A film essay on Bereshis

WHERE ARE YOU?

אַיֶּכָּה
30 minutes · Prologue and 13 chapters · English narration with Hebrew sources
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“A whole world was placed in your hands, and then everyone went home.”

Where Are You? is a 30-minute film essay on Parashat Bereshis, the first portion of the Torah. It begins on a parent’s first night home with a newborn, and then reads the portion from its first letter to its last verse.

Along the way it moves through speech that creates, a garden to work and to guard, and a palace in time. Then come the first thing that is not good, the serpent’s question, a brother’s blood, and one person who finds grace.

The film draws on Rashi, the Rambam, Rav Kook, Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Abraham Joshua Heschel and David Deutsch. It keeps coming back to two questions the portion still asks each of us: Where are you? And where is your brother?

Chapters

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Thinkers

Tap a time to jump to that moment.

Rashi

Rashi explains why God says “Let us make”: to teach humility. He reads “Where are you?” as an opening for conversation. He also notes that the first trees were meant to taste like their fruit.

The Rambam

In the Guide for the Perplexed, the image of God is the mind. The first sin trades true and false for good and bad. In his laws, repentance begins with words said out loud, every person is free to choose, and idolatry begins as respect for the tools.

Rav Kook

The film gives his idea as a paraphrase, marked “After Rav Kook.” Trees whose wood does not taste like their fruit become the ache of every working life. Teshuvah, he taught, will one day restore the taste.

Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik

The Rav sees two portraits of the human being: majestic man, the builder, and covenantal man, the one who is addressed. In The Lonely Man of Faith he writes, “I am lonely.” In Halakhic Man he records Rav Chaim of Brisk’s answer about what a rabbi is for.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Heschel notices that the first thing God makes holy is a day, “a palace in time.” His title God in Search of Man frames the question “Where are you?” He insists that what we do reaches God, and that “few are guilty, but all are responsible.”

David Deutsch

In The Beginning of Infinity, knowledge has no built-in ceiling, so we always stand at a beginning. A bee can build a hive but cannot explain one. Problems are inevitable, and problems are soluble.

Narration

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PROLOGUE

It is the first night home.

The hospital is behind you. The car seat is still in the hallway, because nobody remembered to bring it in. And in a small bassinet beside the bed, there is a person who did not exist a week ago.

You do not sleep. You lie on your side and watch the blanket rise and fall. Every few minutes the breathing goes quiet, and your whole body sits up to listen. Then a small sigh, and the world starts again.

Nobody taught you how to do this. Nobody asked if you were ready. A whole world was placed in your hands, and then everyone went home.

Somewhere around three in the morning, a question arrives. It is not really a question about the baby. It is a question about you. Who are you going to be, now that someone depends on it?

Every real beginning feels like that. A first job. A first apartment. A diagnosis. A wedding. A world you did not make is handed to you, already moving, and a voice asks what you will do with it.

The Torah begins exactly there.

Its first portion, Bereshis, is not only the story of how the world was made. It is the story of what happens when a world is handed to a human being. And the first question God asks that human being is not what he knows, or what he believes.

It is: where are you?

I · THE OPEN DOOR

Bereshis bara Elokim. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

The Midrash asks a child’s question. Why does the Torah begin with the letter bet?

Look at the letter. It is closed on three sides. Above, below, and behind. It is open on one side only, the side that faces forward, toward the next word.

So, says the Midrash, you may not ask what is above, or what is below, or what came before. Only from the day the world was created, and onward.

The first letter of the Torah is a doorway. It closes off the questions we cannot answer, and it opens toward the life we can live.

And the doorway is still open. Every morning, in the blessing before the Shema, Jews praise the One who in His goodness renews, every day, continually, the work of creation. Bereshis is not only a date in the distant past. It is a description of this morning.

The physicist David Deutsch called one of his books The Beginning of Infinity. His argument is that knowledge has no built-in ceiling. However much we understand, there is always more to understand, so in a sense we will always be standing at the beginning.

The Torah agrees that we stand at a beginning. But it adds something a physicist does not set out to say. The beginning comes with a voice. The world is not only a puzzle to be solved. It is a gift, given on purpose, by Someone who is still waiting to hear what we will do with it.

II · TEN SENTENCES

And God said, let there be light. And there was light.

The Mishnah counts ten utterances. Ten sentences, and a world.

Other ancient stories often told creation as a war between gods. The Torah tells it as speech. God speaks, and reality answers.

Then, in the second chapter, God forms the human being from the dust of the ground, and breathes into his nostrils the breath of life. And the human became a living soul.

Onkelos, the ancient Aramaic translation of the Torah, renders those last words in a surprising way. Not a living soul. A speaking spirit.

The breath God breathes into us becomes speech. The power God used to make the world is the power He placed in our mouths.

You already know how much power that is. One sentence from a parent can hold a child up for forty years. One sentence can knock a child down for just as long. A word can end a friendship, start a war, or bring someone home.

Most of us use words as if they weigh nothing. Bereshis suggests they are the heaviest thing we carry. Every time we speak, we do a small version of what God did in the first chapter. We decide what kind of world comes into being after the sentence ends.

III · LET US MAKE

Then comes the strangest sentence in the chapter. Na’aseh adam. Let us make a human being.

Us? Who is God speaking to?

Rashi answers that God consulted the angels. They did not help Him at all. But the Torah would not miss the chance to teach humility. The greater one should consult, and ask permission of, the lesser.

At the moment He creates the most powerful creature on earth, God models the opposite of power. He asks.

Then: God created the human being in His image. In the image of God He created him.

The Mishnah draws out the meaning with startling force. Why was the human being created alone, a single person? To teach that whoever destroys a single soul is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever sustains a single soul, as if he sustained an entire world.

And for the sake of peace. So that no one could ever say to another, my father was greater than yours.

And to show the greatness of the Creator. A human being stamps many coins with a single seal, and they all come out alike. God stamped every human being with the seal of the first man, and not one of them is like another.

Therefore, the Mishnah concludes, every person must say: for my sake the world was created.

That sentence can sound like arrogance. It is the opposite. If the world was created for my sake, then no corner of it is somebody else’s problem. And if every other person must say the same sentence, then every person I meet is also a world, walking around in a body, carrying the seal of the King.

The coins do not look alike. That is how you know whose seal is on them.

IV · TO WORK AND TO GUARD

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

The Rambam answers in the very first chapter of his Guide for the Perplexed. The image is not a face, or a body. It is the mind. The power to understand.

More than eight centuries later, David Deutsch reached something similar from the other direction. A bee can build a hive, but it cannot explain one. A human being can explain almost anything, in principle, and then use the explanation to change the world.

The first chapter of Genesis gives that power its commission. Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth, and master it.

Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik called the human being of that chapter majestic man. The builder. The scientist. The creator. In Halakhic Man he wrote that the peak of religious ethical perfection to which Judaism aspires is man as creator.

But the Torah tells the story of the human being twice. In the second chapter, God takes the human and places him in a garden, le’ovdah ul’shomrah. To work it, and to guard it.

Here the Rav saw a second portrait. He called it covenantal man. Not the master of nature, but the one who is addressed. Limited. Accountable. Placed somewhere, by Someone, for a reason.

The two portraits are meant to live in one person. Work without guarding becomes exploitation. Guarding without work becomes a museum.

The Midrash imagines the moment. God takes the first human and leads him past every tree in the garden. See My works, He says, how beautiful and how fine they are. Everything I created, I created for you. Take care that you do not ruin and destroy My world. For if you ruin it, there is no one after you to repair it.

There is no one after you. That sentence is not only about trees. It is about your marriage, your children, your city, your word. Some things, if you do not guard them, no one else will.

V · A PALACE IN TIME

And on the seventh day God finished the work He had done, and He rested on the seventh day.

Abraham Joshua Heschel noticed something easy to miss. In the whole account of creation, the heavens, the seas, the creatures, the human being, nothing in space is called holy. Not a mountain. Not a temple. Not a stone. The first thing in the Torah that God makes holy is a day.

There is no reference in the record of creation, Heschel wrote, to any object in space that would be endowed with the quality of holiness. Judaism, he said, is a religion of time, aiming at the sanctification of time. The seventh day is a palace in time which we build.

Then the story of creation ends with a strange word. God rested from all His work, asher bara Elokim la’asot. Which God created, to do.

To do? Wasn’t it finished?

The Midrash on this chapter says it plainly. Everything created in the six days still needs work. The mustard needs sweetening. The wheat needs grinding. Even the human being needs repair.

A Roman governor, Turnus Rufus, once challenged Rabbi Akiva. Whose works are more beautiful, God’s or man’s? Rabbi Akiva brought him stalks of wheat, and loaves of bread. The wheat is the work of God, he said. The bread is the work of human beings. Which is more beautiful?

So God stops on the seventh day, with the world unfinished. Not because He ran out of strength. Because He left the rest for us.

And once a week, He asks us to stop too. To put the work down in the middle. To leave it unfinished, and to trust that the world does not rest on us alone.

The Mishnah holds the balance in one breath. It is not your duty to finish the work. Neither are you free to walk away from it.

Six days, we are the hands that carry creation forward. On the seventh, we remember Whose hands are holding it. That is emunah, built into the calendar.

VI · THE FIRST NOT GOOD

Seven times in the first chapter, God looks at what He has made, and sees that it is good. The light. The land and the sea. The plants. The lights in the sky. The creatures of water and air. The animals. And at the end, all of it together, very good.

Then, in the second chapter, for the first time, something is not good.

Lo tov heyot ha’adam levado. It is not good for the human being to be alone.

Not hunger. Not danger. Not death. The first thing in the world that God calls not good is loneliness.

Near the start of The Lonely Man of Faith, Rav Soloveitchik makes a confession. The nature of the dilemma, he writes, can be stated in a three-word sentence. I am lonely.

God’s answer is a strange phrase. Ezer kenegdo. A helper, opposite him. The Talmud plays on the words. If he is worthy, a help. If not, against him. Real companionship is not a mirror. It is someone who stands facing you, close enough to help, and honest enough to oppose.

We live in the most connected generation in history, and the first not good is everywhere. Families eat dinner beside glowing screens. A person can have thousands of followers, and no one to call at two in the morning. We are surrounded by voices, and still alone.

Bereshis does not treat that as a small problem, to be fixed after the important things are done. It is the first thing God fixes. Before law, before covenant, before nations, a human being must not be alone.

VII · THE SERPENT’S QUESTION

There is a serpent in the garden, and it asks the first question in the Torah.

Did God really say you may not eat from any tree of the garden?

Notice the move. God had said the opposite. Eat from every tree, except one. The serpent turns a garden full of permission into a prison with one wall. It does not argue that God is false. It makes the one limit look like the whole world.

Then the woman looks again at the tree. She sees that it is good for food, and that it is a delight to the eyes.

The Rambam reads this moment with great care. Before the sin, he says, the human mind worked with true and false. After it, the human being became absorbed in good and bad, in what is fine and what is ugly, in what people approve and what they condemn.

The Torah says their eyes were opened. But what they were opened to was not more truth. It was more wanting.

We know that world well. We carry it in our pockets. Whole industries are built to be a delight to the eyes, tested and tuned until we cannot look away. The serpent no longer needs to speak. It only needs to refresh.

And the first thing the opened eyes discover is shame. They knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together.

Notice what they reach for. Not God. Not each other. Leaves. Something to hide behind.

That is often our first instinct after we fall. Not to repair, but to cover. To manage the image. To make sure nobody sees.

VIII · AYEKA

Then they hear the voice of God moving in the garden, in the breeze of the day, and they hide among the trees.

And God calls to the human being, and says to him: Ayeka. Where are you?

Rashi is careful here. God knew exactly where he was. The question was not for God’s information. It was a way to open a conversation, so that the man would not be overwhelmed by a sudden sentence of punishment.

So the first question God asks a human being is an invitation. Not, what have you done. Not, what do you believe. Where are you?

Heschel gave one of his great books a title that holds this whole moment. God in Search of Man. The story does not begin with our search for God. It begins with God looking for us, among the trees, where we have gone to hide.

Adam answers honestly, at first. I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid.

Then the honesty runs out. The woman You gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate. And the woman says, the serpent deceived me.

The first sin was eating. The second was blaming. Adam points at the woman, and, if you listen closely, at God, who gave her to him.

The Rambam’s laws of repentance begin in the opposite place. Whoever returns from a sin must confess, in words, out loud. He even gives the words. Chatati, aviti, pashati. I have sinned. I have done wrong. I have rebelled.

Three words, and the hiding is over.

And then the parsha does something that should stop us. Before the man and the woman leave the garden, God makes them garments of skin, and clothes them.

The Talmud uses this verse to teach what it means to walk in God’s ways. Just as He clothes the naked, so you must clothe the naked. And it adds: the Torah begins with an act of kindness, and it ends with an act of kindness.

At the very moment of judgment, God is a tailor. The fig leaves were what we made, to hide. The garments are what God made, so that we could go on living.

IX · THE TURNING FLAME

Then the gate closes. By the sweat of your brow you will eat bread, until you return to the ground. And at the east of the garden God sets the cherubim, and the flame of the ever-turning sword, to guard the way to the tree of life.

There is no way back into Eden. Every attempt to return to innocence, to some pure lost time before complexity, runs into that turning flame.

But the Torah does not leave humanity standing at the gate. It sends us out, into history. Into the fields, where bread has to be made from wheat, by sweat, and by knowledge, and by work.

Rashi notes something about the very first trees. The earth was told to bring forth trees whose wood would taste like their fruit. Instead it brought forth trees that only bear fruit.

Rav Kook saw in this the ache of every working life. The means do not taste like the goal. We endure the road for the sake of the destination. And he taught that teshuvah, return, will one day restore the taste. The tree will taste like its fruit again. The work itself will carry the sweetness of what it is for.

David Deutsch would describe life outside the garden in his own terms. Problems are inevitable. Problems are soluble. The Torah adds a quieter promise. The way back is closed. The way forward is open. Just like the letter bet.

X · MY BROTHER’S KEEPER

Outside the garden, the first family begins. Two brothers. Cain works the ground. Abel keeps sheep.

Both bring offerings. Abel brings the firstborn of his flock, the best he has. God turns to Abel and his offering. To Cain and his offering, He does not turn. And Cain is furious, and his face falls.

Then God speaks to Cain, before anything terrible has happened. Why are you angry? Why has your face fallen? If you do well, you will be lifted up. And if you do not, sin crouches at the door. Its desire is for you. But you can rule over it.

This is the first conversation about temptation in the Torah, and it is full of respect. Sin is real. It crouches like an animal at the entrance to a life. But you can rule over it.

The Rambam builds his laws of repentance on this freedom. Every human being, he writes, can become righteous like Moses, or wicked like Jeroboam. No one decrees it. No one drags you. You choose the road, and you walk it.

Cain hears God. And then, in the field, he rises up against his brother, and kills him.

And God asks a question that Rashi already heard inside the first one. Where is Abel your brother?

Cain answers with the most famous evasion ever spoken. I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?

What have you done, says God. The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground. In Hebrew, the word for blood is plural. Bloods. The Mishnah explains: his blood, and the blood of all the children who would have come from him, to the end of the world.

Cain’s question has been asked in every generation, usually in better clothes. Is that really my responsibility? Is that my neighborhood? My people? My department?

Rav Chaim of Brisk, one of the greatest Torah scholars of the last three hundred years, was once asked what the function of a rabbi is. Rav Soloveitchik records his answer. To redress the grievances of those who are abandoned and alone, to protect the dignity of the poor, and to save the oppressed from the hands of his oppressor.

A man whose genius could have kept him inside the study hall forever said that the job was the abandoned and the alone. That is the answer to Cain. Yes. You are your brother’s keeper.

XI · THE BOOK OF GENERATIONS

In the days of Enosh, the grandson of Adam, the Torah says that people began to call on the name of God.

The Rambam reads that time as the beginning of a great mistake. People reasoned that God had created the stars and the spheres to govern the world. He had placed them on high, and given them honor. So it was fitting to honor them too. It was a reasonable idea. First they honored the instruments. Then they served them. In time, the Rambam writes, the Creator was forgotten, and only the instruments remained.

Idolatry did not begin as foolishness. It began as respect for the tools. That should make every generation nervous, and ours most of all. We have built extraordinary instruments. Markets. Machines. Networks. Artificial minds, made of mathematics. It is right to admire them. The danger is the old one. First we honor the instrument. Then we serve it.

Then the Torah opens a new scroll. Zeh sefer toldot adam. This is the book of the generations of Adam. On the day God created the human being, in the likeness of God He made him.

Ben Azzai called this verse the great principle of the Torah. In one version of the teaching, a greater principle even than love your neighbor as yourself. One way to understand why: it includes every human being, and it does not depend on how you feel about yourself. The Midrash adds a warning. Do not say, since I have been humiliated, let my fellow be humiliated with me. If you do, know whom you are humiliating. In the likeness of God He made him.

And then the book reads like a ledger. Adam lived nine hundred and thirty years, and he died. Seth lived nine hundred and twelve years, and he died. Methuselah lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years, and he died. Long lives, each summed up in a single line.

Except for one. Enoch walked with God, and he was no more, for God took him.

Enoch’s life is the shortest in the list. And his is the only one described by how he walked.

Most of us will be remembered, a few generations from now, by a single sentence, if we are lucky. Bereshis asks us to choose the sentence.

XII · ONE PERSON

The portion does not end well. Hashem saw that the evil of humanity on the earth was great. And Hashem regretted that He had made the human being on the earth, and He was pained, to His heart.

Pained. The Creator of heaven and earth, pained by what people do to each other.

Heschel spent a lifetime insisting on this. The God of the prophets is not indifferent. What we do reaches Him. Cruelty is never only a private matter between the strong and the weak. It wounds the One who made them both.

And Heschel drew a conclusion that could stand as a commentary on Cain. Few are guilty, but all are responsible.

Then, in the very last verse, after the evil and the regret, one sentence. V’Noach matza chen b’einei Hashem. And Noah found grace in the eyes of God.

Look at the shape of the whole portion. It begins with one human being, created alone, so that no one could say his father was greater. It ends with one human being, who finds grace while the world around him is coming apart.

One person was enough to begin the world. One person was enough to keep it from ending.

And the Mishnah’s sentence comes back with new weight. For my sake the world was created. Not because I am the center of it. Because I may be the one who has to carry it.

XIII · HERE

Go back to that first night. The small chest rising and falling in the dark. The parent who cannot sleep.

That is where Bereshis lives. In the moment a world is placed in your hands, and you realize that no one else is coming to take your place.

In a few chapters, the first portion of the Torah gives a whole education. That speech creates. That every person is a world. That power comes with a garden to guard. That holiness lives in time. That loneliness is the first thing that is not good. That the serpent works by making one limit look like a prison. That God clothes us, even as we leave. That one person can be enough.

And under all of it, two questions, still being asked.

Where are you?

And where is your brother?

Not on a map. In your life. In the world you have been given, unfinished, every single morning.

The questions do not wait for a perfect answer. They wait for an honest one. Not an argument. A presence.

Here. I am here. I am not hiding anymore.

And my brother? I know where he is. He is with me.

That is emunah, in the first portion of the Torah. Not a theory about God. An answer to Him, given again every morning.

Bereshis. In the beginning.

Which is to say: now.

Sources

Every source cited on screen, in the order it appears. Hebrew texts are from Sefaria. On screen the divine names are written אֱלֹקִים and ה׳, and the narration says Elokim and Hashem. English renderings of the Hebrew sources are working translations.