Sermons & Stories

Shabbat Shalom!

Bereishit – the beginning of our Torah. It starts out so good! God’s speaking and creating and it’s all good and then God makes us and it’s very good. And then God creates things in a different way – forming Adam and putting him in a garden, forming animals and Eve. And then things start to go off the rails…

Adam and Eve are kicked out of the garden. Cain gets jealous and murders Abel. Lots of people are born and somehow divine beings are attracted to people and that leads to more trouble. By the end of the first Torah portion, we read in Genesis 6:5-6:

Adonai saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time.

וַיִּנָּ֣חֶם ה’ כִּֽי־עָשָׂ֥ה אֶת־הָֽאָדָ֖ם בָּאָ֑רֶץ וַיִּתְעַצֵּ֖ב אֶל־לִבּֽוֹ׃

And Adonai regretted that God had made man on earth, and God’s heart was saddened.

We know about Noah and the flood, but we don’t always think about why it was needed. God created us with a good and evil inclination, but people were evil all the time. God actually regretted creating us. This would be the part of the movie where the cute, but creepy child turns and points accusingly at the camera and says, “You made God cry,” and then the flood begins. Think about that… What must have been happening in the real world for those words to be written into our Torah? Such a regret is certainly not the theology of an all knowing, all powerful, perfect God.

And what do our rabbis do with this – of course they lean into it. In Genesis Rabbah (8:5), Rabbi Shimon teaches that when God was going to create humanity the angels started to argue. Love and Righteousness argued for the creation of people, saying that we would perform loving and righteous deeds. Truth and Peace argued against, saying humanity should not be created because we would bring lies and strife. While the angels are arguing, God goes ahead and creates people and informs the angels that it’s too late because the deed has been done.

This argument doesn’t get a resolution, but the argument doesn’t stop there. In the Talmud (Eruvin 13b) The Sages taught: For two and a half years, Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel disagreed. Beit Shammai argued that it would have been preferable if God had never created human beings. Beit Hillel argued that it’s better that we were created. The Talmud records over three hundred disputes between Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai and Hillel’s argument generally wins out. But not in this case. The sages voted and decided that it would have been better if God had never created human beings.  

It’s a shocking passage. Would you have voted with Beit Shammai or Beit Hillel? That’s rhetorical… Despite this vote, they know that it’s a hypothetical. Humanity does exists – so what should we do? Our Rabbis conclude this section stressing that we should examine and scrutinize our actions.

Thousands of years ago, Genesis expresses the idea that God regretted creating humanity. Many years later, our rabbis agree. In the ancient world, like today, they knew our capacity to do harm to each other and our world. But this is not the end of the story.

In the Torah, God allows Noah and family and animals to survive, learn, and start anew. In the Talmud, we are told to examine our actions. The point is that we can do better. Yes – we, human beings, are capable of horrible things. And we are also capable of improvement.

Despite the regret, our tradition envisions God who loves us, supports us, and can have a relationship with us and all people. Yes, we need to be aware of our capacity to do wrong, but Judaism focuses on our capacity to do better, to change, to do good for our community and our world. That’s why we don’t wallow in these texts or debates – we learn about them to remind us not to be a part of the problem. They inspire us to improve and that is what we are called to do.

Shabbat Shalom!