God created the human in His image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
What it teaches
Human dignity. Honouring every person, because every person is created in God’s image.
The verse gives the image to the human as such, male and female, not to one particular person. The Torah teaches that human dignity is part of how a person is made, not a prize earned by deeds. So it belongs even to those we find hard to honour.
The lesson
Before a person has a name or deeds, they are already created in God’s image.
God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper corresponding to him.”
What it teaches
Love your neighbour. Loving the person beside you and caring for them as for yourself.
The first thing in the Torah that God calls “not good” is a person alone. A garden, work and names for the cattle, birds and wild animals do not fill that gap; the one who fills it is “bone of my bones.” Loving the person beside us begins when we see them as part of ourselves.
The lesson
We stop being alone when someone is beside us, not when something surrounds us.
God called to the man and said to him: Where are you?
What it teaches
Responsibility. Owning what you did and what is in your power to do.
The man and his wife hide, and when God asks, the man points to the woman and the woman to the snake. Only at the end of their words does each of them say that they ate. From this we can learn that responsibility begins when the first thing we say is what we did.
God said to Kayin, “Where is Hevel your brother?” And he said, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?”
What it teaches
Mutual responsibility. Caring about another person’s fate as if it were your own.
God asks Kayin a simple question, where his brother is, and Kayin says he does not know and asks whether he is his brother’s keeper. God does not leave that question hanging: the brother’s blood cries out from the ground. Saying “I don’t know” does not free a person from what happens to his brother.
The lesson
When someone asks where your brother is, “I don’t know” is no answer.
The Torah’s opening five verses: a world brought into being by speech, and light as the first thing called good.
For children, teens and adults
The Torah is a book of mitzvot, so you might expect it to open with one. Instead it opens with a claim about where everything came from: not that the world happened, but that it was made, and made by nothing more than speech. Five verses carry us from dark water with no shape to the first evening and the first morning. Notice what the Torah calls good before it calls anything else good.
The three closing verses of creation, in which God ceases from the work, blesses the seventh day and makes it holy.
For children, teens and adults
Creation is over. Six days of making, and then the Torah spends three whole verses on a day when nothing is made at all. That is odd for a book that has just been describing non-stop activity, and that is exactly the point. Before there was a Jewish people, a Sinai or a single commandment, the seventh day was already built into how the world runs. These are the verses said at Kiddush, and the first thing the Torah ever calls holy is not a place and not a person. It is time.
וַיְכֻלּוּ הַשָּׁמַיִם וְהָאָרֶץ וְכָל־צְבָאָם׃
Bereshit 2:1
vaychulu hashamayim veha'aretz vechol tzeva'am.
So the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their array.
The verses are from Miqra according to the Masorah (Wikisource, CC BY-SA 4.0), via Sefaria, without the cantillation marks. On this site the four-letter Name is written ה׳.
