“Finding Balance at the Beginning” Rabbi Jacobson’s Qabbalat Shabbat Sermon, 10/17/25

Rabbi Suzie Jacobson
Qabbalat Shabbat, October 17, 2025
Temple Israel of Boston

This Shabbat, we roll the Torah back to the very beginning and read Bereishit — the story of creation and the first humans, Adam and Eve.
A lonely God, surrounded by tohu v’vohu — the formless, chaotic void — sweeps across the darkness and declares, “Let there be light.”
Step by step, a world comes into being: water separated from land, celestial bodies, plants, and all kinds of living things to fill the earth, sea, and sky.

Even as creation unfolds, something essential is missing: companionship, a presence to share in the wonder and responsibility of this new world.

Finally, God’s loneliness is alleviated. The human is created b’tzelem Elohim — in the image of the Divine.
God plants a perfect garden and places the human, Adam, within it, giving him one sacred task: to till and tend.
But Adam, like his Creator, is lonely.
God says,
“Lo tov heyot ha’adam levado” — “It is not good for a person to be alone.”
So God creates Eve.
Loneliness solved through a divinely arranged partnership.

But Adam and Eve only get two verses of bliss before the snake enters. Eve is convinced to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and Adam follows — which is probably for the best; could you imagine only one person having moral reason in a relationship?!

The newlyweds commit the world’s first sin. The rabbis teach that Adam’s creation, Eve’s creation, and their snack at the Tree of Knowledge all happened before the sun set on their first day of life. Paradise and perfection were incredibly fleeting experiences for the human being.

For millennia, this story has been used to justify sexism and the oppression of women. The Christian notion of “original sin” argues that all people are born with Eve’s sin — that it’s the woman’s fault that humanity is doomed.

Jewish tradition rejects this idea. We teach that human beings are born blameless, with free will — and that sin is not inherited, but earned through our own choices.
Even the rabbis, for all their wisdom, often read Eve through a lens of suspicion and male superiority. But if we step back from these readings, we can ask: what might Eve’s action teach us about being human?

Maimonides offers one answer: Eve’s forbidden snack, though a sin, was necessary.
Maimonides taught that before their eyes were opened, humans had intellect but not discernment. They could think, but not yet understand.
Only through eating the fruit did humanity gain da’at — moral awareness — the capacity to discern between the good and the corrupt.

Eve’s so-called disobedience was, in truth, a gift.
The first mother bestowed upon all her children the greatest inheritance of all: the ability to make moral choices, to tell the difference between right and wrong, to become good.

And with that, the human journey began — no longer perfect, but deeply, beautifully human.

For everything else in the creation story, there is balance — heaven and earth, light and darkness, sun and moon, water and dry land.
But the human being is unique. We are created alone. 

We now have moral discernment, but we also have free will, and it is hard to know how to choose between right and wrong in a world filled with complexity. And this is our uniquely human problem to solve. 

Maybe that’s why we’re still searching for balance. Because to be human is to live in tension — pride and humility, reason and compassion, certainty and doubt.

Our moral and intellectual complexity sets us apart — and perhaps this is why the rabbis offer different reasons for why we were created last, after everything else.

The rabbis argue about this.
One teaches that we were created last because we are the crown of creation — the world’s guest of honor, arriving only after everything else was prepared.
But another insists that we were created last to remind us of our smallness. Even the gnat came before us.
If we become too arrogant, God can say, “Remember — even the tiniest creature preceded you.”

So which is it?
Are we the best or the least?
The most important, or the most insignificant?
The Torah doesn’t resolve it for us. Maybe the truth is that we are both.

I’m reminded of a Chasidic teaching that says:
“Keep two truths in your pockets, and take them out as needed.
In one pocket, let it be written: ‘For my sake was the world created.’
And in the other: ‘I am but dust and ashes.’”

What a profound lesson in human balance.

There are moments when we reach into the first pocket — moments of joy, accomplishment, awe — and feel as if the whole world was created just for us: when we fall in love, find a fantastic new job, or hold a newborn child.
And there are moments we reach into the other pocket — when we fail, hurt someone we love, or simply fall short — when we feel no greater than the dust beneath our feet.

Both are true.
Both belong to us.
The work of being human is to keep both pockets open — to live with the humility of dust and the sacredness of divine purpose, at the same time.

Maybe that’s what Eve discovered when she reached for the fruit. In her sin, she found her human purpose—and in discovering her purpose, she confronted the full depth of her existential crisis.
She opened both pockets at once.
In that single act, she brought into the world both the knowledge of our greatness and the awareness of our limits.

Eve’s gift of moral discernment gave humans the capacity to choose wisely — but making those choices is easier when we are not alone. 

And God did not create us to be alone or to stay still.
God created us to grow, to discern, to choose.

When God said, “It is not good for a person to be alone,” it wasn’t only about loneliness — it was about a need to seek balance through relationship.

When we feel worthless, our people can remind us how precious we are.
When we grow too self-important, our people can ground us back in humility.

The mystics of the Zohar describe the first human as two beings joined back to back — male and female, one body, two faces, unable to see one another.
So God separated them, not to divide, but so they could turn and face each other.
Only then could they know love, reciprocity, relationship — the very things that bring us into balance.

We are made to live in relationship. 

When we are alone, we forget who we are. When we are alone, Eve’s gift feels like a burden rather than our super power.

When someone near us is crushed by failure or grief, we can remind them, gently, “For your sake, the world was created.”
And when someone grows too certain of their own righteousness, we can help them remember, “You too are dust and ashes.”

We balance one another, just as we are balanced by the sacred and the mundane, by the divine and the human, by Eve’s wisdom and Adam’s wonder.

Maybe that’s the secret of Bereishit — that God’s loneliness, human loneliness, Eve’s courage, and our constant search for morality, balance and connection are all parts of the same story.

And we are still carrying that creative work forward — trying, every day, to find balance in a world that so easily spins us out. 

Eve’s gift was not only knowledge, but the invitation to live in that tension — to see both good and evil, joy and sorrow, humility and power — and to choose wisely.

Because if Bereishit teaches us anything, it’s that we were never meant to be perfect.
We were meant to be in process.
We were meant to reach — toward each other, toward understanding, toward balance.

So this Shabbat, as we begin the Torah again, I pray that we find the strength to hold both truths — to live with both pockets open and know that as we strive for understanding and moral clarity, we are never alone.