For Parashat Breishit: On Loneliness

Lo tov heyot HaAdam levado.   It is not good for a person to be alone.   These are God’s words, in the second creation story, upon seeing Adam alone in the garden He has created for him.  It is not good to be alone.  What is remarkable about this declaration is that it is not preceded by any announcement about how Adam himself actually felt.  The Torah doesn’t tell us Adam was feeling lonely, but only that God looked at Adam and thought -- ah, loneliness, not good.  

It is a little like when I look at my son wearing short sleeves in the winter and think -- he must be cold; let me get him a jacket.   Or like, when we see our children in situations that we have found distressing for ourselves and we take on their suffering, assuming they feel the same way.    

There is projection here, and the projection tells us more about the person doing the projecting than about the object of projection.   Yes, God was surely right that Adam was suffering or would eventually suffer from his aloneness, but the statement actually tells us more about God than it does about Adam.  The implication is that God looked at Adam and saw loneliness because God knew about loneliness, that in some way, He Himself had experienced its ache.  

God’s solution for Adam’s loneliness is also very telling.   He creates beings to keep Adam company -- all kinds of animals, and finally --  fashioned from Adam’s own self -- a woman.   This description helps us understand God’s process in creation, as well; He, too, is searching for a partner, and so, in the first version of creation, He creates all kinds of creatures, one after another, until He finally creates human beings, and here He stops --  He has finally found His partner.    Indeed, Adam’s words on recognizing woman are “this one at last is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh,” not unlike God’s words in the creation of people -- “in our image, after our likeness.”  In each case, there is a recognition of kinship, a possibility of partnership, the hope of an end to loneliness.  

And so the world is created in response to loneliness.  In place of the lo tov (not good) of being alone, God creates a world which He, over and over again, looks upon and calls tov (good); it is the antidote to loneliness, a world built on love, a world built for the sake of connection.  

The strangeness of the word Breishit also fits this sense of searching for a partner.   The word is actually in construct form, literally meaning something like “in the beginning of”  but without an object for the preposition “of.”    It is a dangling word, a word in search of a partner, much like God Himself.  

God’s desire for a partnership -- for someone to love and take care of -- begins with His building of a house in preparation for such an anticipated partner, making everything just right.  He puts up a roof -- the firmament -- and a floor -- dry land; he hangs some lights above,  provides food and playmates, and later, when needed, clothing.

The search for a partner, though, is not met with immediate success.   Human beings turn out to be hard to partner with.     He calls out to them:  Ayeka -- where are you?   I want to connect to you!  But they hide from Him in shame.  They don’t really know how to partner with this awesome force; they are both not afraid enough and too afraid for intimacy.  (Later, Avraham will know how to respond -- hineni,  here I am!).  

It is a heart-rending story for God, Parashat Breishit.    By the end He looks down on humanity with disgust and sadness and disappointment.     Vayitatzev el libo  --  the Torah says --  God is saddened in His heart.   These humans are not fit partners.    

These humans are not fit partners.   Yet.   The story, of course, will unfold through Noah and Avraham and the people of Israel, and the story still continues to unfold right now, this story of God’s search for partnership in humanity.  .  

Does creation actually solve God’s loneliness?   Does it solve our loneliness?   It feels like, at the core of all of creation, are both the profound ache and call of loneliness and the response to it, at the very same moment.    Each bird song and each flower opening and each lonely human cry -- each of these contains both the pain and the balm, the call and the response, the yearning and the fulfillment.   God is in both sides -- in the loneliness and in the parallel possibility of commensurate connection -- both implanted in all of creation and in each of us. 

As Mary Oliver writes in her poem, “Wild Geese”:  

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

God cries out to us for connection through each and every blade of grass; in each is sown the call -- ayeka?  Where are you?  Do you see Me?   Do you feel My presence here in this world of hiddenness?  Do you hear My call at every single moment to come close?   Tov, tov, the wind whistles through the trees.  Tov, tov.  Come close.  Come close.  You are not alone. Through these words God built this world; out of the ache of His own lonely heart He built a world that yearns for nothing more than to be connected.   Through creation, God turned the essential lo tov of being alone into the tov  of a created world.   We are the good that comes out of a broken yearning heart.    Our own loneliness --planted deep inside us, a piece of the divine -- is itself a call to bring forth that tov, to heed the call for connection in each of God’s precious creations, to hear God’s own heart calling to us and know that we are not alone in our loneliness.