This is the d’var Torah I delivered at Congregation Neveh Shalom on October 18, 2025.

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The opening chapters of Bereshit tell us that humanity is created b’tzelem Elohim—in the image of God. It’s a breathtaking statement of dignity and potential. Yet, almost immediately, we watch that potential unravel. From the first bite of the fruit to Cain’s jealousy of Abel, power is misused. The gift of being made in God’s image turns dangerous when we forget that to be like God does not mean to become God.

That tension—between creation and control, between dominion and humility—is as ancient as the Torah itself and as current as the world outside our synagogue doors.

In Bereshit, God creates a world of balance: light and dark, land and sea, rest and work. Humanity is placed in the Garden not to rule ruthlessly, but l’ovdah ul’shomrah—to serve and to protect. Yet, when Adam and Eve reach for the fruit, it is not curiosity that drives them, but the temptation of power: “You will be like God, knowing good and evil.” When Cain strikes Abel, it is again a grasping for control. From these earliest stories, Torah warns us what happens when we let power go unchecked.

Midrash Rabbah teaches: “If you corrupt the world, there is no one after you to repair it.” Power without responsibility destroys creation itself. The Torah’s first command to humanity is to name—to speak. Speech, not dominance, is our true creative act. God creates with words; we, too, are meant to build worlds through words of truth and compassion, not through control or fear.

Today, as people around the world lift their voices in the No Kings protests, that message echoes loudly. Without taking sides, we can recognize the sacred impulse behind it: a call to remember that no one—no ruler, no leader, no human—should hold unchecked power over another. The Torah’s vision of creation depends on equality, partnership, and shared responsibility.

To live b’tzelem Elohim means to wield our influence with humility—to speak truth, to protect the vulnerable, to guard creation itself. The first Shabbat in the Torah arrives when God stops creating and simply rests. Power, Torah teaches, is holy only when tempered by restraint.

May this Bereshit inspire us to build a world rooted not in control but in covenant—a world where every voice matters, and every act of creation is guided by compassion and care.

How often do you take the time to take a step back, zoom out, and just marvel at a moment in time? What about a project or event? When I officiate at a wedding I often ask the couple as they stand under the chuppah to turn around and look at the faces of everyone who has come to hold them in their celebration. I do this so that everyone in the space can be present and purposefully take in the joy and connection of this moment.

So often we all struggle to look beyond the myriad of trees to see the entire forest. We only see the minute details and forget to pause and take a beat to really live in those special moments. 

As we read Bereshit, the creation story, God’s reaction to each act of creation serves as a reminder to pause and marvel at moments. After each part of creation, the text teaches us that God “saw that it was good.” This action models presence and gratitude in a way we might not be accustomed to. 

And, there happens to be a blessing for it: 

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha’olam, hatov v’ha’meitiv.

Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Presider of the Universe, the one who is good and makes good. 

May we practice being present and sharing in these moments of goodness. 

In the wake of the horrific acts of terror this week, the unspeakable brutality against Israeli civilians, it’s hard to find adequate words to describe the overwhelming feeling of helplessness and powerlessness. For our sake, for our children’s sake, and for our community’s sake, it’s important that we find ways, even in dark times, to ground ourselves. If we’re to move forward at all, we must physically plant our feet on the ground, push them into the earth, and feel the earth pushing back. We cannot stand for what’s just and what’s right if we’re not first connected in some way to the ground beneath us.

I hope you’ve had a chance to reset, to notice your body and your breathing. This is something I’ve had to discover and relearn for myself. For so long, my balancing act was to go on a walk, to be in constant movement. I still consider this part of my self-care routine, but it’s the first step of being planted in my own body, feeling the pressure of the earth from my toes to my nose, that I was missing.

This practice, connecting to the earth, is one of the first mitzvot (commandments) that God gives to the people of Israel. This week we read Parshat Bereshit, the first portion of the Torah. We are wowed by the story of creation, specifically the time and care God put into creating each day, each being exactly as God wanted. We learn about the first people and their experience in the Garden of Eden: how they learned to build, grow, and be together. The Torah continues with the story of Cain and Abel, the first sibling rivalry gone terribly awry, and the very real consequences put into place after each of these events. At the very beginning of the Torah, we’re introduced to a concept that recurs throughout the text – God as the parent, creating life and making sure everything has its own place.

Adam, the first human placed in the Garden of Eden, is told what he can and cannot eat of the beautiful bounty, and in addition, the Torah also explains that his purpose there is to “till it and tend it.” Immediately, this suggests that if all of creation is connected through the acts that God took for creation, then humankind, in order to continue their connection to God, must also be a part of maintaining the land. In other words, God could have created a maintenance-free land, but then decided that in order to keep us grounded, we must fulfill the duties of caretakers of the earth.

I’m not suggesting that this type of labor is another post-Eden punishment. Did God want us to have to break our backs caring for the land? I don’t believe so. Instead, perhaps God wanted us to learn what it is to be connected to something from our “toes to our nose.” Perhaps being connected to the land gives us the opportunity to reset ourselves when needed, to literally dig in, and to recognize that we share this planet. May that be our hope for peace as we look to the days ahead.

For the past two years, I’ve taught a weekly Torah exploration class. While similar Parshat HaShavuah (weekly Torah study) classes will often focus on one or two central moments in the text, I chose for this series to be an overview, where we read the whole section and react and reflect on its entirety. One thing I have loved about this approach is it meant that I never knew what would come up from week to week, and every discussion encouraged me to question and view the text through multiple lenses. Truth be told, this has been my favorite hour each week. 

In particular, what has struck me is that each time we read the Torah anew, there are new questions, frustrations, and appreciations that present themselves. For example, in both years of the class the participants zeroed in on the beginning of the Torah as a model that was repeated throughout the rest of the text, yet also one that was no doubt told from a specific and biased perspective. What led us here? The beginning is a good place to start. 

This week we read Parshat Bereshit, the first portion of the Torah. We are wowed by the story of creation, including the time and care God put into creating each day and making it exactly as God wanted. We learn about the first people and their experience in the Garden of Eden, especially how they learned to build, grow, and be together. The Torah continues with the story of Cain and Abel and the first sibling rivalry gone terribly awry, and we get a taste of some very real consequences caused by human actions. Thus begins the idea of God as the parent, creating life and making sure everything has its own place.

In chapter 1, verses 27-28, the narrative provides details that feel both informative and at the same time part of a very specific agenda. “So God created Mankind in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’”

Hebrew, like many languages, is a gendered language that has long struggled with the non-binary, which makes it all the more interesting and alarming that creation was clearly binary and non-binary. Male and female are mentioned, but so is a version of they/them. We typically interpret “them” in the Torah as a plural binary pronoun, but what if God was addressing each human individual as they/them? What if Hebrew was non-gendered? What if the Torah had purposefully adopted this notion of non-binary and run with it? What if our tradition was not subsequently based on women being subservient or “help-meet” to men, but instead built on this duplicity of human nature to be both hunter and caregiver, explorer and rule follower? 

“What if” questions are a fascinating, but mostly fruitless endeavor to reimagine the past in a way that changes the shape of our present. But I can’t help being intrigued by a “what if” that asks us to imagine a world without binary, in any sense of the term. After all, we are created in God’s (nonbinary) image, and we should all be celebrated as the human beings we were intended and blessed by God and the angels to be. 

Like lots of children, I had an imaginary friend when I was young. In fact, I’ve written about this friend before. His name was Petey, and he was a ghost. This was before I had a sibling, so in those years as an only child, I could be a bit mischievous on occasion. I know, shocking, right? I have a vivid memory of messing with the clean, folded clothes in my dresser drawer and my parents asking me who did it. I answered innocently, “Petey did it.” How could they blame me, perfect little Eve, for the mess? It was the perfect story: this ghost who could not be seen by anyone but me was the ideal scapegoat. Eventually, Petey became the joke of the family when things would be misplaced or accidents would happen. “Just blame Petey.”

While this worked as a laughable family mantra, it’s not exactly a great lesson as we work to create a world of responsibility for actions and deeds. The real lesson is as old as time, and apparent in the Torah. This week we read Parshat Bereshit, the first portion of the Torah. We are wowed with the story of creation, especially the time and care God put into creating each day, each being exactly as God wanted. We learn about the first people and their experience in the Garden of Eden, including how they learned to build, grow, and be together. The Torah continues with the story of Cain and Abel, the first sibling rivalry gone terribly awry, and the very real consequences put into place after each of these events. At the very beginning of the Torah, we’re also introduced to God as the parent, creating life and making sure everything has its own place.

The first few verses of the Torah are focused on God as creator. However, as soon as there is more than one human being on the earth, the blame game begins. It takes only until the third chapter of the Torah before someone starts to look for someone else to blame for their own actions. In chapter 3 the snake goes “in for the kill” on Eve. The serpent convinces her to eat from the banned tree. She does, then Adam does, and the minute they do, God comes out again to find out what happened. Adam is quick to first blame Eve, then he blames God for creating Eve. Eve blames the serpent, and both humans are punished for this violation of trust.

However, this blame game doesn’t end there. A few chapters later Adam and Eve’s children have a fight. Cain kills Abel, and when God comes to ask where his brother is, Cain is quick to respond with “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Once again, refusing to admit guilt or take the blame.

Why does our Torah begin like this? Why is there blame right off the bat? It’s likely because admitting guilt and accepting blame is downright difficult. We don’t like being “in trouble” or feeling like we may have messed up. That’s human. The Torah also begins here because these early chapters are a cautionary tale about how our actions and deeds can influence the behavior of others. Imagine if Eve or Adam had admitted blame. Perhaps they would’ve then set an example for Cain to also own his behavior. If he knew he would be expected to own his actions, perhaps he would not have been so reactive.

In reality, my parents never really let me get away with blaming Petey the Ghost. Similarly, Adam, Eve, and Cain aren’t let off the hook for trying to assign blame elsewhere. As we contemplate new beginnings, let us be aware that our actions have consequences. The more we learn to take responsibility for those actions, the better those consequences become.