Creation, the Sixth Day: One and Many in Both God and Human Beings

over the past year, I preached a sermon series on the Torah's seven days of creation at First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn, NY. In this series I lifted up the images of natural beauty and ecological abundance in this passionate text—a text that is too often claimed by (and ceded to) hardline creationists and climate change deniers. Far from the conservative politics that such voices promote, I see the Genesis text as a call for human humility and environmental stewardship. It highlights the gorgeous and fragile gift we have been given in our planet earth, celebrates its diversity, and casts humans as merely one thread in its living web. My interpretations in this series are partly my own midrash and partly the insights of traditional commentators. The following article is adapted from a sermon I delivered on the creation of humans. This is part 2 of the article on the sixth day of creation, begun in the fall, 2016 issue of Tikkun.

Reading the genesis seven days of creation from a human perspective, the Friday afternoon is really where the action is. This is when God makes the first earthling. The Hebrew word for it is adam, which comes from the word adamah, and means "earth." God makes an earth creature. And the way it's described is downright strange: "Then God said, 'Let us make an earthling in our image, according to our likeness.'" Us?! To whom is God referring? And if there's more than one, why is it "image" and "likeness" instead of "images" and "likenesses?" There has been something suspiciously pluralish about this God from the start. The Hebrew name for God used throughout this story is Elohim. "Im" is a plural ending, analogous to adding an –s to the end of an English word. But when Elohim is the subject of a verb in this story, the verb is always in the singular. And now the plot thickens and we have the very first time that Elohim refers to itself. And Elohim calls itself, "us." Perhaps this is the author's way of expressing through creative grammar a God that is both many and one.

The early Hebrews weren't the only ones with this idea—it's actually a much older and much later concept as well. Trinitarian Christianity teaches the mystery of one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And a thousand years before Genesis was written, early Hindus were writing scriptures that described a plurality of gods and a profusion of life all emanating from one universal life force. They write, "Just as the seven colors exist within one ray of light, so too the various Hindu Gods exist within the Supreme, as names of its different qualities." Statues of Hindu gods are often explosions of life forms, with human and animal parts, three heads and multiple arms, each hand holding a different symbolic object. They burst outward, reaching to express the radical diversity of God. They're trying to capture in three-dimensional art something that lives in so many more dimensions as to be unimaginable. And it's all one.

Language, art, and religious expression are always inadequate. The artists and clergy among us are acutely aware of this. Sometimes our representations feel feeble in their efforts to convey the subtlety and diversity and magnificence of reality. But we try anyway. Perhaps God refers to Godself as "us" in the text in the same way that some gender-queer people ask to be referred to as "they"—to try to convey a layered, plural identity that does not conform neatly to a single category. It's awkward, but it's the best that words can do, and so it's worth doing. This is what we see here in this next piece of the Genesis text—a religious narrative trying to describe something infinite and indescribable in a way that people can grasp.

After we hear about God for the first time as "us," the text continues: "So God created the earthling in God's image...