Here is my D’var Torah for Parashat Bereshit back in 5782 (2021).
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This is the book of the stories of humanity — on the day God created humanity, in the divine image did God create it, male and female God created them. (Genesis 5:1)
“We must talk about cleanup,” I say one day at rug time. “Too many children are not helping. Some of you go into the book room instead of doing a job.”
[I is not me, but a kindergarten teacher I’ll tell you about in a bit.]
“You could put in a trap door,” Joseph says.
“I’m serious, Joseph. We’re not talking about trap doors. I’m talking about people who don’t clean up.”
“Lock them in,” Samantha offers. “Then they’ll be locked up.”
“A trap door is better,” Joseph insists. “See, if they’re in there at cleanup time, it would fly open and trap them.”
“Someone could get hurt,” I say.
“I agree with Joseph,” Simon shouts. “Then they fall where the cleanup job is.”
“Yeah, yeah, a trap door is great,” Alex joins in. “It’s a slide so they don’t fall. They slide up to the job.”
“What if they fall back down? I think locking is better,” Arlene says.
“I don’t care for the idea of a trap door,” says the teacher. “Let’s figure out some new rules.”
“Get a guard,” Simon says.
“With a gun!”
“No shooting, right, teacher?” Samantha is determined to be reasonable. “Okay, a trap door then,” she concludes.
For a while [reports the teacher], cleanup is better — people are always more agreeable and generous after a good talk. The children prefer to imagine armed guard and trapdoors as more sensible reasons for our endless cleanup chores. It makes for a better story.
Another day: “Boys and girls, I must complain about cleanup again. People are going into the book room before they do a job.”
“We should of made a trap door,” Joseph says.
“All right. Let’s just pretend there’s a trap door,” I suggest.
“No, it has to be a real one. I’ll make you one.” Joseph draws.
“Let me do the stairs — or is it supposed to be a slide?”
“Yeah, Samantha, you do the slide and then the bad guy slides up here.”
“I’ll do the dungeon part,” Edward offers. “And a key.”
The children place their pictures on the book room floor and Joseph announces, “Whoever goes in there if they didn’t clean up they fall down the trap door.”
The children hurry through cleanup and report to Joseph, the chief of the cleanup project.
“I just slided up here, Joseph, and I wiped off a table, okay?”
“I put away a hundred blocks. Can I go?”
We don’t have a hundred blocks…but it doesn’t matter. The children have taken control and are acting out a solution.
Everyone assembled in the story room. “Come with me, children,” I say. “The cleanup job is not quite finished, although you did make a very fine start.”
Back in the story room, Edward tells Joseph, “Remember the great cleanup job we did with the trap door?”
The teacher in this story is Vivian Gussin Paley, zichrona livracha, a pre-school and kindergarten teacher and researcher, and the author of many captivating books about her work and these children. Of herself, Ms. Paley wrote, “I was not a good listener when my name became Teacher.” Part of how she got there was to bring a tape recorder to class, so she could really listen to her students and transcribe their words, free from her urge to figure them out and respond in the moment. Her books are full of these delightful and unusual observations of what kids sounds like, when they play and in response to real situations.
Ms. Paley’s trained herself to let the kids talk, to her and each other, and not force them to explain themselves in her terms — at least, she learned to back off as in the episode I quoted when she tries to sound like a teacher and the kids don’t get it. Her school gave her files on her students describing many challenges — cognitive, economic, family — but at some point Ms. Paley chose not to read the files. She had heard about a study where the mere awareness of labels caused teachers to listen more to students labeled “bright”, and she was determined to treat each of them uniquely.
Which is why to me Vivian Gussin Paley is one of the most important commentators on the first verse we read in the Torah today — This is the book of the stories of humanity — on the day God created humanity, in the divine image did God create them.
B’tzelem Elohim, in the divine image, is both a radical concept and a constant practice, and even in the adult world there is really no better illustration than the classroom of Vivian Gussin Paley. To snap briefly back in history, the idea of b’tzelem Elohim would have been shocking and surprising and thrilling to our biblical ancestors. Because everyone in the Middle East knew that a creation story ended with someone created special by the gods, and that person would be the king or the king’s ancestor. But in the Torah, it’s my ancestor and yours, no matter who I am or who you are — as the Mishnah puts it, no one can say Abba gadol me-avicha, my father has a better lineage than yours.
That same Mishnah says that every single human being is the first in a line that generates an entire world; and that the unique way each of us looks on the outside testifies to the miraculous mystery of humanity, that God has one image with which to create humans and yet no one of us looks like any other. No one can say that my appearance is more beautiful or divine than anyone else’s.
On second thought, these ideas are just as radical and thrilling and surprising today as they were when the Torah was first revealed.
When Ms. Paley began her teaching career, of course she cared equally for all her students, but that was not enough to actually teach them equally. Following through required her to develop a practice that would be incredibly disciplined. As a new teacher, it was always tempting to interpret quickly what a child is trying to say, particularly when they are frustrated or fighting or not following a rule like cleanup time — to see Joseph and Samantha and Arlene and Simon as riddles to solve, or as beings to manipulate so I don’t get stuck with cleanup and we can move to the next phase of my plan. Equality as a simple concept you could do just by assigning each child a chore and leave it at that, or rotating them through each day.
But not doing that, waiting and paying attention, were necessary to see the kids in proper dimension, to find out from them how one thing connects to another in their mind and their experience. How they move from the simplicity of trapdoors, to the dangers of falling through them and getting hurt, to the solution of being magically slid up and deposited next to the chore you were supposed to do, in a soft landing that makes it okay for everyone. Watching that unfold, between the children in their conversation, is a much fuller picture of seeing people b’tzelem Elohim. It’s each child’s story that reveals them as the image of the Divine.
For us too, b’tzelem Elohim can be too flat — when we talk generally about equality and equal rights, in a static kind of way. I mean hal’vai, if only we had that equality — but that’s hardly all there is to b’tzelem Elohim.
Just as in the kindergarten, there are all kinds of things that obstruct our view of other people as images of the Divine. The things Ms. Paley notes — economics, ascribed intellectual capacity, home and family background — we are wired to see people in terms of patterns.
Add in our own impatient, self-centered desires that others help me right now with something I need, the instrumentality of other people.
In fact we need to pay attention to many of those things and our ability to aggregate and label is in fact what is necessary to make us realize the magnitude of suffering that demands our response in the world. But only if we ask ourselves where in these numbers is the Divine image. Which is why we need constantly to bring ourselves back with conscious practices toward an awareness of b’tzelem Elohim. Back in teshuvah, which doesn’t take a break after Yom Kippur but starts immediately with Bereshit.
Once upon a time, Ms. Paley would count things like positive and negative words spoken by particular students and herself, or the involvement of different children in aggressive and nonaggressive play. When she started to listen to the recordings she began to see how many more dimensions there were to each child. Who brought what solution to cleanup from what other story or fantasy. Who stuck to trap doors, and who progressed from armed guards to superheroes. And who loved dragons and who loved babies and whose dragons began to deliver babies, and who reached out to other kids by inviting them to blend their favorite imaginary stories together as they acted out in play time. And by listening to it all, the specific problem of cleanup turned out to be richer than it originally looked. It wasn’t an isolated thing, a small problem in her small society, but embedded with everything else, a portal to the creative and generative aspects of her kids as well.
So too the problems our society and politics are trying to solve have more layers, and they aren’t just problems, but portals to knowing our fellow citizens better, and to the creativity that might emerge if we took time to listen to each other and all the wonderful and strange connections that come out of our mouths.
We can be classified and labeled, and we can be counted, and b’tzelem Elohim is not about denying that, it’s about correcting those processes or noticing when they take over entirely. In listening to her students so carefully, Vivian Gussin Paley was embodying Rabbi Akiva’s teaching, that one of the greatest gifts we can give is to actually show another person that we regard them as tzelem Elohim. So much of the time, we internalize the idea that the world sees us only as numbers or instruments or surface bodies, and not our own unique manifestation of the divine.
I realized as I skimmed through some of Ms. Paley’s work the other day the one big difference between her classroom and after, which is that she used only audiotape — she listened to her students’ voices. Yes, this was 30+ years ago and the cassette was the available technology. But putting aside visual for voices is actually a powerful practice when we need to bring ourselves back to regarding others as b’tzelem Elohim.
And so one of my own B’tzelem Elohim practices is to pay attention to people’s voices as they speak. I try sometimes not to see with my eyes, but to leave it to my ears. Whether it’s listening to sixth graders talk about themselves and their own quirkiness and the stories they love. Or listening at a funeral to the eulogy given by an adult grandchild or a friend, after they’ve told me the day before they’re not much for public speaking. Or listening to a citizen speak up at a public meeting. I try to pay attention not only to what I hear a lot, about love or friendship or an issue — but the pacing that comes from someone’s own love or commitment or loss, and the tone and timbre of a unique voice. That’s where I perceive the depth and dimension of the Divine image. That’s where I correct for my own rush to count and classify and categorize people at important moments. It’s by listening to people tell their stories, when they compose them and when they just come out.
This is the book of the stories of humanity — on the day God created humanity, in the divine image did God create it. This is the lesson, from Bereshit to a kindergarten class to us. In a time especially when we see people as for-or-against, as like-or-not-like, listen to the stories so we can avoid some of the trapdoors and all get to the book room together. Savor the voice of the people you already know; they are even more than you already know, just as infinite as the Divine. Listen to the stories and the sound of other people, in their individuality — so you can appreciate even more someone who you share something with; so you can learn what’s behind someone you think you don’t share something with. It’s what I hope we do here, where we see people we know each week and have the time to really talk and listen, to hear a full chapter or even a brief digression in the story of each other’s lives. May that spread out from here into our wider community. Then I’m convinced we’ll do more than clean things up neatly, but imagine and act together and creatively, in this new year of Torah.
Shabbat Shalom!
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