Crazy Creations: made in God’s image (Shabbat Sh’lach L’cha 21.06.2025)
You can listen to Rabbi Eleanor's sermon here or read it below.
The latest song that Teddy Swims released, last week, has a retro (70s) vibe, almost a slow jam feel, and it’s a love song trying to put into words “the indescribable feeling you have when you know you've met your person,” your soul mate. He sings to his beloved, “God went crazy when he painted you / Ain’t seen nothing like this before / Took a little extra time on you / Before he let you walk out the door.” This is beautiful imagery with which to describe how gorgeous your beloved is; it’s clear from the tone that ‘crazy’ here is something positive, in the sense of God really going to town in creating this person, taking the time to make everything about her special.
While I don’t exactly expect pop songs to do perfect theology, especially not perfect Jewish theology, and while exactly what even rabbis mean by ‘God’ varies hugely from rabbi to rabbi and from day to day (so you can take that descriptor ‘God’ and understand it in whatever way works for you); still I think these lyrics fit surprisingly well into rabbinic theological thinking. Perhaps most importantly, there’s an assumption behind the detail here that expresses a really key Jewish value: that’s the assumption that there’s Divine input into the creation of each and every human being. This in turn splits into two key ideas: that there is something miraculous in the existence of every single person, and that each person is made b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.
The b’tzelem Elohim part goes back to the original creation of humans in the first chapter of Genesis, when God creates the first human both male and female, in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). Jewish tradition notes that coins all struck from the same mould come out literally identical, but there’s something different happening here, which speaks to the extraordinary nature of God: although each human since Adam and Eve is made in the image of God, each has their own individual appearance (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5); so the tzelem Elohim, God’s image, is perhaps less like a specific picture and more like a Divine spark that illuminates each human.
And the miraculous existence part? The Rabbis of the Talmud teach that there are three partners in the creation of new baby: a mother, a father, and God (Babylonian Talmud Kiddushin 30b/Niddah 31a). They understand – in the scientific terms of their time – that mother and father each contribute genetic material, what they call the red and the white material; yet it is God who miraculously breathes the soul into the new life, so that each new life truly has an element of being a Divine gift.
Sometimes this gift and the godliness within each person are clearly visible to us: especially when we look with love at another person and, searching for how to express the inexpressible, we turn to invoking God’s part in their creation. We call someone ‘heaven-sent’ or a ‘gift’, or perhaps even say that “God went crazy” when making someone, which is a way of hinting that we see something more than skin-deep appearance: we see through to the ineffable something that is their own unique expression of Divinity shining out from within. Yet perhaps more often we don’t see this – and this is where many problems begin.
Our ancient Sages (Babylonian Talmud, Ta’anit 20a-b) tell the story of Rabbi Elazar ben Shimon, who was one day returning from his teacher’s house full of pride in the learning he had done, when a physically ugly man passed him. Instead of returning his pleasant greeting, Rabbi
Elazar very rudely commented on his appearance: “How ugly you are! Is everyone in your town as ugly as you?” The man’s comeback is short and pointed: “Why don’t you go and say to the Craftsman Who made me: How ugly is the vessel you made?” And Rabbi Elazar promptly realises the error of his ways, but it takes literally a long journey and much humbling himself to achieve forgiveness, as well as a commitment not to act like this again. Had he begun by looking with love instead of arrogance, perhaps he would have appreciated the man as a unique creation and seen the Divine spark in him, and so begun the conversation quite differently; he would have saved himself an amount of pain in the process.
What does it mean to fail to see the Divinity in a person? It means to see them as ordinary or worse, perhaps even worthless or expendable; practically, it might mean seeing another person as having value only for what they can do for us, not simply as a human being in their own right. In Rabbinic terms, it might even mean spurning God: my ears pricked up at Teddy Swims’ song because of the contrast between his lyrics and the attitude of the Israelites in Parashat Sh’lach L’cha, who (as we heard today) ignore the signs of God’s presence among them and descend into despair, rebellion, and division.
Our ancient Rabbis tell of Rabbi Elazar and his superior, unkind attitude to encourage us to behave differently: they know that living with others, building relationships and eventually communities, relies on each of us learning to see something precious within other people and to treasure each individual as a unique gift to the world, even when we profoundly disagree with them. This Thursday I’ll begin a three-part series of classes thinking about Lamentations and what it means to be in community (at 8pm on Thursdays 26 June, 3 and 10 July, and you’d be very welcome for any or all of them), but today I’d like to leave you with a simple thought about how we live with other people.
Both Rabbinic teaching and modern love songs – two great sources of wisdom – remind us that we have the capacity to see Divinity within a person, and many of us know this from our own experience, whether encountering a beloved partner or our children, when we’ve had those moments of wonder that we can’t simply explain. Clearly we can’t be in love with every person we meet, but the quality of those interactions might inspire us to ask: if we remembered to look for the tzelem Elohim (God’s image) within others, even just a bit more often, how might the world be different? How might our relationships with each other change if we approached each person as a miraculous creation? How would your conversation with the person next to you change if you thought that “God took a little extra time with [them] before he let [them] walk out the door”? Perhaps this will be the week when you’ll take another look at the people you meet and see just how wonderfully crazy God can be.
