This drash was delivered at our service on October 10th, 2026. You can listen to this sermon on Contact Chai Podcast or watch it on our YouTube channel.
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They say every rabbi has their Torah, an idea that they keep coming back to again and again. It’s the thesis statement threaded through each sermon they give. And so coming to Bereishit, the very beginning of the Torah, it’s hard to not talk about the verse that stands behind everything I do as a rabbi. In fact, Rabbi Lizzi encouraged me to look at the passages we just read – the creation of humankind, finding that human a fitting companion, and those two humans eating from the forbidden tree. These stories are provocative, perhaps even troubling, pushing us to ask good questions about human nature. And I promise, we’ll get there. But I can’t skip past one of my favorite verses of Torah.
וַיִּבְרָא אֱלֹהִים אֶת־הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים בָּרָא אֹתוֹ זָכָר וּנְקֵבָה בָּרָא אֹתָם
And God created humankind in the divine image, in the image of God it was created, male and female they were created.
We’re going to focus on the first half of the verse (the second half, “male and female they were created,” leads the rabbis to one of my favorite midrashim, which inspired one of my tattoos – ask me about it later). But I want us to talk about this part: “And God created humankind in the divine image, in the image of God it was created.”
What does it mean to be created in the divine image?
I want to emphasize how remarkable this verse is. The story we find in Genesis shares common elements with other creation myths from the Ancient Near East. It begins with the struggle between primordial chaos and the creative will of a deity (or deities), out of which the world, deliberate and ordered, emerges triumphant. Yet those stories conclude with the creation of a particular people and a particular place, like Babylon or Sumer. The Torah is the foundational narrative of the people Israel (that’s us) – yet the first Jew doesn’t appear until chapter twelve, well after the world has been established. And so the assertion that humankind is created in the divine image is a universal statement, applying to all people – regardless of origin or affiliation.
This shared inheritance is probably best expressed through a rabbinic teaching on the inherent equality of humankind. Why does God begin with a single human (in contrast to plants and animals, which are created in abundance from the very beginning)? It is to remind us that no one can say “my ancestor is better than yours,” since in the end we all have the same progenitor. In this light, our “choseness” as a people is more about vision and mission (if not responsibility and obligation), rather than any kind of superiority. It is why our tradition abhors kings. Why should one person be able to raise themselves above others? While power may be granted to some, it is conditional rather than absolute.
https://youtu.be/IJRLW5mLcCE
This common origin also leads the rabbis to a place of wonder. They imagine God using the mold of the adam, the first human, to create every subsequent person. When we use a stamp to make many coins, they observe, every coin looks the same. Yet how amazing is it that when God uses the same stamp, crafted in the divine image, to make human beings we are all unique. Not just our appearance, but who we are – our personalities and passions, our talents and abilities, even our rough edges are all a reflection of God. It is both a testament to the incomprehensible vastness of the creative force behind the universe, and to the sanctity of each single life. There never was and there never will be a person like you.
And this irreplaceable uniqueness, coupled with the idea of a single source for all humankind, leads our tradition to recognize that every life is sacred. Whoever destroys one life destroys an entire world, the rabbis teach. But whoever saves a single life saves an entire world.
Now there is another version of this teaching (this is when I let some of you in on the fact that there are not one, but two, editions of the Talmud – the Bavli, or Babylonian, which is the dominant voice in our tradition, and the Yerushalmi, or Jerusalem, which preserves a parallel but sometimes distinct voice). The other version reads: whoever destroys the life of one Jew destroys an entire world. But whoever saves the life of one Jew saves an entire world.
The rabbis are aware that sometimes we must make impossible decisions between my life and yours, or the lives of our families and the lives of our neighbors – and so they spilled a significant amount of ink arguing about how we triage human life in a world that is not always as it should be. But they are clear that the world we are tirelessly working to create is one that returns us to the foundational principle of b’tzelem Elohim, of the sanctity of every single human being.
The reason this idea has been on my mind recently is that I’ve developed an unhealthy new habit. It’s called Threads. Threads is basically Instagram’s response to Twitter, which was a platform I judiciously avoided because sifting through the unfiltered vitriol of so many people (and probably just as many bots) was no bueno for my mental health. But Threads is sneaky. It pops up between posts about workout tips and silly cats (in case you’ve ever wondered what’s on my feed) and without thinking, I click on it. And because of what piques my unquestionably morbid curiosity, Threads shows me some of the worst of who we are when able to project whatever happens to be on our hearts or minds without immediate consequence.
I knew I shouldn’t have logged in on October 7. It’s a day that weighs heavily on my heart, as I know it does for so many of us. Unfortunately, my curiosity (and the algorithm) got the better of me. You might be able to imagine some of what I read. But I want to use one example, and one that you’re probably familiar with – regardless of your presence on, or absence from, social media. It’s one that has dominated my feed, having lived in New York and with many friends and colleagues there.
I want to imagine that Zohran Mamdani thought he was doing the right thing to commemorate October 7. And I’m not here to adjudicate whether he did, although I’m happy to have that conversation with you later. For right now, I am more interested in how people reacted to what he chose to do. First, he released a carefully crafted statement that he and his team likely agonized over for days (I know this from personal experience, as someone who has attempted to thread the needle of Israel and Palestine many times). They knew that people would be upset – if he only mentioned the terror inflicted on Israelis, certainly if he solely focused on the devastation experienced by Palestinians. They were aware that people would analyze every word used or not used. So they settled on what probably felt like the best answer: to begin with the tragedy of October 7, extend his sympathy to the victims of the ensuing war (which he believes is a genocide), and place all this within the context of an ongoing conflict that has claimed far too many lives. He then attended a candle light vigil organized by Israelis for Peace. And after he ate dinner at Hinds Hall, a Palestinian restaurant on the Upper West Side. On paper, it was a deliberate, relatively balanced, and generally human-centered approach that appealed to the base that elected him to office.
The backlash was immediate. In response to his invocation of genocide, the ADL accused Mamdani of "weaponizing a day meant for mourning… to recycle usual antizionist talking points.” The Israeli Consulate called his statement a “disgrace, shame, and insult.” And yet in response to his attendance at the vigil, pro-Palestinian activists called him a “traitor,” an “opportunist,” and a “zionist sellout.” And then there is a photo going around of Mamdani, sitting stony faced at the event, with people saying this is proof that once he thinks the cameras aren’t watching we can see how he really feels – that he doesn’t actually care about the people killed on October 7, but was using this as a PR stunt to please the city’s Jews. And then there was another picture of him holding the menu at Hinds Hall, which includes a map of modern Israel but labeled “Palestine,” with people saying this is evidence he wants to wipe out all Israelis. And I’m going further down this rabbit hole on Threads (I told you, it’s not a great habit) and I couldn’t help but feel like we’ve lost the plot.
October 7 was a terrible inflection point in a long conflict that has claimed too many lives, in a world that has treated human beings as expendable collateral in the clash of nations. But our tradition is insistent that every single one of those people, every single one, was unique, irreplaceable, made in the image of God. And I wondered how different the conversations around Mamdani and how we have decided to collectively memorialize the day and how any of us have decided to remember that heartbreaking tragedy would be if we set that foundational principle at the forefront. Because in the exchange I was witnessing, in both content and how that content was being expressed to other people, it seemed like we had collectively forgotten this fundamental truth that stands at the very genesis of our existence.
These past three years have been heart rending, for us as a people and for humankind as a whole. I understand the temptation to lash out in anger, especially when it feels like our particular pain is not being seen or addressed. But instead of creating space to remember the unique lives that have been taken from this world, and to hold each other in our grief, people were using their deaths as tools to make a point. And whether or not I agree with Mamdani, I have to hand it to him for trying – because knowing how hard it is to address that collective pain in a way that brings people together, that doesn’t open you to animus and hate, I don’t blame anyone for deciding it’s better to say nothing at all.
But then I remember the words of my friend and constant source of inspiration, Alon-Lee Green, one of the co-founders of Standing Together, that the real fight not is not between us but between all people and the forms of extremism that seek to strip away our humanity.
I owe it to my colleague Rabbi Yehiel Puopko who once taught me that one of the worst forms of idolatry we can inflict on the world is narrowing our perception of one another through labels and assumptions, or operationalizing other people for our own gain. Or put another way: to deny or denigrate, whether with intent or without thought, the god-made image of the other is to deny God. The rhetoric I saw online, which I know has found its way into conversations from city hall to the dinner table, is a hillul ha’shem, a desecration of God’s name.
This is our gift to the world, as Jews, a story that begins with us all – and all of us b’tzelem Elohim, in the divine image.
So I promised I’d actually get to the part of the Torah we read today. God recognizes that it is not good for humankind to be alone. And so God creates a companion for the adam, an ezer k’negdo. I love this term. It’s often translated as a fitting helpmeet, but let’s take a closer look. Ezer, a helper, yes, but also salvation, something that brings us toward our truest and wholest selves. K’negdo, literally in opposition, different and distinct. We need each other to survive, certainly, the unique abilities and talents of the other allowing us to be our fullest selves. I appreciate my doctor and my dentist. I can’t do my own taxes. You should see the way I kill plants. But it’s more than just what we do, it’s how we help each other grow. Alone, we might think that the world should be made in our image. We are, after all, created in God’s likeness. But then we meet another person, who shows us a radically different facet of the divine. And another person, and another, and suddenly we realize that what we thought was true and what we thought was certain is only a small part of a much larger picture.
It is easy to get caught up in these differences, and social media has only made it easier to see who can shout loudest from our particular vantage point. And so then we are reminded, in these opening passages of Torah, of a fundamental and immutable truth: that every single human being is valuable, sacred, irreplaceable, needed, equal in value, worthy of being treated as the reflection of the divine that they are.
And so this is my blessing for us today: recenter the central principle of our story. To see the world through the lens of the divine image, stamped on each and every person. To allow that to be the guide to our conversations. To courageously remind one another of this truth. I know I said it’s my Torah, but I sincerely believe that, if we made it the one each of us comes back to again and again, the world will move that much closer toward redemption.
