With this week’s parasha, B’reishit, we get to begin our Torah reading cycle once again. Here, we actually get not one, but two stories about God creating humankind. In the first creation story, God made human beings “in the divine image.” In the second creation story in this parasha, God actively “breathed” life into humankind at the beginning of the Adam and Eve story. God in this part of our Torah is intimately, inescapably gathered up into human existence.
I’m especially drawn to the ways God takes care of human beings in the Torah, even when Godself and the people are in particularly challenging moments. In B’reishit, even as God punishes Adam and Eve for eating from the Tree of Knowledge, God also clothes the two humans in skins to protect them from the elements. In our parasha last week at the end of the Torah, God also took care of Moses right up to the end of his life: God buried Moses, Godself’s longtime representative, in an unknown place. Rabbinic commentaries interpret these examples as God demonstrating the appropriate ways to perform mitzvot: clothing the naked and burying the dead. The Torah, from this perspective, is bookended by acts of caretaking and love.
In the B’reishit narrative, God has a lot of work to do: dividing light from the dark, making boundaries in time, creating land and water and animals, and blessing it all. Why should we bother to consider this active, hands-on God? It’s difficult to see a frustratingly silent God in our modern world full of poverty, terror, hatred, and violence. However, just as God entrusted the world of plants and animals to all of us, we ourselves are a fundamental part of creation. God also entrusted us to one another. We must act, despite fear or apathy, to take care of each other and the ones who need us most by doing mitzvot. We are asked to follow God’s example, even when the situation becomes difficult.