By Hazan Gavriel ben David, Esnoga Beit HaShoavah, Amarillo, Texas

Rabbi Yisroel C. Blumenthal posed the question again this week, cleanly, the way a teacher poses it when he already knows the room will reach for the wrong answer.

Who was God speaking to when He declared, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26)?

Does this mysterious passage reveal something profound about God, humanity, and the purpose of creation?

Yes. It does. And the profundity is not a second or a third person inside the One God. The profundity is that the human is a child of two parents, the Torah has already named: the earth, adamah, and the heavens, the breath of Hashem. The court is consulted. The parents are addressed. Only One creates.

That is the Jewish answer. It is the Rabbi’s answer. It is also the answer sitting in the next hinge of the scroll, Genesis 2:4, if we let the grammar finish the sentence Genesis 1:1 began.

The question, in the Rabbi’s own frame

In LET US MAKE MAN: Who Was God Speaking To?, Rabbi Blumenthal walks the verse the way Jews for Judaism has walked it for years. The plural is real. It is not a slip. It is also not a partnership in divinity. The Torah describes God taking counsel with His heavenly court before creating humanity, and then, in the very next verse, creating alone.

וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים נַעֲשֶׂה אָדָם בְּצַלְמֵנוּ כִּדְמוּתֵנוּ

And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” (Genesis 1:26)

וַיִּבְרָא אֱלֹהִים אֶת־הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים בָּרָא אֹתוֹ זָכָר וּנְקֵבָה בָּרָא אֹתָם

And God created man in His image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. (Genesis 1:27)

Plural in the consultation. Singular in the act. The Talmud states the rule without raising its voice: wherever the heretics misread, the refutation is written beside the verse (Sanhedrin 38b). Verse 26 opens the door. Verse 27 closes it. One subject. One verb of creation. Vayivra Elohim. God created.

That is the Rabbi’s answer, and it should be stated before anything else is added. The “us” is the heavenly court. The Maker remains one.

Why is the court addressed?

Rashi learns meekness here, not metaphysics. Man is in the likeness of the angels. They might envy him. So the Holy One takes counsel with them. The midrash drives home the same point in a lesson Moses himself is reluctant to write. When Moses reaches na’aseh adam, he says, in effect, “Master of the universe, why hand the heretics an opening?”

The answer he is given is pedagogical rather than doctrinal. 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 consulted the ministering angels before He made the human (Bereshit Rabbah 8:8).

The court does not co-create. It is taught. Some stand to plead. Some stand to accuse. The same pattern appears when the prophet sees the host of heaven stationed at the throne (1 Kings 22:19), and when Daniel hears a decree by the watchers (Daniel 4:14). Hashem has a family, a household. He does not have a colleague.

That is why the passage teaches human dignity without cracking the Shema. We are addressed in the figure before we exist. A being who will rule fish, birds, beasts, and soil is not manufactured in silence. The King announces the heir to the court so the court will not mistake the heir for a rival god, and so the heir will not mistake himself for a beast. The image is an office. Likeness is orientation. Dominion is the job description that follows the announcement, not a license to strip the house.

Hear, O Israel: Hashem our God, Hashem is one. The court can be spoken to. The court cannot be the Speaker.

The other Jewish answer, and it is not a rival

There is a second classical reading, and this essay is written to place it beside the Rabbi’s, not against it.

Ramban, citing Rabbi Yosef Kimchi, hears na’aseh as an address to the earth already on stage. The waters were told, “Let the waters swarm.” The earth was told, “Let the earth bring forth.” When the human is reached, the verb changes because the human is neither a swarm nor a beast. “Let us make” means: I and the earth already mentioned. The earth brings forth the body from its elements, as it did with cattle. He, blessed be He, gives the spirit from His mouth. Genesis 2:7 is the receipt for Genesis 1:26.

וַיִּיצֶר יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים אֶת־הָאָדָם עָפָר מִן־הָאֲדָמָה וַיִּפַּח בְּאַפָּיו נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים וַיְהִי הָאָדָם לְנֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה

Then Hashem Elohim formed the human, dust from the adamah, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living soul. (Genesis 2:7)

Body from below. Breathe from above. Similar to both, says Ramban. In the capacity of the body, similar to the earth from which he was taken. In spirit, similar to the higher beings, because the spirit is not a body and does not die. Then verse 27 narrows the lens on purpose: “in the image of God He created him,” so no reader will think the human is only a finer animal. The distinction is the breath. The partnership is not divine. It is parental, and only one parent is God.

Rashi gives the court. Ramban gives the soil. Both refuse a second deity. A blog that loves the Rabbi’s question can hold both without blurring the lines between them.

Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 2:4: heaven and earth become parents

This is the additional data, drawn from the reading we opened on Parashat Bereshit, the seventy faces, and Adam the blueprint.

Genesis 1:1 is a completed architecture.

בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ

In the beginning Elohim created the heavens and the earth.

God is the subject. Heaven and earth are the objects. Elohim builds by separation. Light from dark. Waters from waters. Sea from dry land. Days 1–3 make the rooms. Days 4–6 fill them. The human arrives last, male and female, in the image, blessed to be fruitful, to fill, to subdue, to rule. That is Adam as the crown of the architecture. Not yet Adam as a lonely body in dust.

Then the scroll turns the camera.

אֵלֶּה תוֹלְדוֹת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְהָאָרֶץ בְּהִבָּרְאָם בְּיוֹם עֲשׂוֹת יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים אֶרֶץ וְשָׁמָיִם

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, on the day Hashem Elohim made earth and heaven. (Genesis 2:4)

Toldot is not a caption. It is a birth record. Everywhere else in Genesis, eleh toldot introduces what a parent generates: the generations of Adam, Noah, Shem, and Terah. Here, the parents are the heavens and the earth. Chapter 1: Heaven, then Earth. Chapter 2:4: earth, then heaven. That inversion is not a redactor tripping on his cloak. It is the hinge that turns a cosmos into a family.

Watch the Name do the same work. Chapter 1 speaks as Elohim, the face of power and judgment, din. Chapter 2 fuses the Name: Hashem Elohim, compassion joined to power, and never Hashem alone in this panel. The Judge and the Merciful are one. The garden is where you find out whether the human can live inside that oneness. Hashem hu haElohim.

So when Genesis 1:26 says “let us,” the scroll has already prepared two listeners who are not gods. The court above, which must not envy the image. The earth below, which must yield the body. And the breath that will make the dust a speaker comes from the same One who made the heavens in Genesis 1:1.

Earth is adamah. Heaven is the breath.

Say it plainly, because the Torah says it plainly.

The human is not named for a private biography. Adam is the creature taken from adamah, colored like adom, kept alive by dam. Earth. Red. Blood. The human is the dirt that learned to speak.

Before that learning, chapter 2 diagnoses a world that is finished and still barren: no shrub of the field, no herb of the field, because Hashem Elohim had not caused rain, and there was no human to work the ground. Then a mist rises and waters the face of the adamah. Rain, even as mist, is heaven and earth acting like parents. That is why 2:4 called them toldot.

Then the forming. Dust from the ground. Breathe into the nostrils. Nishmat chayim. Ramban will not let that breath be mistaken for a finer vapor of the elements, or for an overflow from the angels. The full Name is on the verse for a reason. The soul is breathed from the Most High. The body stays kin to the potsherd. The person is at the meeting.

That is what “in our image, after our likeness” is doing in Kimchi’s reading, the reading Ramban calls the clearest. Our image: the human will resemble both parties to the making. The earth, in body. The higher realm, in spirit.

Psalm 8 sets the altitude without confusion: “You have made him a little lower than the angels, and crowned him with glory and honor.” Lower than the court. Higher than the cattle. Child of soil and of breath. Not a third of God, and not a godling in clay.

Males and females belong in the same sentence. Genesis 1:27 refuses to let image be a male monopoly: “in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Genesis 5:2 goes further: “He called their name Adam on the day they were created.” The singular contains the plural. The name is the species, the couple, and the first person. Pull one ring out, and the others collapse.

What is the passage for

The Rabbi’s video asks what the verse teaches about human dignity, responsibility, and the purpose of creation. The Torah’s answer is practical.

Dignity: you were announced. A court was told. A ground was addressed. A breath was given that did not come from the ground. No human is raw material.

Responsibility: image is not a complexion. It is a post. Rule the fish and the bird and the beast without becoming what you rule. Work the adamah you were taken from. The ground is mother, not merchandise. Cain’s blood crying from the adamah is the family crime in the family soil. If Earth is parent, brother’s blood on the ground is not a private stain. It is a wound in the mother.

Purpose: the human is the place where the upper and the lower are supposed to meet without one swallowing the other. Elohim separates, or the world drowns. Hashem Elohim moistens, or the world bakes. We are the creature who has to learn both gestures. Receive life. Do not seize it. The Tree of Life remains the destiny of the one who can hold judgment and compassion in one Name. Exile, in Genesis 3:22–24, is mercy against a hand stretched out to take.

All of that fails if “let us” is drafted into a divided God. A divided God cannot give an undivided image. A partner-god cannot teach the court humility, because he would be negotiating, not consulting. The next verse exists so that mistake cannot plead ignorance.

Adam the blueprint, not a fossil

Adam is not a fossil and not a mascot. The Adam is a blueprint. Image. Dust. Breath. Male and female. Naming. Loneliness. Desire. Exile. Work. Childbirth. Death. Brother-blood on the ground. The seventy nations of Genesis 10 are not other species. They are Adam after the split, mapped into seventy faces.

The alef becomes an ayin, so the one human can wear seventy faces and still be called back to the Tree. Wine is yayin, gematria 70. The Torah is compared to wine. Seventy faces. Seventy languages at Sinai. The opening plural of Genesis 1:26 is not the first crack in unity. It is the first hint that one image will have to be carried by many without ceasing to be one.

That is why the Ten Sayings later feel like family medicine. They answer wounds already open in the garden and in the field. You shall not murder. Do not steal a life that was breathed. Do not bow to what you were set over. Remember the day the making stopped, so the child of earth and breath does not forget which parent is God.

A direct answer, in one page

Rabbi Blumenthal, this is the answer as we hear it at Beit HaShoavah, offered beside yours, not in place of it.

God was speaking to His heavenly court, as Rashi and Bereshit Rabbah teach, so that the greater would consult the lesser, and so that envy would not be the first word spoken over the image.

God was also speaking to the earth, as Ramban and Rabbi Yosef Kimchi teach, because the body of the human was to come up from adamah, as the beasts had come up, while the breath would come down from Him.

And the scroll itself, at Genesis 2:4, tells us what those two are in the grammar of family. Heaven and earth are the toldot-parents. Genesis 1:1 creates them. Genesis 2:4 lets them generate. The earth is the mother of the dust. The heavens are the realm from which the breath of Hashem is given. The child is called Adam because he is still adamah, and is called a living soul because he is no longer only adamah.

The “our” of image and likeness is the resemblance to both sides of that making. The verb of creation stays singular because resemblance is not authorship. Parents in the order of the world. One Father of spirits. One Name.

That is profound. It is also enough. The purpose of creation, at the human seam, is a meeting: soil that can hear, breath that can choose, a court that must not be jealous, and a people who will one day be told that the greater consults before he acts. We are at that meeting. We are not the Maker.

Hazan Gavriel ben David Esnoga Beit HaShoavah, Amarillo, Texas Parashat Bereshit, 5787

Frequently asked questions

Who is the “us” in Genesis 1:26?

In Jewish tradition, the “us” is the heavenly court, the ministering angels, whom God consults. It is an act of humility and a guard against angelic envy, not a confession of multiple deities. A second classical reading, Ramban’s, hears God addressing the earth: the earth to yield the body, God to give the breath. Verse 27 returns to the singular: God created.

Does “Let us make man in our image” teach the Trinity?

No. The Torah places the singular act in the next verse: “And God created man in His image.” Sanhedrin 38b notes that the misreading is answered beside the verse itself. Image means office, dignity, and resemblance to the charge God gives, not a division inside the One God. Hashem is one.

How are heaven and earth our parents?

Genesis 2:4 calls the next panel “the generations of the heavens and the earth.” Toldot is a birth language. Genesis 2:7 then shows the birth: the human is formed from adamah, the earth, and receives nishmat chayim, the breath of life, from Hashem Elohim. Earth mothers the body. The breath from above fathers the living soul. Only God is the Creator.

What does it mean to be made in the image of God?

Not a body copied from God. God is not a body. Ramban: the body resembles the earth it was taken from; the spirit resembles the higher realm, because spirit is not flesh and does not die. Psalm 8: a little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor. Image is responsibility: rule without ravaging, work the ground you came from, carry the breath you were given.

Why does Genesis 1:27 switch from plural to singular?

Because consultation is not creation. The court may be asked. The earth may be addressed. The making is God’s alone. The switch is the point.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

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Creation itself was declared tov me’od — very good. You are His child. He does not need your goodness; He wants you to choose it. The command in Devarim is still the same one that stood between the two trees:

“See, I have set before you life and good, death and evil… choose life.”

The Tree of Life was never removed from the structure of reality. It is still the option. Hashem is already in every human life as HaMakom. The only thing He leaves entirely in your hands is whether you will fear Heaven — whether you will turn toward Him and choose good.

The Jewish idea, in short

Free will had to exist in the Garden. That is why there were two trees.

If there had been only the Tree of Life, Adam and Chava would have had no real alternative. Love that cannot be refused is not love; obedience that cannot be refused is not choice. Hashem therefore placed the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the same garden so that the first humans — and every human after them — would stand before a genuine decision.

The Sages put the paradox in one sentence (Berachot 33b):

“Everything is in the hands of Heaven except the fear of Heaven.”

And Rabbi Akiva (Avot 3:15):

“Everything is foreseen, yet free will is given.”

Hashem knows the whole story because He is not in the story. He is HaMakom — The Place. The world exists inside Him; He is not contained by the world. Time and space are His creations. His four-letter Name (Yud-Heh-Vav-Heh) itself holds hayah / hoveh / yihyeh — was, is, and will be — at once. From outside time, He sees every moment. From inside time, you still choose.

That is the “Name squared” image: the letters arranged in a geometric square containing galaxies. The Name is not a label inside the universe; the universe is inside the Name.

Creation itself was declared tov me’od — very good. You are His child. He does not need your goodness; He wants you to choose it. The command in Devarim is still the same one that stood between the two trees:

“See, I have set before you life and good, death and evil… choose life.”

The Tree of Life was never removed from the structure of reality. It is still the option. Hashem is already in every human life as HaMakom. The only thing He leaves entirely in your hands is whether you will fear Heaven — whether you will turn toward Him and choose good.

מקום in standard gematria is 186.

$$מ = 40,\quad ק = 100,\quad ו = 6,\quad ם = 40$$מ=40,ק=100,ו=6,ם=40

$$40 + 100 + 6 + 40 = 186$$40+100+6+40=186

That is the number that the Arizal and, later, the Kabbalists pair with the squared Tetragrammaton.

The squared Name (Mispar Perati)
Do not square 26. Square each letter of יהוה:

$$10^{2} + 5^{2} + 6^{2} + 5^{2} = 100 + 25 + 36 + 25 = 186$$102+52+62+52=100+25+36+25=186

HaMakom
With the article: המקום = 5 + 186 = 191.
If the final mem is counted gadol (600): מקום = 746. The usual teaching uses the simple 186.

Where the word first appears
Genesis 1:9: “Let the waters under the heaven be gathered unto one place (makom).” The first makom in Torah is the gathering-point of creation — space itself being assigned a location by the One who is not located.

The midrash that names Him HaMakom
Bereishit Rabbah 68:9, on Yaakov at Bet-El (“he encountered the place”):

Why do they call the Holy One HaMakom? Because He is the Place of the world, and the world is not His place.

That is the theological payload of 186: He contains time and space; they do not contain Him. That is also why foreknowledge and free will can stand together.

Other 186 identities used in the sources

The letters of the word itself
מקום splits as מ–ם (the two mems, waters / presence) around קו (kav, the ray). Chassidic writers read that as: the inner letters are the kav that enters the vacated space; the outer letters are the mem of the primordial “waters.” Space is not empty. It is structured by the Name.

Reduced / katan
1+8+6 = 15; 1+5 = 6. Six is vav, the connector between the Name and makom. The Place holds the worlds together.

For the video line, the clean teaching is:

Square the Name: 100 + 25 + 36 + 25 = 186.
186 is Makom.
The Name squared is The Place.

That is the gematria. The midrash is the meaning.

“But Hashem already knows what I will do — so where is free will?”

From outside the reel, He sees every frame at once. That is what the Name means: hayah, hoveh, yihyeh — was, is, will be — one word. Square the letters, and you get 186, which is Makom. He is the Place that contains the film. Knowing the movie is not the same as forcing the actor.

From inside a frame, the choice is real. Rabbi Akiva: All is foreseen, yet free will is given. Free will is not a single moment at the beginning. It is everywhere on the strip.

The film strip and the Matrix line

Your life is already on the reel, like a finished movie in the can. In the block universe, you can “visit” any frame — memory, teshuvah, even prayer that reaches “back” — but you do not cut frames out. The Matrix line is used that way: you did not drop into this world only to invent a path from nothing. You entered a story that already has a shape, and you are here to understand why you chose and to live out that choice as His child.

That does not cancel bechirah. The Oracle can see the door. You still walk through it.

What has Hashem made you for

He made you with potential. He made you succeed. You are not a prop outside Him. You are a frame inside HaMakom. The two trees are still standing in the middle of the garden because a movie without a real choice is not a human life.

In 2000, at Rabin Medical Center in Israel, Professor Leonard Leibovici took the charts of 3,393 patients who had bloodstream infections between 1990 and 1996. He randomized them, double-blind. Then people prayed for one group — years after those hospital stays were already over.

The prayed-for group had a slightly lower death rate (28.1% vs 30.2%) and significantly shorter hospital stays and fever. The prayer landed in the past.

Ephraim’s point is not “science proved tefillah.” He says it himself: an interesting, controversial study that fits what the Torah already teaches. In Hashem’s world, there is no separate past. He is HaMakom. Every frame is present to Him. So ein mukdam u’meuchar baTorah — there is no before and after in the Torah. Avraham is not gone. Kaddish is not only memory. A mitzvah can touch a life then.

The four reasons (Shaar HaGilgulim, as Ephraim teaches them)

1. Repair. You crossed a prohibition. The soul returns to fix the break.
2. Finish the mitzvah. You left a positive command undone. Torah itself is the endless one: if you only learn pshat, you return to it until you also learn remez, drash, and sod. Four levels. You can learn forever.
3. Help someone else. Not because you failed. Because you are needed. A soul that has already done well is sent back to guide and rectify others.
4. Bashert. Free will can make two destined souls miss each other. The wheel brings them again.

Purpose

The destination is set. The route is yours. Ephraim’s GPS: you take a wrong turn, and it says, “Recalculating.” Same end. New road. Hashem made you to succeed. Gilgul is not a trap. It is time to learn and to choose good in this frame.

Free Will is the only thing you do not do against your will.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

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• What It Means To Be Free.
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The Blueprint of Creation and the Tree of Life

The First Hebrew

An essay on Gan Eden as the story of every human soul

The Story Beneath the Story

The story of Gan Eden is not a children’s tale about a talking snake and a piece of fruit. It is not only a report of something that happened once to two people at the beginning of time. It is the story of every human being who has ever been born.

Adam is not merely a remote ancestor. Adam is the father of everyone alive today. We are all B’nei Adam — children of the one. Before the many, there was one. That one is the blueprint.

The Zohar Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai

The Torah cannot be understood on the literal level alone. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai in the Zohar warns against the person who thinks the narratives of the Torah are ordinary stories: the tales are garments; beneath the garments is a body of commandments; beneath the body is a soul; and in the World to Come the righteous will look upon the soul of the soul.

The Rambam Genesis: A Map to the Soul

The Ramban writes at the opening of Bereishit that Ma’aseh Bereishit is a deep secret that cannot be understood from the verses themselves, but only from the received tradition dating back to Moshe Rabbeinu, and that those who know it are bound to conceal it. The Rambam, in the Guide for the Perplexed, likewise treats the account of creation and the garden as carrying secrets clothed in figurative speech.

He refuses to read Genesis 3 as a casual historical anecdote. It is an instruction about the human intellect, desire, and the condition of man. What follows stands in that line: peshat is not discarded, but the garden is read as the map of a soul.

What Is Adam?

Adam is not a private biography. Adam is the original collective spirit that contained every later soul. Before individuals, there was one living form — a cell that would divide into a body of many cells, still sharing one life.

The Arizal’s tradition of the great soul of Adam and the simple fact that Scripture itself calls male and female by the single name Adam point to the same truth: the many are rooted in the one. To ask “Who was Adam?” is also to ask “Who am I?” The garden is not only behind us. It is the inner landscape through which every soul passes.

The Process of Life. Atzilut, Beriah, Yetzirah

Creation itself proceeds in stages, as the verbs of Scripture reveal. Intention arises first. Then creation. Then formation. The four worlds of the kabbalists — Atzilut, Beriah, Yetzirah, Asiyah — are not later inventions pasted onto the text. They are the grammar of Bereishit. Bara, “He created,” and the verbs of forming and making describe different densities of being.

Adam was not created first as a creature of the physical world. The human was intended, created, and formed in the upper garden and the lower garden — spiritual dimensions of Gan Eden in Beriah and Yetzirah — and only afterward clothed in the density of Asiyah. The verbs tell you which world is being spoken.

Adam The BluePrint and the Two Yuds

When the Torah describes the forming of the human, it writes vayyitzer with two yuds: וַיִּיצֶר. When it describes the forming of the animals, the same verb appears with one yud. The Sages heard the doubled letter.

There were two formations: from the upper worlds and from the lower worlds; a formation for this world and a formation for the World to Come; and two inclinations placed within the one being — yetzer tov and yetzer hara.

“Woe unto me from my Creator, and woe unto me from my inclination.” The two yuds are the signature of a creature who belongs to heaven and to earth at once. That is what it means to be Adam.

Why They Ate: Wisdom, Growth, and Two Readings of Genesis

Why did they eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? The surface reading is disobedience. The inner reading is more severe and more compassionate. Chava saw what the verse actually says she saw.

“When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise…” She saw food. She saw beauty. She saw wisdom — lehaskil. The tree offered expanded vision. The eyes would open. They would know, as knowing is known, in a world where good and evil are no longer sealed in separate rooms. That is not a small temptation. It is the temptation of growth.

Here, the Jewish reading of Genesis differs from the dominant Christian reading. In much of Christian theology, the episode becomes original sin: a fall that stains every descendant and can be repaired only by a unique savior. Judaism does not deny the wound. It refuses to make the wound the last word about the human being. The Torah’s own later voice is not “you are ruined.”

The Two Trees-Choose Life

It is “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil… therefore choose life.” The tree is the beginning of moral knowledge and free will, not the annihilation of the image. Good and evil are now intertwined in everything in this world. Beneficial things can harm. Bitter things can heal. That mixture is Earth’s climate. It is also the only climate in which a soul can grow.

How does a soul grow in heaven? In a realm of unbroken unity, there is light, but there is little to push against. What can you gain there that you do not already have as a gift? Growth is the greatest reason for coming here. Earth is not a punishment first. Earth is a workshop. The descent is for the sake of the ascent. You are formed against your will.

You are born against your will. So teaches Pirkei Avot. The soul does not volunteer for constriction the way a tourist volunteers for a trip. The soul is brought. It resists. It is placed. That resistance is part of the tradition’s honesty. We did not design this curriculum. We are inside it.

What Death Means, and What Nakedness Became

What is death? In Hebrew, the surrounding language of death is the language of crossing. The root avar means to pass over, to transfer, to move from one place to another. A ma’avar is a passage. Mavet, death, in the inner reading, is not the snuffing of a candle. It is histalkut — a leaving of one garment and one world for another.

The First Hebrew Adam, Crossed Over: Died

So Adam and Chava did die. They crossed. They left the unity of the upper garden and entered the world of duality. Male and female as separate, facing one another rather than as one Adam. Heaven’s unity became earth’s two.

“They were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed.” In the world before eating, nakedness was transparency. Nothing to hide because there was no split between the inner and the outer. After eating, the same nakedness became a source of shame. The eyes opened onto a world in which exposure has a cost. That is not only a story about clothing. It is a story about consciousness.

The Garments of Light to Garments of 70

Then Hashem makes garments. The verse says kotnot ‘or — garments of skin. In Rabbi Meir’s Torah, the same words were found written as garments of light. One letter: alef instead of ayin. Or with an alef is light. Or with an ayin is skin. Alef is one. Ayin is seventy.

The journey from garments of light to garments of skin is the journey from unity to the seventy faces of a fractured world. Spirit becomes physical. Light is folded into skin. That is embodiment. That is what it means to become human in Asiyah.

The Torah has seventy faces. Each letter has seventy reasons it stands where it stands. The shift from alef to ayin is not a scribe’s accident in the Midrash. It is the whole itinerary: from the One into the seventy, so that the seventy can find their way back to the One.

The Real Journey: Consequences, Work, and the Serpent

What does it mean to become human? It is not a fall that ends the story. It is a journey that has consequences. Our story is the same story, with the same consequences. The work of your hands. The pain of raising children. Bread from a ground that resists you. These are not only curses. They are the curriculum of a world where nothing is handed over finished.

The serpent is told it will crawl on the dust and eat dust all the days of its life. The appetite that once could have walked is now pressed into the earthly realm. This is the animal self against the higher soul.

Who is the serpent? Not a cartoon villain outside the human being. In the inner teaching, the nachash is the innate drive, the yetzer itself. At first it had “legs” — a capacity to move upright, to walk toward Hashem. After the misdirection, it loses that stature. It crawls. It eats dust. Its hunger is now bound to the lowest field.

358 – Messiah and the Serpent

The serpent is the life-energy of the soul when that energy is directed toward appetite rather than the Source. Hashem’s question in the garden is not only a question to one man in one hour. It is the question asked of us: Are you Adam or a snake? Will the drive remain on its belly, or will it rise above its lower states and follow Hashem?

The gematria makes the point without softness. Nachash, serpent, equals 358. Mashiach equals 358. The same number. The misdirected energy is not thrown away. It is removed from the dust and moved upward. What crawls can walk. What eats dust can feed on the Tree of Life. The serpent must rise. That rising is the work of redemption in a single life and in the life of the world.

The Journey Home

The path is from spirit to physical and back again. Light into skin. From this world home. But not as we left. We return with love that was lived, with struggle that was not theoretical, with wisdom that can only be purchased where good and evil grow on one tree. That is why the eating happened. Not because the story needed a villain, but because a soul that never leaves unity never learns what unity costs and what unity is worth.

This is taught in its fullness only from teacher to student, father to son, within the oral tradition. The verses are the garment. The soul of the verses is handed across a table, not downloaded from the page alone.

Adam remains the first Hebrew in the sense that matters here: the first one whose name means both “earth” and “likeness,” the first one formed with two yuds, the first one asked whether he would be a human being or a snake. The garden is still open as a question. The Tree of Life still stands in the center. The blueprint has not been lost. It is waiting for hands that have already known skin and still remember light.

“It is a tree of life to those who grasp it.” — Proverbs 3:18

Hazan Gavriel ben David

Beit Hashahoavah

• Chapter 2: The Tree of Life
• Why Christianity Never Got Out of the Garden
• Hashem Chose a Family: The Tree of Life Blueprint Was Given to Protect All of Humanity
• Becoming Aware of Your Soul: The Tree of Life Blueprint Christianity Never Answered
• The Eternal Struggle of Self: Reincarnation, the Expanding “I,” and the Soul’s Never-Ending Journey

One Of America’s Top Vision Doctors

In the first minute of a conversation between caregiving researcher Neal K. Shah and neuro-optometrist Dr. Bryce Appelbaum, the host is corrected. Eyesight, Appelbaum says, is a symptom. It is the ability to focus clearly, the thing glasses and contacts are for, the thing a standard exam stops at: are the eyes healthy, and can you read the chart? Vision is what the brain does next.

It filters, organizes, and processes what comes through the eyes, then turns it into meaning and action. You can be told you are 20/20 and still be unable to converge both eyes on one point, track a line, or find your way through a familiar room.¹

That correction is the whole essay.

We have an attention deficit. I transpose letters. You carry the signs people file under dyslexia. I also teach Torah. For years, I watched my grandchildren glued to a phone, and I watched my mother spend the last years she could still function in front of a television, in a house that was not empty. I thought those were separate sorrows. Appelbaum’s distinction says they are one failure, missed because everyone was reading the chart.

Scripture already ran the functional exam.

Where there is no vision, the people come apart

The King James of Proverbs 29:18 says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.” The Hebrew is sharper, and it is not about eyesight.

בְּאֵין חָזוֹן יִפָּרַע עָם וְשֹׁמֵר תּוֹרָה אַשְׁרֵהוּ

Where there is no chazon, the people yippara. Chazon is a revealed sight, an oracle, not a score on a chart. Yippara is the same verb used of Israel at the golden calf: they cast off restraint, they were made naked, they came apart.² The second half is not a different subject.

The one who guards Torah is happy. Revelation without instruction runs wild. Instruction without a living sight is a chart you can recite but still cannot use to navigate the room.

A standard exam asks, ” Can you read the letters. A functional exam assesses whether the two eyes and the brain work together. The proverb asks the same question of the people. Can you see what was revealed and keep it?

The wrong prescription

My teacher, Rabbi Tovia Singer, does not tell people to pray for a doctrine. He tells them to read the Book and take off the glasses someone else put on them. Read the original without the prescription.

That is Hosea, not a slogan.

נִדְמוּ עַמִּי מִבְּלִי הַדָּעַת כִּי־אַתָּה הַדַּעַת מָאַסְתָּ וְאֶמְאָסְאךָ מִכַּהֵן לִי וַתִּשְׁכַּח תּוֹרַת אֱלֹהֶיךָ אֶשְׁכַּח בָּנֶיךָ גַּם־אָנִי

“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also reject you from being priest to Me. You have forgotten the Torah of your God; I also will forget your children.”³

Nidmu is to be cut off, silenced, ruined. The cause is not a missing building. It is mibli hada’at, due to a lack of knowledge. And the knowledge they rejected is named in the same verse: Torat Eloheicha, the Torah of your God. The priest who will not look at the text loses the children. That is the verse I did not want. It is also the verse that explains a house.

Appelbaum says fifteen of the eighteen symptoms most often tied to ADHD are also symptoms of functional vision problems, and that children labeled with ADHD are about three times more likely to have convergence insufficiency, the failure of both eyes to point at the same place.⁴

I am not a clinician, and I am not claiming my transposed letters were only a vision problem. I am saying that a label can describe the behavior while missing the team that is failing. Someone looks at the chart, says, “You see fine,” and hands you thicker glasses.

Adam’s family has been handed a religion in the same way. We can pass the chart. You can repeat the creed. You still cannot converge. The Torah’s claim is blunt: one Adam, one household, one set of sayings. If the glasses require a second founder before the first book is allowed to say what it has to say, they are not correcting vision.

They are replacing the test. Christianity and Islam can be argued elsewhere. Here, one contrast is enough. The Ten Sayings repair a house. A creed that cannot sit at the same table as the family next door has failed the functional exam. Rabbi Singer’s instruction is the clinical move: take the prescription off and read the page as it was before the glasses.

This is a midrash on a medical distinction. Dr. Appelbaum did not diagnose a religion. The mapping is mine.

A mother, a television, a familiar room

The 2024 Lancet Commission added untreated vision loss to its list of modifiable dementia risks, a small share in its worldwide model, about 2 percent.⁵ A Johns Hopkins analysis the same year, in a national sample of older Americans, estimated that up to 19 percent of prevalent dementia cases might be attributable to vision impairment, much of it correctable, with contrast sensitivity and near vision carrying more of the weight than the distance chart.⁶

Appelbaum’s point to families is the practical one. Getting lost in a familiar place can be an early warning sign that spatial vision, not just memory, is failing. A standard exam does not test whether the brain is still building a map of the room.

I missed it.

My mother spent the last years she could function watching television, alone inside a house where her family lived. I am not diagnosing her from a podcast, and I am not charging the family with a medical error. I am naming what the screen does. It does not ask you to converge on a face.

It does not ask you to track a voice, judge a doorway, or answer. Passive television viewing and scrolling, Appelbaum warns, weaken the visual and nervous systems, especially when cognition is already declining.¹ The room goes flat. The person is present and not present.

Hosea had already said the quiet part. Forget the Torah of your God, and the children are forgotten too. A person can live with the Book in the house and still be watching something else. Lack of knowledge is not a low test score. It is a priestly failure: the ones who were supposed to keep the sight did not put the page in their hands.

Glued: To Your Phone and Television

Appelbaum calls the screen habit a strain that the visual system was not built for. Hours at inches from the face. High-energy light. Almost no distance. Almost no real depth. A two-dimensional field where the eyes lock near and stop teaming the way they team in a room.¹

I have watched my grandchildren’s posture. Glued is the word, and it is earned. A child who cannot look up cannot learn to track a line of Hebrew, a face across the table, or a boundary. Yippara again. No chazon, and the people, including the small ones, cast off restraint. The phone is not a neutral window. It is a prescription that says the chart is fine while the skill of seeing a real room atrophies.

He does not answer that with thicker glasses. He answers it with training. Shut the near field. Give the system distance, motion, and two eyes on one point. The spiritual shape is the same. Shut the rectangle. Put the page in the hands. Read aloud. The skill returns with use. Hosea’s threat is also Hosea’s map: the children are lost when the Torah is forgotten, and they are the ones the verse refuses to leave unnamed.

The exercise

Appelbaum’s good news is that vision is a skill, trainable at any age, and that cognitive decline is not always a sentence.¹ I cannot promise that of a brain disease. I can say the proverb has already promised it to the people. The one who guards Torah is happy. Not the one who passed a creed. The one who keeps the instruction at heart, where the seeing actually happens.

Adam is the blueprint. The Ten Sayings are the alignment. Torah is the operating text. Someone gave us glasses and told us everything was all right. Rabbi Singer’s line is the functional exam: do not pray for a doctrine. Read the original without the prescription.

Do one thing. Do not collect a new religion and call it a checkup. Ask whether the eyes and the instruction are converging on one point. If the household can name one father and keep the sayings, the chart was never the problem.

I transpose letters. I still track the text. That is the receipt that the skill can be trained.

With thanks to Dr. Bryce Appelbaum and to Neal K. Shah of Johns Hopkins and CareYaya, for the conversation that made the distinction plain: eyesight is the symptom; vision is the brain. The rest of the mapping is a Torah teacher’s, not theirs.

Footnotes

1. Neal K. Shah, interview with Bryce Appelbaum, OD, “The 30-Second Exercise That Could End Reading Glasses Forever,” YouTube, July 21, 2026, https://youtu.be/tkwSfy5prIE. Appelbaum distinguishes eyesight (clarity, the chart, glasses) from vision (brain filtering, teaming, tracking, depth, meaning, action), and warns that passive screen time weakens the visual and nervous system.
2. Proverbs 29:18. Hebrew chazon is revelation or oracle, not eyesight. Yippara is “cast off restraint”; the same verb describes Israel at the calf in Exodus 32:25.
3. Hosea 4:6, author’s translation from the Masoretic text.
4. As stated by Appelbaum in the Shah interview. The convergence finding has a paper trail: David B. Granet et al., “The Relationship between Convergence Insufficiency and ADHD,” Strabismus 13, no. 4 (2005): 163–68, reported a roughly threefold higher rate of convergence insufficiency among children with ADHD. Overlap of symptoms is not the same as identity. Vision therapy studies have reported improved binocular measures and lower ADHD symptom scores in children who had both; they do not show that ADHD is only a vision problem.
5. Gill Livingston et al., “Dementia prevention, intervention, and care: 2024 report of the Lancet Standing Commission,” The Lancet 404, no. 10452 (2024): 572–628. Untreated vision loss was added as a modifiable risk factor, with a population attributable fraction of nearly 2 percent in the Commission’s model.
6. Jason R. Smith et al., “Vision Impairment and the Population Attributable Fraction of Dementia in Older Adults,” JAMA Ophthalmology 142, no. 10 (2024): 900–908. In a U.S. sample of older adults, the population attributable fraction of prevalent dementia for at least one vision impairment was 19 percent (95 percent CI 8.2–29.7). That is an upper-bound estimate assuming causality, not proof that one in five cases is caused by the eyes alone. Contrast sensitivity carried the largest share.

• Chapter 1: The Elephant in the Room
• The Divided Mind: Cain, Abel, and the Blueprint of Creation in Torah and Neuroscience
• The Atom and The Man
• Toldot | תולדות | “Consequences”
• Until This Day Parashat Ki Tavo