and during the day, along with the sun. You will sometimes be able to be seen by day, too. The moon said to God, “What greatness is there in shining alongside the sun? What use is a candle in the middle of the day?” God responded to her: Very well, in addition, the Jewish people shall count the days and years with you; the moon will be a central part of their calendar, and this will be your greatness. But, she said to God, “The Jewish people will count with the sun as well; the Jewish calendar is tied to both the moon and the sun.”
The moon was despondent, and God saw that no matter what God did, God could not comfort her. So the Holy One, Blessed be He, said, as written in the Torah, “make a hatat ladonai — bring atonement for me — since I diminished the moon.”
On one level you might say, of all the things for God to regret — hunger, war, suffering, pain — the sin offering brought on behalf of God is for God’s diminishment of the moon? But in Jewish tradition, the moon represents the people of Israel, and the people of Israel represent all of humanity. This midrash may be the rabbis’ way of teaching that God, as we remember each time we experience a Rosh Hodesh — a new moon — God is making atonement to humanity too, for all the shortcomings humanity experiences, all the deficiency, all the hurt, that God produced in creating the world.
So here, God, too, experiences regret and seeks the opportunity to make repairs.
So we are created in God’s image. The capacity for regret is woven into creation since its inception: in our Creator, and in us.
Perhaps, in fact, it may be that this experience of creation, of life — this capacity for choice, and regret — is not a bug but a feature of existence: the cracks, as Leonard Cohen teaches, through which the light gets in.
On Erev Rosh Hashanah, we talked about the midrash that creation was brought about when God said, “Let there be light.” But because that light was so strong, God placed the light into vessels, which then shattered, and creation was brought about through that shattered combination of vessel and light, vessel and light.
But we didn’t talk about the nature of existence before that. Before that, the midrash teaches: God’s light had filled all of existence. There was no created world; there was no vacant place, no empty space or void. Everything was filled with the light of the Divine. Divine sameness in perpetuity, the infinite.
To create the world, the mystics teach, God had to contract some of God’s Self, to diminish part of God’s Self, to withdraw, in order to make space for creation.
After God withdrew, that’s when God sent forth that light encased in vessels, which shattered and brought about the universe, and then, the tradition teaches, it was time to create… us. In God’s image. And the Torah writes as follows: וַיִּ֩יצֶר֩ יְהֹוָ֨ה אֱלֹהִ֜ים אֶת־הָֽאָדָ֗ם עָפָר֙ מִן־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה The ETERNAL God formed a human from the dust of the earth. Now the word “formed” here, וַיִּ֩יצֶר֩, is written mysteriously: it contains a double-yud — two letter yuds — when one would have been sufficient. “Why?” the rabbis of the Talmud ask. Because, one rabbi says, the Holy One created in each of us two yetzarim, two inclinations, two instincts: one, the yetzerhatov, the instinct toward goodness, and two, the yetzer hara, the instinct toward badness. This is a feature of humanity from our inception.
And yet, the tradition teaches, the “instinct toward badness” is probably too simplistic of a construct. Instead, the rabbis teach that there is something about this alternative yetzer, this alternative inclination, that is not without merit. It, too, comes from God; there must be something redeeming about it. And they teach that, without it, in fact, we might not be able to endure in the world as we need to. It is something about this alternative instinct that, without it, the midrash teaches, human beings would never build a house, would never engage in commerce, would never get married, would never bring children into the world. The midrash cites the book of Kohelet, Ecclesiastes, traditionally attributed to King Solomon, which says כּל־עָמָ֗ל all labor and skillful enterprise come from people’s — and here they add a different flavor to what this alternative instinct is — קִנְאַת־אִ֖ישׁ rivalry with one another — rivalry, not exactly an unadulterated good, certainly not without its significant problems, but not without some important effects. God had to withdraw to make space for the world; humans have a complicated makeup to keep the world going.
Still, they say, there is no doubt that this spirit can be dangerous, can be corrosive. There is no doubt that this spirit needs to be channeled, not allowed to unilaterally govern. In the same way, the rabbis note that the creation of humanity involves two yuds for our two inclinations, a different important word in Torah has another double letter as a corollary: וְאָ֣הַבְתָּ֔ אֵ֖ת יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֑יךָ בְּכל־לְבָבְךָ֥ You shall love the ETERNAL your God with all your heart. The word לְבָבְךָ֥ “your heart” has two bets. “Why?” the rabbis ask. So that both of those inclinations, the inclination toward goodness and the inclination — whether you want to call it evil, or toward rivalry — that both inclinations are directed toward a love of God, toward a love of the Holy One.
Now, easier said than done. If you’re anything like me, your competitive fire can easily take on a life of its own, can take the driver’s seat. And yet, we are created in the image of God, and God provides a roadmap for how to navigate two instincts that are counterpoints to one another. Just as we experience conflict, God experiences conflict. God, a midrash teaches, works to move when necessary from God’s throne of judgment to God’s throne of mercy. God, a midrash teaches, prays that God’s own attribute of mercy overcomes God’s own attribute of anger. So, in the image of God, we, too, are called upon to engage these two instincts of ours in a sacred struggle, to not let the one, the rivalrous inclination, eclipse the instinct for goodness.
What does that look like? The rabbis prescribe the following:
One should always יַרְגִּיז agitate his inclination for goodness toward his inclination for rivalry. If your instinct toward rivalry is engaged, make sure to wake up your instinct toward goodness. If in doing so, the good instinct is able to win out, mutav — all the better — they say, you’re in good shape. If not, if the rivalrous instinct eclipses the good instinct, they continue, there are a couple of tactics you can deploy. Step one, they say, ya’asok batorah. Immerse yourselves in the words of Torah. Do the kind of engagement with sacred teachings we’re doing here today. Immerse yourselves in the sacred texts, the sacred stories, the sacred wisdom of your people, and your good instinct should be able to prevail, they say. If not, they say, if you blow past your instinct for goodness, they say, יִקְרָא קְרִיאַת שְׁמַע, call out the Sh’ma: remind yourself to listen for God’s oneness reverberating in your soul. This should lead to you making the choices you want to make, the choices you’d be proud of. If still no, if you are still struggling to have the goodness in you win out, they say, there is one final move you can make: and it’s where we began our Torah reading, aharei mot. After the death. יִזְכּוֹר לוֹ יוֹם הַמִּיתָה A person should yizkor lo, remind themselves of their yom hamitah, the day of their death. When we are struggling to do the right thing in a given moment — the goodness within us clashing with our competitive instincts — we picture the end of this life, our last day, and we say, “How do we want to have lived?”
That’s a practice we are supposed to undertake when we come to crucible moments in our lives.
People often say to me that they imagine that the hardest part of my job is accompanying people during moments of death, of loss.
And don’t get me wrong: witnessing that pain, being present in that pain, can be incredibly challenging — nothing like what they are going through, of course, but it can be incredibly difficult.
But it is also a regular curriculum about what is truly important in life. Hearing people reflect about what their loved ones cherished, the contributions they made to the world, about what they valued, helps me learn about what is important in life.
And yet we also know that no person who lives a full life made, exclusively, choices that they were proud of. We all have regrets.
Three of the most difficult words to say as a rabbi are as follows: Barukh Dayan Ha’emet. Those three words mean “blessed is the true judge,” and the reason they are so difficult to say is not what you are saying, but when you say them.
According to tradition, we say those words upon hearing the news of a death. It doesn’t matter if it’s the death of a 99-year-old, or the death of a one-week-old; a death where all their loved ones gathered to say goodbye, or a death where someone was snatched from this life without a moment’s notice. According to Jewish tradition, upon hearing the news of a death, we say, Barukh Dayan Ha’emet, blessed is the true judge.
I imagine you can gather why these words are so difficult for me to say — not even necessarily because I struggle with the theology of it, though I’ll address that in a moment. But because in a moment where all someone needs is compassion, the expression of our gratitude for the truth of God’s justice seems to miss the mark.
Still, having wrestled with those words for years now, I’ve begun to arrive at a different understanding of them. Our bristling at those words arises in part because we associate God’s judgment with negativity, with punishment, with a critical assessment of our rights and wrongs. But what right and wrong could a one-week-old have engendered? And if we are created in Your image, God, what does it mean for You to be our Judge?
So I have come to understand Barukh Dayan Ha’emet as not exclusively being about God’s strict justice, but as an expression of true compassion. God knows. God knows and understands all the pain we’ve experienced, all the heartache, all the regret. God knows because God experiences it. God knows the destiny of this life and beyond. When I say Barukh Dayan Ha’emet, I am saying, blessed are you, God, for knowing all of the features that make up this world, both ha’olam hazeh, this world, and ha’olam haba, the world to come; for knowing all of the features of the human beings who comprise these worlds — our gifts and our shortcomings, our temptations and our yearnings; You know us because we are in Your image. And so when we say, Barukh Dayan Ha’emet, blessed is the judge of truth, we know that your judgment, however mysterious it can appear to be, takes into account all of those features which you have planted within us, in your image.
Rabbi Aryeh Ben David writes, “In fifth-grade Sunday school, they taught me that God was omniscient. That was a pretty big word for a ten-year-old. I had no idea what they meant. But now it comes back to me. God knows. God already knows. And precisely because God already knows, I can cry out. There is no embarrassment — God already knows. There is no shame — God already knows.”
So when I reflect on what it means, how to reconcile the notion that I am created in the image of God with my similarly deep capacity for failure, I have begun to reflect on God’s capacity to understand each and every turn of the heart I make. God already understands. God knows.
May you each feel truly and fully known this year, and may you be sealed for good in the Book of Life.
