Two verses, spoken at the two ends of the same week, hold the partnership James Long and Rabbi Chaim Richman were tracing.
And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” (Genesis 1:26)
So the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to work the soil from which he was taken. (Genesis 3:23)
The first sounds like an invitation. The second sounds like a sentence. The sages refuse to leave them apart. The invitation is the sentence, and the sentence is the invitation. Man is not set down in a finished world and then punished into labor. He is consulted before he is formed, and then handed the very dust he was formed from, and told to work it.
The plural and the answer written beside it
Other systems have long taken “Let us make” as a crack in the Oneness. The Torah does not leave the crack open. The next verse shuts it: “And God created the man in His image” — singular, vayivra, not vayivra’u (Genesis 1:27). The Talmud states the rule without raising its voice. Wherever the heretics misread, the refutation is written beside the verse (Sanhedrin 38b).
Rashi learns the same lesson from Bereshit Rabbah: Moses himself hesitated at this line and said, in effect, Master of the universe, why hand them an opening? The answer he was given was not a doctrine of many makers. It was a lesson in conduct. Write it. The greater will one day need to learn from his Creator that even the One who made the upper worlds and the lower worlds took counsel before He made the human (Bereshit Rabbah 8:8; Rashi on Genesis 1:26).
So the classical reading stands, and it should be said first. The Maker remains one. The plural is consultation, not company.
With whom?
The midrash does not choose a single answer, and that is its honesty. Rabbi Yehoshua, in the name of Rabbi Levi, says He consulted the works of heaven and earth. Rabbi Ami says He consulted His own heart. Rabbi Hanina says He consulted the ministering angels, who asked what this creature’s nature would be and were shown only the righteous who would come from him (Bereshit Rabbah 8:3–5).
Rashi takes that last path and draws the moral of meekness: man would be in the likeness of the angels, and they might envy him, so the greater asked the lesser’s permission. The Ramban, in the name of Rabbi Yosef Kimchi, hears the verb addressed to the earth already on stage. The waters had been told to swarm. The earth had been told to bring forth. Now the body would rise from adamah, and the breath would come down from Him. Both of you, He says to the soil. I will give the soul.
The Great Noahide Teacher
And then, in the same chapter, one voice says what James Long is convinced of.
Rabbi Yehoshua of Sikhnin said in the name of Rabbi Shmuel: He consulted the souls of the righteous. The proof-text is a quiet line in Chronicles: “They are the potters, and the dwellers of Netaim and Gedera; with the king in his work they sat there” (I Chronicles 4:23).
The midrash reads the potters as the forming of man from dust, the planters as the garden in Eden, the fence as the bound set for the sea — and “with the king in his work” as the souls of the righteous, with whom the King of kings took counsel when He created the world (Bereshit Rabbah 8:7).
The Sages on “Let Us Make”
That is not a later invention laid over the verse. It is a saying of the sages. The “us” is not a second deity. It is, among the voices the midrash preserves, the souls themselves, already seated with the King in His work, who told what the partnership would be before a body had been formed to carry it. The physical realm is not a fall from that consultation. It is what the consultation was for. A soul that never meets soil never meets the work it was asked to share.
The sages say the same thing from the other direction, at every birth. There are three partners in a person: the father, the mother, and the Holy One. The parents give the white and the red, the bones and the flesh; the Holy One gives the spirit and the soul, the light of the face, the sight of the eye, the hearing of the ear (Niddah 31a; Kiddushin 30b). “In our image” is not exhausted on the sixth day. It is repeated every time a child is born. The plural keeps returning because the partnership was never closed.
He stopped so that the work could be shared
Creation does not end with a finished object. It ends with an infinitive. “And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it He ceased from all His work which God had created to make” — la’asot (Genesis 2:3). “And He made” is not what is written. “To make” is what is written.
The midrash hears the open end: the Sabbath arrived before the work was finished, and what remained was handed on (Tanchuma Buber, Bereshit 17). Ibn Ezra reads the verb as the power given to creatures to continue—to reproduce, to bring forth, to do. The world is not a closed artifact. It is a work left in the infinitive.
The Earth Needed Our Prayers
The rain teaches the same partnership in plainer speech. Before Adam, “no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to work the soil” (Genesis 2:5). Rashi, from the midrash, asks why the verse joins the two clauses.
Hashem Needs You
Because there was no man to recognize the benefit of rain. When Adam understood that the world depended on it, he prayed, and the rain fell, and the trees came up. The seeds were already in the ground. What was missing was a partner who would ask. Hashem withheld the last act so that the first man would have something to do that was not mimicry of a finished world, but a real share in bringing it up.
That is the force of James Long’s line. He stopped so that we could be co-creators — not makers of something from nothing, which remains His alone, but workers of what He had already spoken into the soil, and askers for what He had already prepared to give. The image is not a statue of God set in a garden. It is a capacity to act in the world in a way that answers Him.
Sent out to work the soil from which he was taken
Then the partnership is tested, and the verse that follows the exile is the one Rabbi Richman set his hand on.
He is not merely driven out. He is sent — vayeshalchehu — “to work the soil from which he was taken.” The purpose clause is the whole teaching. The expulsion has a lamed: to work. And the soil is not anonymous ground. It is the soil of his own making.
Where Was The Soil From
Where was that soil taken from? Bereshit Rabbah says: from the place of his atonement. “An altar of earth you shall make for Me” (Exodus 20:21). The Holy One said, I will create him from the place of his atonement; perhaps then he will endure (Bereshit Rabbah 14:8; Rashi on Genesis 2:7).
Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer and Midrash Tehillim place him, after the exile, on Mount Moriah, because the gate of the garden is near that mountain, and from there he had been taken, and to there he was returned — “to work the soil from which he was taken” (Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer 20; Midrash Tehillim 92).
The Kli Yakar draws the line tight. The verse mentions “from which he was taken” for a reason. The coarse stuff of the body is what made the fall possible. Therefore, the repair is assigned to the same staff. He is sent to the earth of the altar, to work it into an altar, because the damage is mended through the thing that occasioned it (Kli Yakar on Genesis 3:23).
This is Rabbi Richman’s sentence in the language of the sages. The objective now is to subjugate the physical soil from which I was taken to the spiritual essence.
The soil is not the enemy.
It is the assigned material. Illusions mislead precisely because the soil is real, and food is real, and desire is real, and a man can forget that the dust in his hands was taken from the place of atonement and breathed into by the One who consulted his soul. The work is not to escape the soil. The work is to work it until the altar shows through.
Adam’s first labor in the garden was already described with the same verb: “to work it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15). The sages hear avodah there as more than farming.
What is left after the exile is not a different task. It is the same task, now without the shelter of the garden, on the dust that can fail him and can also become his offering. Kayin and Hevel, in the next chapter, are already bringing from that soil and from the flock. The altar begins at once.
The wrestle is also from Him
James Long invoked the wrestle, and he was right to. Yaakov does not learn that the struggle interrupts providence. He learns that the struggle is providence. He crosses the Jabbok diminished, having already said katonti — I am too small for all the kindness and all the truth You have done with Your servant (Genesis 32:11) — and he rises with a new name:
“Your name shall no longer be called Yaakov, but Yisrael, for you have striven with God and with men, and you have prevailed” (Genesis 32:29). The prevailing is not a victory over Hashem. There is no such thing.
It is the moment a man stops treating the night as an accident and confesses that the adversary, the limp, the blessing, and the dawn were sent by the same hand. Hosea will say it in a line: he strove with God, he wept, and made supplication to Him (Hosea 12:5). The weeping and the supplication are the content of the victory.
The Soul and the Soil
That is the thread between the two verses and the river. The soul consulted in the beginning is the soul that must meet soil, and the man of soil must meet a night he did not choose, and both meetings are the partnership.
Everything is from Hashem does not mean that nothing is asked of us. It means that the asking is also His. The yetzer, the ground that resists, the angel that will not give its name until dawn — none of it arrives from outside His will. The image was given so that the creature’s will could answer, not so that the creature could pretend to be a second source.
What the partnership is, and what it is not
The sages are careful here, and an essay on these verses should be careful with them.
We do not create as He creates. Bara remains His. The heretics are answered in the next verse, and they are answered again every time a Jew says the Shema. The consultation of angels teaches humility, not shared divinity. The consultation of souls teaches that we were wanted in the work, not that we were necessary to it. He could have caused the rain without a prayer. He caused it to wait.
What he did not keep for himself was the finishing. La’asot. The prayer that brings the rain. The soil worked until it remembered it was altar. The night wrestled until it yielded a name. A life in which the physical is not obeyed as if it were the whole story, and not despised as if it were a mistake, but subordinated — Rabbi Richman’s word is exact — to the spiritual essence that was breathed in after the dust was gathered.
The Connection and the Clay
The connection is older than the body. The midrash seats the souls with the King in His work before the potters have formed the clay. The connection is also never elsewhere than the body. He sends the man back to the very soil from which he was taken, and He calls the sending a mission.
Between those two — the consultation before the forming, and the labor after the exile — is the whole of a Jewish life. Everything is from Him: the image, the dust, the expulsion, the altar hidden in the expulsion, the angel at the river, the dawn. And because everything is from Him, the work can be offered back to Him, and the partnership He opened with a plural verb can be answered, one life at a time, in the singular of a man who finally knows whose soil he is working.
Shalom Hazan Gavriel ben David