The Partnership

Finding God in the Garden: Backyard Reflections on Life, Love, and Compost
by Rabbi Balfour Brickner

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The Genesis story reveals a challenging truth: God could not maintain Eden alone.

No shrub of the field was yet on the earth and no grasses of the field had yet sprouted, because the Lord God had not sent rain upon the earth; and there was no man to till the ground. Gen. 2:5

The Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to till it and tend it. Gen. 2:15

Let us not underestimate the importance of these deceptively simple verses. The Bible is telling us that God needed human help so that the entire life/growth process might move forward. The early rabbinic commentators jumped on this thought: "The edible fruits of the earth require not only God's gift of rain but also man's cultivation. Man must be a coworker with God in making this earth a garden" (J. H. Hertz, ed., Pentateuch and Haftorahs). In other words, paradise was perfect - almost. It was complete - almost. For all its beauty, for all its wonderful design, something was missing. Us! God needed a partner: us.

One of Judaism's more audacious theological principles is that God and humanity need each other to complete the creative process. It is an empowering thought. Instead of seeing ourselves as yet another life form to be redeemed by some other, outside force, we see ourselves as essential, of intrinsic worth, possessed of such capacity that we are needed to complete the Eternal's plans for the universe. We may not be equal partners with God, but we are definitely part of the equation.

It is not much of an intellectual step to move from saying that humans are of value to saying that they are unique - qualitatively different from all other living things. The biblical writers portrayed humans this way. In a highly imaginative passage, they described our special relationship to God when they wrote that we, more than any other living creature, possess the breath of God in our being. It was their way of saying that they believed we have souls. "The Lord God formed man of the dust of the earth. He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul" (Gen. 2:7).

Do cats and dogs and leopards and lizards also have souls? Many pet lovers and animal rights activists swear that they do. Perhaps so, but I doubt that anyone would argue that the soul of a tadpole and the human spirit are qualitatively the same. We have even enshrined this value judgment that the one surpasses the other in our structure of law. It elevates the value of human life above the value of any other living thing. We give this value a name: sacred. Kill a bear or catch a striped bass, and you may be fined. If the species is endangered or under some other kind of special protection, you may, at worst, be briefly imprisoned. But take the life of another human being (except in a sanctioned situation such as war or self-defense), and you risk the possibility of having the state take yours. We have made a cardinal principle of the concept that human beings are special, possessed of some essence that positions them on the highest rung of the evolutionary ladder and thus subject to special protection. That is why the Sixth Commandment is so explicit when it says "Thou shalt not murder" rather than "Thou shalt not kill." The biblical writers recognized the difference. We can kill in certain circumstances, but we cannot indiscriminately murder each other without paying a terrible price in the courts of justice.

So we see ourselves as unique. Fine, but uniqueness carries with it additional responsibilities.

Copyright © 2002 by Rabbi Balfour Brickner

About the Author

BALFOUR BRICKNER has been a rabbi for half a century and still he lives to tell the tale. His career began in Washington, DC where he was the founding rabbi of Temple Sinai, a congregation he built and served for a decade. In 1961 he moved to New York City to join the national executive staff of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the central organization of Reform Judaism.