Dvar Torah: The God of Becoming: Finding Faith in Uncertainty

How do you imagine the first moment God breaks centuries of silence and speaks to Moshe?

We have certain expectations of the Divine. We expect majesty. We expect power. If we were choosing the location, we might pick a cedar of Lebanon, towering and ancient. We might choose a jagged mountain peak, or a storm like the one that will eventually descend on Sinai. We expect the setting to match the status of the occupant.

Yet when the time comes to break the silence of centuries and speak to Moshe, God defies every expectation. The setting is a sneh—a lowly, prickly thorn-bush. A shrub that offers no shade, produces no fruit, possesses no beauty. The humblest plant in the desert.[1]

A Midrash notices exactly what we notice. Shemot Rabbah asks: why a thorn-bush? And it answers: to teach that there is no place devoid of the Divine presence, the Shechinah, not even a thorn-bush, not even the lowest, most painful places.[2]

That is already profound comfort. God is not found only in the beautiful, the successful, the photogenic. God is found in the thorns. God is found where we would rather not look.

But the thorn-bush does more than teach us where God can be found. It hints at how God behaves.

A God who chooses the thorn-bush is not a distant monarch. Not the Greek ideal of the "Unmoved Mover"—perfection understood as being untouched, unchangeable, unbothered.[3] The God of the thorn-bush goes to where the pain is. God is present not above the world, but within it. A God who is moved. Abraham Joshua Heschel called this divine pathos: the claim that God is not indifferent, that God cares, that the world matters to God.[4]

Which is why Moshe's question, in the very next breath, feels so human.

Moshe asks: "When they ask me, 'What is God’s name?', what shall I say?"[5] On the surface, it sounds practical. But Moshe is not really asking for information. If he were, saying “the God of Avraham, of Yitzchak and of Yaakov” would’ve been enough. He is asking for trust. How can I trust a God I cannot define?

We human beings love nouns. We love names. If we can name something, we can grasp it. If we can grasp it, we can control it. That impulse lives very close to the heart of idolatry—not only bowing to statues, but turning the infinite into something finite. Trading the God who calls for a god we can manage.

And we live, perhaps more than most generations, in a time of radical uncertainty. Some of it is personal: health, family, relationships, ageing. Some of it is communal: identity, cohesion, conflict. Some of it is global: violence, climate, technology, the constant sense that the ground can shift under our feet.

In such a world, the temptation is to ask religion to become a theological security blanket. We want God to be the answer that makes uncertainty go away. We want God to be a noun: solid, dependable, unchanging. A cosmic controller who has everything decided.

Then the Torah does something extraordinary. God refuses to give Moshe a noun. Instead, God gives him a verb:

Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh.[6]

Some of us might’ve grown up hearing it translated as "I Am That I Am." It sounds majestic, philosophical, static. Pure Being. A God who is complete, finished, beyond all motion.

But the Hebrew refuses to sit still. Ehyeh is in the imperfect tense. It leans forward. It opens out. "I Will Be What I Will Be." Not a frozen definition, but an unfolding presence. Not only "being," but "becoming."

Here we need to name an influence that many of us carry without noticing. Greek philosophy gave Western religious imagination a powerful picture of God as perfection-through-unchangeability. That picture influenced Christian theology, and it also influenced medieval Jewish philosophy. Maimonides develops a model of God as absolute, necessary existence, beyond change and beyond any human attribute.[7] There is grandeur in that vision. But it can become spiritually dangerous when it quietly turns God into a cosmic controller, a being of absolute certainty, too perfect to be affected.

That is not the God speaking from a thorn-bush.

Because in the Torah itself, God does not merely announce existence. God speaks relationship.

"I have surely seen the affliction of My people."

"I have heard their cry."

"I know their suffering."

"And I have come down to deliver them."[8]

This is not a God untouched by the world. This is a God who is affected by what human beings do to one another. Rashi sensed this dynamism immediately. He interprets Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh not as a metaphysical definition, but as a promise of presence: "I will be with them in this sorrow, just as I will be with them in future troubles."[9]

Do you hear the difference? The Greek God says, "I exist." The Jewish God says, "I will be with you." The first offers certainty; the second offers relationship.

And this is where Jewish Process Theology becomes not just an intellectual exercise, but a lifeline. Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson challenges the picture of God as a coercive monarch who has already decided everything. He offers instead a God of relationship, a God who does not override human freedom but works through it, inviting, luring, calling creation towards healing and wholeness. Not the "Unmoved Mover," but the "Most Moved Mover."[10]

If God says "I will be," then the future is not predetermined. It is open. Who God becomes in history depends, in part, on what we do. We are not passive recipients of a fixed plan. We are partners in redemption.

That is thrilling, and it is frightening.

It is thrilling because it means the world's brokenness is not the last chapter. It means change is genuinely possible. It means our actions matter, not as footnotes to a script, but as real contributions to what the future becomes.

But it is frightening because it means we cannot cling to the idol of certainty. We cannot know how the story ends. We cannot outsource responsibility to the heavens.

The Talmud offers a remarkable scene that captures this theology in narrative form. In Tractate Brachot, God initially wants Moshe to tell Israel, "I will be with you in this suffering, and I will be with you in future sufferings." Moshe protests: do not mention future sufferings now, it is enough that they bear the suffering of the present. And God agrees, and tells him to say simply: "Ehyeh has sent me to you."[11]

Read as theology, it is startling. God not only speaks, God listens. God not only commands, God responds. God enters a dialogue about what people can bear. It is a portrait of divine relationship, not divine distance.

Now, if this is the God in parashat Sh'mot, what changes for us?

First, it changes how we pray. If we pray to a God who has already decided everything, prayer becomes either performance or persuasion. But if we pray to Ehyeh, the God of becoming, prayer becomes relationship. Prayer becomes alignment, but not passive alignment. It becomes turning ourselves towards the divine call, answering it, arguing with it, consenting to it, and then returning to it again.[12]

Second, it changes what "faith" means. Faith is not certainty. Faith is not knowing the ending. Faith is the willingness to live without the idol of control, whilst staying in relationship with a God who cannot be pinned down.

And third, it changes how we live with suffering. A static, all-controlling God can make suffering unbearable, because if God is the cosmic controller, then every tragedy becomes either willed or permitted with full power to prevent it. That is the theology that breaks people's hearts.

The thorn-bush suggests something else. God is present in suffering, not as its author, but as its companion, and as the power that calls us towards response. God is the fire that burns, yet does not consume. Not the destroyer, but the resilience. Not the one who guarantees we will never be in the thorns, but the one who meets us there and calls us towards a different future.

And perhaps this is why the bush burns but is not consumed. Not because redemption is a single moment that fixes everything. But because becoming is ongoing. The fire keeps burning, and still we are not consumed.

So here is the invitation for this Shabbat.

Let us be honest about our uncertainty. Let us stop demanding from theology what theology was never meant to provide: total control.

Instead, let us listen for the voice that calls from the thorn-bush, not from the places where we feel powerful and composed, but from the places where life scratches, where the world hurts, where we are tempted to look away.

And when that voice says, "I will be," let us hear it as promise and responsibility.

Promise: the present is not the final word.

Responsibility: the future is being written, and our choices are part of the ink.

We do not worship a thing. We worship in relationship. We do not follow a map with every turn marked out. We are in dialogue with a voice that says: I will be with you, as I will be with you.

And in a world that is uncertain, and sometimes frightening, and often unfinished, that is enough.

Shabbat Shalom.

[1] Exodus 3:1–2.

[2] Shemot Rabbah 2:5.

[3] Aristotle, Metaphysics

[4] Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets.

[5] Exodus 3:13.

[6] Exodus 3:14.

[7] Moses Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed I:63.

[8] Exodus 3:7–8.

[9] Rashi on Exodus 3:14.

[10] Bradley Shavit Artson, God of Becoming and Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology (Jewish Lights, 2013).

[11] Babylonian Talmud, Brachot 9b.

[12] Toba Spitzer, "Why We Need Process Theology," CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly (Winter 2012).

Dvar Torah: Voices from the Akedah – A Bibliodrama

From amongst the pedagogical tools for teaching Torah I've encountered in my career as a Jewish educator, one of the most powerful is called Bibliodrama. It’s a technique adapted from psychodrama in which we inhabit Biblical characters to gain insight and empathy into their inner worlds. By hearing multiple perspectives, we read not only what the text states, but also what it implies and what it silences.

I'd like to use that technique—without the acting—to examine the story of the Akedah, the binding of Itzchak and his almost-sacrifice ordered by God, and see what this 360-degree approach reveals. What voices are missing from the narrative? What silences echo through the text?

Avraham:

We first encounter Avraham when God instructed him to leave behind everything familiar and go to an unknown land, following an unknown voice—and Avraham did just that. Then, in an emblematic story earlier in this very parashah, Avraham challenged God as no one had ever challenged the Divine. Avraham was not destroyed for his lack of decorum, as many might have expected. Avraham argued passionately for the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah: "Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?".[1] Yet, in the end, all his arguments were incapable of convincing God not to destroy those cities.

This time, when God asked Avraham to offer his son as a sacrifice—not his only son and not the only one he loved, despite what the text affirms, but the one through whom the covenant Avraham had established with God would be continued—it would have been reasonable to expect Avraham to challenge the request immediately. But Avraham did not. No argument. No challenge.

We do not know whether this was out of fear, hope, or disappointment with a God who had destroyed Sodom and hadn't protected Yishmael when Sarah demanded his expulsion. A midrash portrays Satan approaching Avraham on the road: "Old man, are you out of your mind? You're going to slaughter the son God gave you at the age of one hundred?! It was I who deceived you and said to you, 'Take now your son...'" Rav Kook explains that Satan here represents Avraham's conscience, his internal struggle about whether he truly heard God's voice.[2]

Rabbi David Hartman observes: "We are not only amazed at the unintelligible demand of God, but dumbfounded when Avraham, who had so boldly stood before God and argued for justice, now submits unquestioningly".[3] Perhaps Avraham was waiting for God to change God's mind. Perhaps his silence was not obedience but paralysis—the inability to know what God truly wanted.

Itzchak:

Itzchak walked beside his father for three days, carrying the wood for his own sacrifice. His question was achingly innocent: "Father... where is the lamb for the burnt offering?".[4] Avraham's answer—"God will provide the lamb"—remains one of Torah's most ambiguous statements. Faith? Evasion? Desperate hope?

According to a midrash,[5] Itzchak understood what was about to happen and asked his father to bind him tightly "lest I tremble and cause you to make a blemish." But the text's later silences tell a darker story. After the Akedah, Itzchak disappears from the narrative. Avraham and Itzchak do not walk down the mountain together—only Avraham returns to the servants.[6] Ibn Ezra notes pointedly: "It does not mention Itzchak."

Itzchak is not present at his mother's funeral. The next time we see him, he lives separately from his father. How does a son rebuild trust with a father who bound him to an altar? The text's silence is itself an answer. Some wounds are too deep for words.

Sarah:

Perhaps the most disturbing voice in the Akedah is the one we never hear: Sarah's. God commands Avraham, Avraham obeys, Itzchak is bound—but where is Sarah? According to Midrash Tanchuma, Avraham deliberately concealed his intention from her, fearing her reaction.

Sarah was not consulted. She was not asked for consent. She was not informed. When she learned what occurred—the shock killed her. A midrash[7] tells us Satan went to Sarah and said: "Avraham took Itzchak your son and slaughtered him." Sarah cried out, making sounds corresponding to the shofar blasts, "and her soul burst forth from her and she died."

The text reveals: "Avraham came to mourn for Sarah".[8] He came—suggesting he was elsewhere when she died. The Akedah was at Mount Moriah, Avraham returned to Beersheba, but Sarah died in Chevron. The family was geographically fractured even before her death.

The American poet Eleanor Wilner imagines Sarah's voice in "Sarah's Choice”[9] after God approaches her asking for a sacrifice of Isaac (who is her only and beloved son):

"No," said Sarah to the Voice. "I will not be chosen. Nor shall my son— if I can help it... Shame," she said, "for thinking me a fool, for asking such a thing. You must have known I would choose Itzchak. What use have I for History—an arrow already bent when it is fired from the bow?"

In Wilner's midrash, Sarah refuses the test. She chooses her son over the covenant, humanity over History—asking what might have happened if Sarah had been given a voice.

The Ram:

One voice is rarely considered: the ram, caught in the thicket, immediately slaughtered in Itzchak's place. It has no story, no agency—it simply appears and dies.

Yet Jewish tradition remembers it. According to Pirkei Avot,[10] the ram was created at twilight on Creation's sixth day—always meant for this moment. Its horns become the shofarot we blow on Rosh Hashanah.

When we hear the shofar's blast, what are we hearing? Sarah's six cries? Or something else—the cry of the vulnerable, the voiceless, those sacrificed for purposes they do not understand? The ram reminds us that every one of our acts has a cost.

God:

The text begins: "God tested Avraham".[11] This should reassure us—it was only a test, God never intended Itzchak to die. But this raises more questions than it answers. What kind of test is this? What does it prove? At what cost?

One midrash in the Talmud[12] offers a troubling backstory: Satan approached God and said, "To this old man You graciously granted the fruit of the womb at the age of a hundred, yet of all that banquet which he prepared, he did not have one turtle-dove or pigeon to sacrifice before you!" God replied, "Yet were I to say to him, 'Sacrifice your son before me,' he would do so without hesitation." In this reading, the Akedah came about because of Satan's challenge—a cosmic wager not unlike the story of Job. Was Avraham's test, then, the result of divine pettiness? A need to prove something to Satan?

According to the Talmud,[13] God declares: "I never said to slaughter him. I merely said to 'raise him up.'" A midrash[14] imagines God explaining: "When I said 'take your son,' I never said to slaughter him." These midrashim suggest Avraham misunderstood God's intention.

But if so, why didn't God say so clearly? Why allow three days of anguish? Why permit the binding, the raised knife? Some say the Akedah taught the world that God does not desire human sacrifice. But surely there was a less traumatic way to convey that message.

The text is unclear whether Avraham passes or fails. He demonstrates obedience—but loses his wife, his relationship with his son, and never again hears directly from God. Perhaps the most honest reading is that we cannot know God's intentions. Was Avraham supposed to obey? Refuse? Argue, as he had done for Sodom?

A part of me wants to believe that this episode also changed the Divine, who, as a result, would not test the people anymore and would not instruct senseless acts of destruction. The rest of the Torah, though, proves that this is not the case. Maybe God was the One who failed the test….

After the Akedah: Can We Rebuild?

The Torah offers no tidy reconciliation. Avraham returns alone.[15] Sarah dies far away in Chevron, and only then does Avraham come to mourn her.[16] Itzchak is absent from both scenes. Later, however, he and Yishmael bury their father together.[17] The family is not restored, yet a thread of obligation endures. This is a truthful hope.

We cannot always mend what has been broken, but we can still choose presence, honour, and restraint. In the language of the Akedah, holiness is often the moment we lower the knife.

Perhaps this is the Akedah's most honest teaching: we can continue even when we cannot fully repair. But we can also choose—as Wilner's Sarah does—to refuse the test, to say "I will not be chosen." Sometimes the most faithful response is resistance.

The power of Bibliodrama is that it refuses single interpretations. When we inhabit Avraham, we feel his uncertainty. When we inhabit Itzchak, we feel his betrayal. When we inhabit Sarah, we feel her exclusion. When we sit with the ram, we remember all who are sacrificed for grand narratives they do not understand. When we try to understand God’s reasons, we remain baffled.

The Akedah lays bare the terrible costs of acting without considering impact upon others. It shows how decisions made in isolation—without consulting those most affected, without considering resulting trauma—can shatter families. It reveals the complexity of discerning God's will when voices compete and certainty eludes us.

As we read this parashah, let us honour all voices—spoken and silent, present and absent. Let us ask: What decisions are we making that affect others? Whose voices are we failing to hear? What trauma might result from our actions? Whose voices are we silencing in our certainty?

May we have wisdom to listen before we act, courage to question our certainty, and humility to acknowledge when we have caused harm by failing to consider the full impact of our choices.

Shabat Shalom.

[1] Genesis 18:25
[2] https://www.jewishideas.org/article/thoughts-akedah
[3] https://oztorah.com/2022/11/isaac-the-akedah/
[4] Genesis 22:7
[5] Leviticus Rabbah 20:2
[6] Genesis 22:19
[7] Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer 31
[8] Genesis 23:2
[9] Sarah's Choice, University of Chicago Press, 1989
[10] Pirkei Avot 5:6
[11] Genesis 22:1
[12] Talmud Bavli Sanhedrin 89b
[13] Talmud Bavli Ta'anit 4a
[14] Genesis Rabbah 56:8
[15] Genesis 22:19
[16] Genesis 23:2
[17] Genesis 25:9

More Questions and Fewer Certainties

(A previous version of this text was published on this blog in Portuguese under the title "Por mais perguntas e menos certezas")

Between immediate obedience to Divine commands and vigorous protest against them, Avraham embodies strikingly different forms of religious leadership in this week's parashah, Vayera. When God reveals the plan to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because their sin is overwhelming, Avraham challenges God's ethics in the strongest possible terms: "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?!".[1] On the other hand, when, a few chapters later, God demands that Avraham sacrifice "his son, his only son, the one he loves, Yitzchak",[2] our patriarch consents without question, takes his son and walks with him to the place God had indicated for the sacrifice. If not for Divine intervention at the last moment, when the sacrificial knife had already been raised, Avraham would, in fact, have followed God's instruction and ended the life of his own child.

Across the centuries, both stories have been held up as models of virtue and religious conduct. Many commentators, pointing to the near-sacrifice of Yitzchak, have stressed that not only was Avraham willing to carry out the Divine instruction, but Yitzchak was also willing to be sacrificed, if that was God's plan. From this perspective, and from the lessons drawn from this biblical passage, devotion that rises above one's personal wishes and needs is the religious ideal to be sought. If Avraham was tested in this episode, these commentators argue, then he passed with distinction.

However, at least since Talmudic times, and despite attempts by rabbinic leadership to sideline this approach, a critique of Avraham's ready acceptance of the Divine order to sacrifice his own son has also featured in how commentators read the near-sacrifice of Yitzchak.[3] For them, Avraham's challenge to the revelation of Sodom and Gomorrah's destruction reflects a healthier posture in relation to authority, even Divine authority. In particular, for Avraham, seen as an iconoclast, one who would overturn idols and who was unafraid to stand against general consensus, such a stance would be more in keeping with his life story.

I think about these stories and how they relate to different theological models, not only the external Divine Voice that Avraham heard, which instructed him to leave the place he lived and build a new home in a land that God would show him, but also the inner voice, the one that comes from the Divine spark in each person. When do we listen to our inner voice almost without asking questions, and when do we challenge it intensely? When are our certainties so strong that we accept their premises at face value, without any questioning, like dogmas whose validity is beyond dispute and whose very acceptance becomes a form of unexamined devotion? When, on the other hand, do we ask the uncomfortable questions, unsure where they will take us, with a trembling fear that we might, in fact, be betraying our inner voice and who knows what else in the process?

These ancient tensions between obedience and questioning echo powerfully in our own time, particularly in how we engage with strongly held beliefs. In the age of social media, we define ourselves by the causes we champion, often speaking out with unwavering certainty. Like rival supporters whose clashes sometimes turn violent, a pattern we know too well across our sporting landscape, we share our side's arguments without questioning their validity, scrolling past opposing views without considering the wisdom they might contain. We become both perpetrators and targets of abuse, hardening positions and deepening divisions.

I take inspiration from Avraham's courage in challenging God over Sodom and Gomorrah, and from the lessons we can draw from that example. The dialogical relationship with the Divine that is established there is one of the Torah's most moving passages for me. In our beautifully diverse society, where we encounter different convictions and traditions constantly, this lesson feels particularly urgent. May we all learn from him to have the courage to ask more questions and hold fewer certainties, to break the cycles of abuse and violence into which our stances sometimes harden. May we pursue dialogue and ubuntu, the recognition of our shared humanity, and welcome each person's pains, traumas, joys and convictions, so that we can foster debates marked by greater respect, deeper understanding, and genuine fruitfulness.

Shabbat Shalom!

[1] Gen. 18:25
[2] Gen. 22:1–2
[3] See, for example, chapter 5 of J. Richard Middleton, Abraham's Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job and How to Talk Back to God.

Dvar Torah: Not God in a Box, God in Covenant

Just like last week, I will start tonight with a confession: I am a heavy user of Generative Artificial Intelligence chatbots, like ChatGPT and Gemini. It has got to the point that my 14-year-old son scolded me, saying I was getting too dependent on these platforms.

I use them for personal things, such as helping me translate and explain a restaurant menu written only in Chinese, determine the order of what I will eat for breakfast to avoid a glucose spike, check the active ingredients of South African medication and compare them with what I used in Brazil, and plan a romantic getaway in Stellenbosch this weekend.

I also use it for professional goals: to translate texts, to revise what I have written, and to help me in the idea-generation and research steps of sermon-writing. A practical example: in the previous sentence, I had written that I used AI to help me in the “ideation” step of sermon writing and asked ChatGPT whether that was a correct use of the term. Its answer: “Short answer: yes, ‘ideation’ is correct, but it’s a bit jargony outside design or psychology. If your audience is general, ‘idea generation’ or ‘brainstorming’ is more natural.”

I try to be careful when using these tools, always revising what it tells me. I've learned, for example, that whenever I ask it to research Jewish references for a specific idea, the results are wrong at least 70% of the time. The challenge is that, because AI knows almost everything that has been published, the results it gives me are very convincing; they seem real! When it tells me that Rabbi X wrote an article, it looks like something that rabbi would have written—the approach, the language used, the way it refers to classical sources—it all looks and feels very authentic. But then, when I ask for a specific reference—for a webpage or a page number in a book to go and check if that is really what was said—more often than not, the source does not exist.

Once I got into an argument with Gemini, Google’s AI platform. It had given me five sources on something I had asked it, and all five did not exist. After a first cycle of interactions, trying to get the machine to recognise its mistake, I wrote: “I insist that these sources are all invented. Please, retract these invented sources and bring me 5 recent real ones.” Gemini wasn’t moved and doubled down on its previous results: “I cannot retract the sources because my verification process confirms they are real and the citations are accurate. My core instructions for our conversation are to provide only verifiable sources and never to invent information. Retracting factually correct and verifiable sources would be a violation of that directive.” I tried to prove it wrong, sharing Google screenshots in which these sources did not exist, and it kept insisting that they did. Eventually, I gave up. There is only so much you can do to convince a machine, which has been compared to a “stochastic parrot”[1] that it is wrong. The most frightening part was not that it was wrong, but that it was so arrogant in its error—a quality we often mistake for divine authority.

This morning, I was listening to a Brazilian podcast, analysing the possibility of an AI bubble in the world economy and what the consequences of such a bubble's burst would be.[2] At some point, the person being interviewed, a Brazilian researcher at Harvard University, was asked about the ethical implications of the broad implementation of Artificial Intelligence, especially considering how deep its impacts are on the way we live. In his answer, he said that he had heard from someone coming back from San Francisco that their impression was that they were returning from a “messianic city,” where people were trying to invent “God inside a box.”

“God inside a box”—that expression stuck with me. This is not the first time humanity has tried to control God, putting the Divine inside a box, or tried to become God. Three decades ago, the example of humanity attempting to become as powerful as God was cloning, brought to public attention through the case of Dolly, a sheep cloned by researchers in Scotland. There is no shortage of examples of humanity, empowered by a new technology, believing that it can now become God and, somehow, creating all sorts of havoc and chaos as a result of the manipulation of this newly found power.

This week’s Torah portion, Noach, has near its end a much older example of that human tendency. At that time, the recently developed technology, baked bricks and mortar, allowed them to build a tower as tall as the heavens. And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; lest we shall be scattered all over the world.”[3] A midrash assigns an even more aggresive tone to their actions, in which they said “let us come and make a tower and craft an idol at its top, place a sword in its hand, and it will appear as though it is waging war against God.’”[4]

When that goal became evident, God did not like it at all, fearing that “nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach.” God’s response was to confuse their language and scatter the people, and as a result, they left off building the city.

So, it seems that the instinct to abuse the technical instruments at our disposal to try and become God is, at least, as old as the Torah, which scholars date to around the year 400 BCE. Taking the extremely dubious step of quoting Spider-Man’s uncle Ben, I will say that “with great power, comes great responsibility.”[5] Unfortunately, these attempts have not been accompanied by a conversation about the ethical implications of these technologies; about who will win from the construction of high-rise towers following the improvement of construction techniques and who will lose; who will get new tools for sermon-writing and who will lose their jobs, replaced by the new functionalities of artificial intelligence.

In these actions, we keep making the same mistake regarding the attributes of what qualifies as Divine. We often think that power is what characterises God, but the Jewish tradition insists that God sides with the oppressed, with the underprivileged, with those whom the system has failed. In Psalm 146, we read that God is the One “who secures justice for those who are wronged, gives food to the hungry. Adonai sets prisoners free.”[6] In the Talmud, it is told that the Mashiach “sits among the poor who suffer from illnesses” and helps them with their bandages, undoing and redoing them with attention and care.[7]

And so, we return to the beginning of this week’s parashah, which says: “The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with lawlessness. When God saw how corrupt the earth was, for all flesh had corrupted its ways on earth, God said to Noach, ‘I have decided to put an end to all flesh, for the earth is filled with lawlessness because of them: I am about to destroy them with the earth.’”[8] In last week’s parashah, Bereshit, when humanity was created, it was entrusted with the role of working and protecting the land[9], and yet, we insist on believing that a God-like attitude is to exploit the land, to exploit the people, to exploit technology without thinking of the consequences.

This is the very essence of the sin of Babel. The builders saw the world as something to conquer. Empowered by their new technology, their impulse was to build a single, monolithic fortress up to the heavens, to “make a name for themselves.” It is the “God in a box” impulse, driven by a desire for power and a terrifying, uniform consensus—the same impulse as my AI chatbot, doubling down on its own error, insisting it knows best.

But our parashah does not end there. It pivots. It introduces us to Avraham.

And a famous midrash[10] tells us that Avraham, too, saw a construction. He was traveling and saw a birah doleket—a great palace. But this word, doleket, is beautifully ambiguous. It might mean that he saw a palace that was “illuminated,” dazzling in its intricate wisdom and design. It might also mean that he saw a palace that was “burning”—on fire with the chaos, corruption, and violence of the generations before him.

The midrash suggests he saw both. And this is the perfect metaphor for our new Artificial Intelligence. It is our modern birah doleket. It is a dazzling, illuminated palace of knowledge, so convincing it looks and feels very authentic. And it is burning with chaos—with hallucinations, with systemic bias, with the power to displace and divide. The builders of our modern Babel, our “God in a box,” are so impressed with their illuminated creation they want to keep building higher, faster, regardless of the fire and the chaos it brings.

But Avraham's response was not the response of Babel. He did not try to conquer the palace. He did not try to build his own. He stopped, and he asked a single, world-changing question: “Is it possible that this palace has no master?” It is a question that searches not for power, but for accountability. Not for control, but for relationship.

As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks observes,

After the two great failures of the Flood and Babel, Abraham was called on to create a new form of social order that would give equal honour to the individual and the collective, personal responsibility and the common good. That remains the special gift of Jews and Judaism to the world.[11]

Avraham’s entire life and his relationship with God are the antithesis of Babel. The Babel generation built a tower to consolidate power and make a name for themselves. God’s response to Avraham is, “I will make your name great.” The builders of Babel built a closed fortress to storm heaven. Avraham built a tent that was open on all four sides, to welcome the stranger, to care for the oppressed, to lift up those whom the system has failed.

Our tradition does not command us to smash the machine. It commands us to learn from Avraham’s example. Not God in a box, but God in covenant. Not a tower for a few, but a tent for the many.

The test of our powerful new tools is not “how high can we build?” but “whom will it serve?” Will we use this new power to build higher towers and walls, to “make a name for ourselves” while insisting on our own correctness? Or will we, like Avraham, look at this brilliant, burning world, seek its true Master, and use our new tools to open our tents wider—to fight the violence of our generation, to serve the world and protect it?

Shabbat Shalom!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot
[2] https://open.spotify.com/episode/6mZrapsR4eYkNRzxJhGqsc
[3] Gen. 11:4
[4] Bereshit Rabbah 38:6
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_great_power_comes_great_responsibility
[6] Psalm 146:7
[7] Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 98a
[8] Gen 6:11-13
[9] Gen 2:15
[10] Bereshit Rabbah 39:1
[11] https://rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/noach/individual-and-collective-responsibility

Dvar Torah: Bereshit and the Big Bang: Two Stories, One Wonder

I want to start with a confession. I am terrible at putting together flat-pack furniture. You know the kind I mean, from those stores that require you to assemble the products you buy, like IKEA in the US and in Europe, or Mr Price Home and Decofurn Furniture here in South Africa. You visit the store or the website and you fall in love with a beautiful, sleek bookshelf. It looks so simple, so elegant. Then you get home with the box. You open it, and a cascade of wooden planks, mysterious plastic bits, and a bag containing approximately one million screws spills out. And then there’s the instruction manual. It’s all diagrams. No words. Just a series of pictures of a strangely serene-looking cartoon person performing impossible acts of engineering with a single Allen key.

This manual is the "how." It tells us, step-by-step, how to connect panel A to dowel B. It’s technical, precise, and utterly devoid of poetry. It does not, at any point, explain why we are building this bookshelf. It doesn't tell us about the dream of having a place for our books, about creating a home, about the warmth of a room filled with stories. The "how" is the instructions; the "why" is the home.

My frustration with a furniture manual is one thing, but our tradition has a much older, and far more profound, version of this very idea. A teaching from our sages in the Midrash, in Bereshit Rabbah, imagines how God created the world. It says that just as a human king would not build a palace from his own head, but would consult blueprints and plans, so too did God. The Midrash asks: what was God's blueprint? And it answers: "הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא מַבִּיט בַּתּוֹרָה וּבוֹרֵא אֶת הָעוֹלָם" – "The Holy One, Blessed be [God], looked into the Torah and created the world."[1] For our Sages, the Torah was God’s instruction manual. It was the architectural plan for reality. I would like to offer a different take in today’s drashah: the Torah wasn’t the blueprint, it was the project brochure: back to our furniture assembly metaphor, it did not contain the image of how to put the pieces together, it gave meaning to a life in which that bookshelf was a part of. The tension between those who see Torah as blueprint or project brochure is not new and it has not yet been completely overcome.

And every year, when we turn back the scroll to the beginning, to Parashat B'reshit, we are back to that polemic. We read the opening words: "בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ" – "When God began to create heaven and earth,"[2] and for many of us, a tension immediately arises. We hold the Torah’s story in one hand, and in the other, we hold the story we learned in school: the Big Bang, the 13.8 billion years of cosmic expansion, evolution, natural selection.

One story speaks of six days. The other speaks of billions of years. One speaks of divine pronouncements—"Let there be light!"—and the other speaks of quantum fluctuations and genetic mutations. It can feel like we’re being asked to choose. It can feel like a battle, a war between science and faith.

But what if it isn’t a war at all? What if, like the furniture assembly manual and the dream of a home, they aren’t even trying to tell the same story? What if one is obsessed with the "how," and the other is dedicated to the "why?" As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks beautifully put it: “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.”[3] Just as science is the wrong tool to tell us what our purpose is, religion is the wrong tool to tell us how the universe was created.

The idea that science and religion are locked in a mortal combat is, as the Brazilian Jewish physicist Marcelo Gleiser, who teaches at Dartmouth College, puts it, "a fabricated war."[4] It’s a drama that we’ve created. Now, let’s be clear. There are sincere, deeply religious people who absolutely reject this idea. They believe the biblical narrative must be read as a literal scientific record. For them, the world was created in six 24-hour days, just a few thousand years ago. In this view, any evidence to the contrary—like dinosaur fossils and rocks that appear to be millions of years old—must be explained away. Some even go so far as to suggest that God may have planted those fossils to test our faith.[5] That is a path of faith. But it is not our path.

Our tradition has a long, proud history of embracing reason alongside faith. Science, at its best, is a magnificent, humbling, and awe-inspiring project. Its mission, to use Gleiser’s words, is to "explain the unknown with the known." It observes, it measures, it gathers data, and it builds a story of how the universe works. But religion’s mission is different. It seeks to "explain the unknown with the unknowable."[6] It addresses the questions that can’t be put in a test tube or observed through a telescope.

John Polkinghorne, who was both a brilliant quantum physicist and an Anglican priest, offers a beautiful analogy. He asks us to imagine a beautiful painting. A chemist could come along and analyze it. They could tell you the precise chemical composition of every pigment, the molecular structure of the canvas. They would give you a perfect, factual, and complete description of the painting's physical properties. But, as Polkinghorne says, they "would have missed the point of the painting.”[7] They could tell you how the painting is made, but they couldn't tell you why it is beautiful, why it moves your soul, what it means.

The Torah, in the opening chapter of Genesis, is not a scientific textbook. To read it as one is, with all due respect, to miss the point of the painting. Our sages understood this long before the Big Bang was a glimmer in an astronomer's eye. Maimonides, the great Rambam, writing over 800 years ago, insisted that the Torah was not a physics textbook. He argued that if a literal reading of the text contradicted established rational proof, then the Torah must be interpreted metaphorically.[8] For him, the question was never "Is the science right or is the Torah right?" The question was, "What is the Torah trying to teach us about God, about ourselves, and about the meaning of this world?"

So, what is the "why" of B'reshit?

First, it’s a radical declaration against a world of pagan chaos. The world of our ancestors was filled with capricious, warring gods who treated humanity as their playthings. The sun was a god. The moon was a god. The sea was a terrifying deity. Into this world, the Torah speaks a revolutionary message: there is one God, one source of everything, and the universe is not chaotic—it is orderly, intentional, and purposeful. The sun and moon are not gods to be worshipped; they are lamps, placed in the sky to give light. They have a job to do. The world is fundamentally, as God declares seven times, tov—it is good.

Second, it gives humanity a unique and dignified role. We are not cosmic accidents, not just clever apes clinging to a rock hurtling through space. The Torah tells us we are created B'tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. And that statement applies to every single human being, without exception. This isn’t just a beautiful poetic idea; it is a profound ethical demand. It gives us an immense responsibility for how we treat other people. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: "You cannot worship God and then look at a human being, created by God in God's own image, as if he or she were an animal.”[9] But our purpose is not just ethical, it is spiritual. B'tzelem Elohim means we are partners with God in creation, the part of the universe that can look back in wonder, ask "why?".

But even this comes with a "shadow side," as Polkinghorne calls it. The very processes that allow for freedom and novelty in the universe also allow for brokenness and pain. He explains that if God created a world with the freedom to "make itself"—a beautiful description of evolution—then that same system allows for things to go wrong. The same process of genetic mutation that allows for incredible diversity and adaptation is the same process that can lead to cancer. The same tectonic plates whose movement replenishes the surface of our planet can also slip and cause devastating earthquakes. This doesn’t make God incompetent; it is the necessary cost of a world with genuine freedom, a world that is not a divine puppet show.[10]

And finally, at the end of this biblical Creation story, we get an additional "why". After six "days" of creative work, God rests. God creates Shabbat. Think about this. A star doesn't stop shining to appreciate its own light. A galaxy doesn't pause its spinning to reflect on its beauty. Only humanity, created in the image of God, is invited to stop, to rest, to bless, and to infuse the universe with holiness and in meaning. Shabbat adds new layers of “why” — we stop to celebrate that we are partners with God in the creation of the world. It is the moment we stop tinkering with the "how" of the world and simply experience its "why"—its goodness, its beauty, its sacredness.

The story of the 13.8-billion-year unfolding of the cosmos is an incredible story. It is a scientific poem of immense grandeur, and we should embrace it and teach it to our children. It fills me with awe. But it doesn't tell me why I am here. It doesn't tell me how to live. It doesn't tell me what my purpose is. It can’t. It’s the wrong tool for the job.

For that, we turn to our story, to B'reshit. We are not at war with science. We are in a dialogue with it. We bring our awe at the "how" and join it with our sacred story of "why." Because, as Marcelo Gleiser says, at their core, both the scientist and the person of faith are driven by the same impulse: a deep "relationship of wonder with the unknown," and a profound desire "to better understand who we are."

May this Shabbat give us the space to marvel at both stories, to see the intricate genius of the "how" all around us, and to feel, deep in our souls, the purpose and the meaning of "why."

Shabbat Shalom.

[1] Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 1:1.
[2] Genesis 1:1.
[3] Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning (New York: Schocken Books, 2011), 2.
[4] https://www.fronteiras.com/leia/exibir/21-ideias-marcelo-gleiser-e-a-complementaridade-entre-religiao-e-ciencia
[5] This refers to the "Omphalos hypothesis," famously proposed by Philip Henry Gosse in Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (London: John Van Voorst, 1857), which argued that the fossil record was created by God to give the earth the appearance of age.
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24N0pE6H-W8
[7] https://open.spotify.com/episode/46AgVZTyYny0zJYA1PQL9W
[8] Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, Part 2, Chapter 25.
[9] Abraham Joshua Heschel, "Religion and Race," in The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human Existence (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 86.
[10] https://open.spotify.com/episode/46AgVZTyYny0zJYA1PQL9W
[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24N0pE6H-W8

In the Divine Image: Judaism's Foundation for Human Rights

 (A previous version of this text was published on this blog in Portuguese under the title "Bebendo na fonte judaica dos Direitos Humanos")

It was John Locke who first defined the concept of ‘human rights’, a set of fundamental protections to which all human beings are entitled. Although the Hebrew term ‘זְכוּיוֹת הָאָדָם’, z’khuyot ha-adam, is even more recent as a label for this idea, Judaism had already developed the notion of the inalienable dignity of every human being long before John Locke formulated his theory.

In the classical Jewish perspective, the creation of the human being ‘in the Divine image’, an idea developed in this week’s parashah, Bereshit, grounds the concept that every human figure is endowed with dignity and deserving of respect. Nahum Sarna writes that the likeness of man to God reveals the infinite value of a human being and affirms the inviolability of the human person.[1] The same author notes that in other cultures it was not uncommon for the king alone to be considered created ‘in the Divine image’, whereas only in the Jewish tradition is this idea universalised, making every human being a reflection of God’s image. This concept, which might have remained an interesting curiosity without practical application, receives concrete implementation already in the next parashah, Noach, when, after the Flood, God prohibits murder, stating that ‘Whoever sheds the blood of a person, by a person shall that person’s blood be shed, for in the image of God humanity was made.’[2]

This fact, on its own, would already secure the centrality of these texts in constructing a Jewish view of human rights. Indeed, in rabbinic tradition, the expression ‘בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים’, b’tselem Elohim, ‘in the Divine image’, is used to refer to concepts that would later be included within the definition of ‘human rights’.

There is, however, an additional dimension in this week’s parashah that is not captured merely by the idea of creation in God’s image. During the process of Creation, every time God brings forth a new category of living beings, the category is expanded through the expression ‘לְמִינֵהוּ’, leminehu, ‘each according to its kind’. So it is with vegetation, seed-bearing plants, fruit trees, great sea creatures, all the living beings that swarm and fill the waters, domesticated animals, creeping things and wild animals.[3] When God created adam, the first human being, however, the expression ‘each according to its kind’ was not used. Our sages understood that the absence of this phrase indicated that all humanity belongs to the same kind, even though we display different physical characteristics.

A midrash, noticing that people born in different parts of the globe have different skin colours, relates that, when creating the first human, God gathered soils of different colours from the four corners of the earth. In this way, when a person dies, the soil of that place cannot say, ‘Return to the place from which you came, since your soil does not belong here.’ ‘On the contrary,’ says this midrash. ‘The human being belongs to every place to which they go, and to there they may return.’[4] What a powerful expression of a worldview that recognises the humanity of every person and the dignity of the stranger, wherever that person may be found.

Today, however, there are not a few circles in which the idea of human rights is presented in opposition to a worldview based on biblical values, in which racism and prejudice are given religious legitimacy. May we, on this first Shabbat of the Torah reading cycle of 5786, recover Jewish religious perspectives that are deeply committed to the dignity of every human being, and commit ourselves to public policies that give expression to this value.

Shabbat Shalom,

[1] Nahum Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis, p. 12.
[2] Gen. 9:6.
[3] Gen. 1:11, 21, 24–25.
[4] Yalkut Shimoni, Bereshit 1:13.