Question

 
I will narrow my focus to the final point of creation, to the living being often called the “crown of creation” — the human being. Let me remind you that the human being we are talking about, the one similar to us, the one of whom we are the continuation, is created in the Torah portion twice, in two ways. One way is on the sixth day, where it is written, “For God made the human being in the image of God”; in the image of God, that is: intelligent, responsible, self-aware. The second way is on that very same day, but in the Garden of Eden, when he was tempted to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and thereby to turn from a creature lacking self-awareness into a human being — one who is in the image of God and knows what is required of someone for whom that is the primary defining trait. In both ways there was a sharp and immediate transition from a state of no human being to a state of a complete human being possessing choice, awareness, understanding, and responsibility. Rabbi Kook especially emphasizes choice. But such a sharp transition, from zero to one hundred, contradicts what we clearly know from unequivocal findings about the human species: that it has been walking the earth for hundreds of thousands of years, that its external form and physiology were more or less similar to ours, and that from it there gradually developed, in a process whose stages are not all known, what we call “the wise human,” Homo sapiens in the accepted foreign term. That is the one entitled to the characterization “the image of God.” The description of creation in the Torah is not a historical story but an ideological summary of a sharp and binding transition that, in the nature familiar to us, took place in a prolonged and gradual process, yet one of great significance. The verses in the portion of Genesis that describe the creation of man, or the emergence of his consciousness, take place hundreds of thousands of years after human beings already existed on earth, male and female, fruitful and multiplying and filling the earth, very similar to the human being as we know him today. The dramatic event that took place on that metaphorical “Friday” was not the creation of the physical human being, but a description of his becoming the bearer of the image of God.