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we respect and recognize the uniqueness of 
another person are we capable of respect-
ing and recognizing the uniqueness of God 
Himself.
 
CREATION ITSELF
Now let us return to the two creation 
accounts, this time not looking at what 
they tell us about humanity (as in 
Soloveitchik’s The Lonely Man of Faith), but 
simply at what they tell us about creation. 
In Genesis 1, God creates things — 
chemical elements, stars, planets, life-
forms, biological species. In Genesis 2-3, 
He creates people. In the first chapter, He 
creates systems. In the second chapter, He 
creates relationships. It is fundamental to 
the Torah’s view of reality that these things 
belong to different worlds, distinct narra-
tives, separate stories, alternative ways of 
seeing reality. 
There are differences in tone as well. 
In the first, creation involves no effort on 
the part of God. He simply speaks. He 
says, “Let there be,
” and there was. In the 
second, He is actively engaged. When it 
comes to the creation of the first human, 
He does not merely say, “Let us make Man 
in our image according to our likeness.
” 
He performs the creation Himself, like 
sculptor fashioning an image out of clay: 
“Then the Lord God formed the man from 
the dust of the ground and breathed into 
his nostrils the breath of life, and the man 
became a living being.
”
In Genesis 1, God effortlessly summons 
the universe into being. In Genesis 2, He 
becomes a gardener: “Now the Lord God 
planted a garden …
” We wonder why on 
earth God, who has just created the entire 
universe, should become a gardener. The 
Torah gives us the answer, and it is very 
moving: “The Lord God took the man and 
put him in the Garden of Eden to work 
it and take care of it.
” God wanted to give 
man the dignity of work, of being a creator, 
not just a creation. And in case the man 
should view such labor as undignified, God 
became a gardener Himself to show that 
this work, too, is Divine, and in performing 
it, man becomes God’s partner in the work 
of creation.

IMPORTANCE OF RELATIONSHIPS 
Then comes the extraordinarily poignant 
verse, “The Lord God said, ‘It is not good 
for the man to be alone. I will make a 
helper suitable for him.
” God feels for the 
existential isolation of the first man. There 
was no such moment in the previous 
chapter. There, God simply creates. Here, 
God empathizes. He enters into the human 
mind. He feels what we feel. There is no 
such moment in any other ancient religious 
literature. What is radical about biblical 
monotheism is not just that there is only 
one God, not just that He is the source of 
all that exists, but that God is closer to us 
than we are to ourselves. God knew the 
loneliness of the first man before the first 
man knew it of himself. 
That is what the second creation account 
is telling us. Creation of things is relatively 
easy; creation of relationships is hard. Look 
at the tender concern God shows for the 
first human beings in Genesis 2-3. He wants 
man to have the dignity of work. He wants 
man to know that work itself is Divine. He 
gives man the capacity to name the ani-
mals. He cares when He senses the onset of 
loneliness. He creates the first woman. He 
watches, in exasperation, as the first human 
couple commit this first sin. Finally, when 

the man gives his wife a proper name, 
recognizing for the first time that she is dif-
ferent from him and that she can do some-
thing he will never do, He clothes them 
both so that they will not go naked into 
the world. That is the God, not of creation 
(Elokim) but of love (Hashem).
That is what makes the dual account of 
the naming of the first woman so signifi-
cant a parallel to the dual account of God’s 
creation of the universe. We have to create 
relationships before we encounter the God 
of relationship. We have to make space for 
the otherness of the human other to be 
able to make space for the otherness of the 
Divine other. We have to give love before 
we can receive love.
In Genesis 1, God creates the universe. 
Nothing vaster can be imagined, and we 
keep discovering that the universe is bigger 
than we thought. In 2016, a study based 
on three-dimensional modelling of images 
produced by the Hubble space telescope 
concluded that there were between 10 and 
20 times as many galaxies as astronomers 
had previously thought. There are more 
than a hundred stars for every grain of 
sand on earth. 
And yet, almost in the same breath 
as it speaks of the panoply of creation, 
the Torah tells us that God took time to 
breathe the breath of life into the first 
human, give him dignified work, enter his 
loneliness, make him a wife, and robe them 
both with garments of light when the time 
came for them to leave Eden and make 
their way in the world.
The Torah is telling us something very 
powerful. Never think of people as things. 
Never think of people as types: They are 
individuals. Never be content with cre-
ating systems: Care also about relation-
ships. 
I believe that relationships are where our 
humanity is born and grows, flowers and 
flourishes. It is by loving people that we 
learn to love God and feel the fullness of 
His love for us. 

The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks served as the 

chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the 

Commonwealth, 1991-2013. His teachings have been 

made available to all at rabbisacks.org. This essay was 

written in 2019.

 POINTS FOR DISCUSSION

• Why do you think there are 
two separate and contrasting 
descriptions of how God 
created humankind?
• What is the danger represented 
by the first name (Isha) that 
Adam gave to his wife?
• How can we learn to love 
God from loving the people 
in our life?

