This is the D’var Torah I gave in 2022 for Parashat Bereshit, the opening chapters of the Torah in the annual weekly cycle. I am leaving it here with one contemporary reference I made at the time that might sound different today. I also may update this as my D’var Torah for this Shabbat (I am publishing this the day before we read Parashat Bereshit once again).
One thing I’d like to do more of this year is to show how Torah works — how it might have worked for its original Israelite community and how it worked for the Talmudic rabbis and their midrashic process. Otherwise a Dvar Torah is basically a TED Talk that references a story or a verse. Which is also absolutely one of the ways the Torah works — but I can’t generate a TED-quality talk every week even when I know what message I want to drive home. And in any case that is not the only way, and it’s important for you to pick up some of the tools, or how to use the instruction set to write new code, or see under the hood of what I’m doing up here. You learn that kind of thing mostly in study sessions and interactive, and you get practice doing it yourself — but I want to show it also from time to time on the bimah and today will be one of those.
So I want to introduce a term that’s kind of insider-y, it’s an Aramaic phrase that you can use with your Talmud studying friends: hava amina. Sounds like hava nagilah, but it’s: hava amina. It means: I would have said, or I might have said. Hava הַוָּה in Aramaic is like haya הָיָה in Hebrew, was or would have been, and amina אַמִינָה is like omer ani אוֹמֶר אֲנִי in Hebrew, I say or I would say — because when you talk fast an “r” often gets dropped or merged into a nearby “n”. Like how we say “irresponsible” instead of “in-responsible.” Hava amina הַוָּה אַמִינָה: I would have said or I might have said.
Hava amina is how a response starts in the Talmud whenever someone hears a teaching that is either screamingly obvious, or not that far from common sense. The Talmud wants to know why the Torah or the famous rabbi said this thing which hardly needed saying.
It’s funny, we don’t think of Jews and rabbis as needing a special permission to start talking ever, but actually the early rabbis were kind of E.F. Hutton-ish; they expected themselves to be quiet unless they had something significant to say.
So Talmud will say: No it’s not so obvious, it had to be articulated — because hava amina, I could have said this other thing which is more natural or seemingly more obvious, and we need this teaching to rebut that. Hava amina is your “prior” as they say today, your prior assumption. If you want to sound like you really know, you’ll say “What’s the hava amina?” — what’s the alternative assumption you’re rebutting. And you can say it today about anything from football to politics to whether you think a movie will be good or bad. A fancier version of this is dibrah Torah k’neged yetzer ha-ra — the Torah is talking back to the evil impulse. Behind many if not all statements in the Torah is a specific observation about the power of the yetzer ha-ra, the thing inside that holds us back from goodness.
So one great tool for Torah analysis is trying to figure out the hava amina, the assumption the Torah notices people have which has to be rebutted or refuted.
I am going to give you three hava amina-s related to the statement that humans are created b’tzelem Elohim, in the Divine image. The verse says Vayivra Elohim et ha-adam b’tzalmo, b’tzelem Elohim bara oto, zachar unekevah bara otam. וַיִּבְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים?׀?אֶת־הָֽאָדָם֙ בְּצַלְמ֔וֹ בְּצֶ֥לֶם אֱלֹהִ֖ים בָּרָ֣א אֹת֑וֹ זָכָ֥ר וּנְקֵבָ֖ה בָּרָ֥א אֹתָֽם: God created the human in God’s image; in the image of God God created it; male and female did God create them. (Genesis 1:28). We say this so much that it has become obvious to us, in some ways even banal. To get at the power, we have to uncover the hava amina, the what else would you have thought.
Hava amina #1 requires some history.
In the ancient middle east, there were creation stories associated with different shrines or kingdoms or fall festivals. And there was a pattern, in Mesopotamia and in Canaan, the cultures our ancestors were immersed in from 2000 BCE through the 500s BCE, the whole time that is described in the Torah and the prophets. The pattern involved some early behind-the-scenes work by the gods to fashion the observable world out of whatever was there already, and then a fight among the gods often to the death until one of them was on top, or the death and rebirth of the main god, and then the creation of a special human being and the creation of a shrine to that main god. The human being created in the story was the king or the ancestor of the current king, and the shrine was in the capital or the imperial city. That’s the story our ancestors would have expected to hear about creation, whether in the time of Avraham or at Mt. Sinai or when scholars think the first chapter of Genesis was first written or conveyed somewhere around the 7th century B.C.E. or maybe the 6th, meaning a few hundred years after King David and possibly around the time of the exile by the Babylonians.
The hava amina is that there is one special human, or one special human family, and then the rest of us. The special one — that’s royalty, and they are associated with this grand city and this grant nation. Me, Israelite in this itty bit land dominated by other empires, I’m not anything. Me, average Israelite, I’m not grand. Me, female Israelite, I don’t amount to anything.
So Rabbi Shai Held emphasizes that the Torah comes and at the moment God is creating a human, that Israelite would have expected to hear God fashioned a king — and instead there is: God created Adam, a person. You, the individual. Every human is like the king — vayivra Elohim et ha-adam, God created the singular person, b’tzalmo. Male and female are royalty, or equivalent to how humans think usually about royalty — zachar unekevah bara otam. Israelites who aren’t part of some big empire — and also these Canaanites all around, and also the imperial nation and all their people — bara otam, God created each of these individuals and all the individuals together.
No one else anywhere was saying that each individual was just as significant as a king with a special relationship to a god. Many centuries later, the Mishnah teaches that one non-king human was created so that no one can say: abba gadol me-avicha, my daddy’s bigger than your daddy, my lineage is superior to yours.
Today we take that for granted on the surface, but the hava amina was much more sensible to our ancestors and hearing this must have made a huge difference, and given them hope when in daily life and international affairs they were often not regarded as very much, by their own kings or by other nations.
And we have to work at the force of what it means to swing from some people are really valuable to everyone is. To take one example, in 2011 it was this week of Parashat Bereshit that the Israeli government arranged for the release of Gilad Shalit from Hamas capavity, where he had been for more than 5 years. At times it was doubted whether he was actually alive, or whether the prospect of his life was just some manipulation on the part of terrorists. To get Gilad back required Israel to release over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, many with Israeli blood on their hands. It was incredibly controversial. The hava amina is strong — at some point one individual isn’t as important, or there is a price too high. But the ethos of Israel is that every single soldier is someone we are responsible for, as a society that forces them into battle, for good reason but without their consent — we are responsible even at great social cost or sacrifice or even risk. Gilad Shalit was never far from the front page in Israel all those five years of on again off again negotiations.
Hava amina #2 comes via a teaching of Rabbi Akiva in Pirkei Avot (3:14) — Chaviv adam shenivra b’tzelem, chibah y’tayrah noda’at lo shenivra b’tzelem. Beloved are humans in that they are created in the Divine image, but more beloved that they are told they are created in the Divine image.
The hava amina is that people often do not know that we are in the Divine image, because our society speaks out of both sides of its mouth. Much of our civlization seems built on the opposite assumption that we are not all valuable or valuable in ourselves. We treat people as eyeballs, commercial opportunities; we rate people by superficial appearance and how they can be useful to my own happiness. We particularly force our kids to measure up constantly, to a grade point average or a list of worthwhile activities. Not that those are not connected to values of learning and living together, but too often it gets detached, and kids internalize it. And we even as adults internalize all this as severe self-judgment.
The uncountable, the quirky, the unique, the undirected or inner-directed parts we have to remind ourselves to notice and celebrate, in each other and in ourselves. Rabbi Akiva says the Torah sets the example, by telling us more than once that we are in the Divine image. So that it’s not just something that the Divine is aware of, but we are too. We have to make ourselves that Torah-like story for other people, to let them know they too are created in the Divine image.
Hava amina #3 is connected, and comes via another midrash. Rav Simlai taught: The Torah’s beginning is devoted lovingkindness, gemilut chasadim, and its end is gemilut chasadim. The beginning, in that God make clothing for Adam and Chava out of animal skins, and the ending in that God buried Moshe God’s-self without any help.
That sounds nice. Those are actually like the third and third-last things in the Torah, not exactly the first and last, but sort of and close enough. But the hava amina is this: Adam and Chava, and Moshe, didn’t deserve a lot of care because they were far from lovable in those moments. Adam and Chava had just disregarded a big part of the first thing God had ever told them. And had God not said that if they ate from the tree they would die? Moshe’s life was ending because he dishonored God’s own holiness in front of the peopel when he struck the rock for water in anger. The hava amina is that people are sometimes hard to love and for that reason hard to care for, or be kind to, and maybe so hard that you have a good reason to walk away or take a break.
And nonethless God takes care of them precisely in those moments. God makes sure that the last impression we have of Adam and Chava, and of Moshe, is not their flaws or failures, but that they are fundamentally deserving of God’s care.
And not just the minimum level. What does God care if Adam and Chava want to go around wearing different leaves every few days, God never told them they had to cover up. But so as not to let them feel abandoned at a time of punishment and even exile, God took care of them on their terms.
Sometimes it’s easy to see people in their full humanity, and sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes caring is easier and sometimes it is very hard. So the image of God idea is to push us to see ourselves turning away from people, and reminding us the reason to turn back even when the loving feeling might seem gone, gone for a time.
The Torah itself, as our first ancestors heard it and our Talmudic rabbis understood it, is all about uncovering the hava amina — the very real things in human nature that strain our ability to do good, or that offer us an appealing off ramp from doing it.
The image of God, Tzelem Elohim — this is both an obvious concept by now and one of the most challenging. We don’t get it by ignoring the hava amina, but by making sure to surface it, to take serious the yetzer ra that the Torah is speaking against. Every ethical teaching in the Torah is meant to be a revolutionary new idea, wrapped around the most realistic observations about human nature. The more hava amina-s we figure out, the better we know ourselves, and the more dramaticaly we can make Tzelem Elohim more real in our world.
Shabbat Shalom!
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