Tikkun Leil Shavuot: Betzelem Elokim Creativity and Responsibility

Tikkun Leil Shavuot: Betzelem Elokim

Creativity and Responsibility

Open with privilege of being able to share my thinking with you

Gratitude for awareness- reflect on the richness of this topic and being in the image as our inheritance- Hibah yetera

Acknowledge and express gratitude for the privileged position we find ourselves in.

Brought home to me by a friend who just returned from an amazing visit to Guatemala- women’s conference of women noble prize winners and grass roots organisations doing work mainly in developing countries . Several of those women were detained on their way and way back from the conference in their home countries because of the nature of the work they are doing. Some of them were mothers of young children, others elderly women. How we use the freedom of oppression that we have?

Also the other point she made was interconnectedness of all people and global citizen and connection with the environment. Can not be blind and deaf to the effects we have and the way we are all interconnected. The act of caring becomes something that actually enables us to live our full image. Come back to that later.

ברוך אתה ה' אלהינו מלך העולם, אשר יצר את האדם בצלמו, בצלם דמות תבניתו, והתקין לו ממנו בניין עדי עד. ברוך אתה ה', יוצר האדם.

Blessed are You, Hashem, our God, Sovereign of the Universe, who forms humanity in your image, in the image of the likeness of your structure, establishing from it eternal standing. Blessed are You, LORD, creator of humanity.

Sheva Brachot (Babylonian Talmud, Ketubot 8a)

Sheva brachot: When I explain the sheva brachot, just as I did with Lara the other night, go through the glory of the world-(shehakol bara lichvodo, asher yatzar et ha’adam) like kaddish at death- everything is around the glory of the Divine

Before we get to the blessing- significance of 3^rd term- highlights significance of the human relationship. What I say to people is that it is not about if God created the world or humans It is about what we learn about humans from the idea that God fashioned them, not only that but in God’s image.

We hold out that perspective on humans and their intimate intimate relationship with the divine- that is how close we are with God, hand-made, that connected. Not only that but also in God’s image.

Different teachers have taken our being in the image to mean different things. Tomer devorah- R. Moshe Cordevero-loving, compassion, midot of rahamim. Others have used it to attribute the beauty and wonder of our capacity for reproduction.

I want to talk about freedom and responsibility- what it gives us and what it demands of us

Rav Soloveitchik was of the opinion that humanity reaches the fullness of the divine image with which we are endowed through the realisation of our creativity.

“The most fundamental principle of all is that man must create himself”

R. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man p109

This is why he was so taken by Maimonides approach to teshuva and the agency that it expresses about the human capacity for transformation.

Rambam, Hilchot Teshuvah, Chapter 5:2

Do not even consider what the silly people of the nations and most of the dull-minded of Israel say, that the Holy One, Blessed Be, decrees upon each person at the time of birth whether he or she will be good or bad. This is not so - every person has the potential to be as righteous as Moses our Teacher, or as wicked as Jeroboam, clever or stupid, merciful or cruel, misery or noble, or indeed to possess any of the other temperaments. Nobody can force one, decree upon one, or lead one into one of the ways, but one should choose a way out of one's own free will. Jeremiah said, "Does not both good and evil come from the mouth of the most high?", i.e. that the Creator does not decree upon a person whether he or she will be good or bad. Nevertheless, a sinner damages himself or herself, and it is therefore fitting for him/her to cry and eulogize on account of sins and on what has been done to his soul by wrapping it with evil. Jeremiah further said, "Why then does a living person complain, a person for the punishment of his or her sins?". By this he means that since it is in our own free will to do evil, it is [also] fitting for us to return in repentance and to leave our evils, for this is also in our free wills. He further said, "Let us search and try our ways, and turn back to the Lord".

Constantly recreating ourselves and also using our brilliant minds to attend to the challenges of the world.

We are created in the image of God, the ultimate creator. The process of being intelligent involves creating new concepts. The ability to create new, exact responses maybe defined as human intelligence.

The recognition of each moment being a new moment and capacity to make new choices from full range of possibilities

Harvey Jackins

With more understanding the day can come when every act at our hand will be a creative one, in the finest sense, and man and women will rejoice in each other’s accomplishments from minute to minute.

In fact a full reclamation of this principle will mean the end to war and vast reduction of suffering and the rational distribution of the world’s resources among its peoples.

This brilliance in ourselves calls upon us to recognise the brilliance in another, or at least to acknowledge the honour of humanity- kavod habriyot- and the demands that that honour makes upon, even Torah laws. (Question about whether tzelem actually has halakhot attached to it- the only mitzvah is peru urvu in that pasuk, even parsha)

Rabbinic sources of kavod habriyot- meta-halakhic cateogory, halakhic value

(importance because all laws filter through these categories)

The implications that being made in the divine image has for how humans treat each other?

How we act (like God) but how we treat another (who is also God) both of those are about the other person- because we can be mohel on our own honour

Hope that we can be more humane to each other.

Explanations of its greatness- even though it is not a mitzvah it can override mitzvoth

And also- it is so great that the divine was prepared to be mohel/ to surrender on divine honour in its place.

Rashi explains according to the gemara there that when it says it overrides a negative commandment of the Torah it refers to lo tasur- do not stray from their words right or left- which is why it refers to overriding rabbinic commandments (because the rabbis instilled on their words d’oraita severity but also the capacity to reinterpret and override this severity)

Sort out different situations:

Examples of people going to do pesach offering, circumscise their son and if they hear someone has died and if the are a met mitzvah- they need someone to bury them- Rashi explains this is something that is kavod habriyot and pushes off something d’oraita

This shev ve’al taaseh (not doing something) is to be differentiated from actually having to do something forbidden. As Rashi explains: There are many things that have been permitted to uproot something from the Torah (la’akor dvar Torah) as a precaution and because of kavod habriyot but this is not a case where something is actually uprooted with an action but rather the person is inactive and the dvar Torah is thereby uprooted like blowing the shofar and lulav but someone who actually uproots it with their actions, this is not on. Like someone who wears kilayim…big warning about that.

Classic case is being able to transgress carrying laws (d’oraita) for this principle- taking stones – old fashioned toilet paper- in to a private space to avoid humiliation.

If someone will see someone else (as in Tosefta) but for oneself one is obligated to forego one’s own honour in order that the honour of the divine should not be desecrated

An excess of honour- we are treating other people as if their honour is transcendent and our own as if it is not.

An exception is in the case of hashavat aveida where a person does not have to return something that is beneath her honour because there is no obligation to humiliate yourself for the money or possessions of your fellow (although there is for your person)

We learn also from burying the dead (kvurat hamet), comforting the mourners (nihum aveilim), visiting the sick (bikur holim) and preparing the bride (hachnasat callah) and making her happy (meseach callah) : these are the things that are not beneath anyone’s honour.

(hashem visiting Abraham after his milah)

Coming back to the idea of caring and seeing the other as divine as something that completes us:

May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude:

There is only really one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one’s gift to those one loves most…The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up. Getting a sense of worth from ourselves which then in turn causes us to act like someone who is worthy.

"Excessive fear of sin destroys the goodness in a person, and makes of him a lowly creature, who does nothing but lie there, shaking." So writes Abraham Isaac Kook, in the opening paragraph of Orot Ha-emuna. "A person must believe in his life, in both his physical and moral powers." The lack of emunah in oneself is the greatest of all the curses in the Torah, "Your life will be in the balance...and you will not believe in your life." You will be plagued by self-doubt (Your life will be "in the balance") and lack inner confidence. Because of this inner anxiety, "In the morning you will say, 'Who will give evening?' and in the evening 'Who will give morning?' "katnut ha-emunah," "insufficient emunah," is a lack of confidence in oneself, and "comes from the inability to raise one's own self-worth to the point of understanding how he is deserving of the Divine Greatness."

Therefore we must not stifle any talent, any human propensity, from developing to its fullest. It must first be allowed to exhaust the individuality buried within it. Once its full nature has been revealed and drawn out, then, and only then may the Jewish genius for integration and synthesis, including the rolling back of excessive development, be brought into play. If we impede the power of human creativity in the name of "faith" we sin against emunah.

Rav Kook Orot Ha’emunah (Yehuda Gellman)

Here we sin against God when we block our creativity