In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth… and the Earth was Chaos and Void. But God fixed all of that. God gave it form. God filled in the emptiness and brought order to the universe. God made light and plants and the animals of the land and the sea. And perhaps, for a brief moment, the chaos was controlled, and the darkness was relegated to its proper time… But then God made us.
We human beings, parts and partners in this grand design, sometimes bring back the chaos and the darkness that God sought to repair. And we do it with God’s own tools—words. When God engaged in the act of creating the universe, God spoke truth into being… and we do too. That’s part of another lesson we learn from this parsha—that we are all created b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s image.
But what does that mean? Do we physically look like God, a being that is famously formless and incomprehensible?
I think that this means we are uniquely powerful as creators. We, too, make life and produce brilliant works with our hands and our words. But it means that we can destroy, too. It means that we, like God, have the ability to make hard choices.
One of the hard choices we consistently have to make is how to use our power to create with words. On Kol Nidre, I spoke to the congregation about machshavot tovot and diburim tovim—good thoughts and good words. This week’s parsha is a masterclass for how we might use these thoughts and words to bring about goodness… and I hope that in this new cycle of Torah we will all hear this message loudly and clearly so that we may live fully as God’s partners in creation.
