Friday, October 9, 2026
Tomorrow is Shabbat Bereshit — the Shabbat on which the new cycle’s first portion is actually read aloud. We’ve circled it all week (Rashi and ex nihilo, Cain’s exile, the two creation accounts, the bnei elohim, the seventh-day problem); this is the last pass before it’s chanted.
The portion runs Genesis 1:1–6:8 and covers more narrative time than the rest of the Torah combined: creation in six days, each stage pronounced “good,” humanity last — “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (1:26), that unexplained plural, then “in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (1:27). Then the second, earthier account: Eden, the two trees, the serpent, the expulsion. Cain kills Abel; ten generations run from Adam to Noah; the bnei elohim take human wives; God regrets the whole project, and the portion ends with Noah finding favor — the Flood cued up for next week.
Today’s thread is the phrase we’ve stepped around all week: tzelem Elohim, the image of God. It appears at creation (1:26–27), again at 5:1 heading the genealogy (“this is the book of the generations of Adam… in the likeness of God He made him”), and once more next week at 9:6, where it grounds the ban on murder. The Torah never defines it. What it visibly does is democratize it: in Egypt and Mesopotamia, “image of the god” was royal language — the king is the god’s image, and statues of the king mark the god’s claim on territory. Genesis takes the court title and hands it to every human, male and female alike. Humans are the only “statue” of this God permitted — arguably one reason the same tradition bans making any other image of Him.
But does “image” mean we look like God, or that we think like Him? The text’s silence left a vacuum, and Jewish readers fought in it for a thousand years. That fight is today’s debate — and it ended with books in an actual fire.
Start with the Mishnaic-era frame, because it sets the stakes. In the Sifra on Kedoshim (parallel in Yerushalmi Nedarim 9:4), Rabbi Akiva says “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18) is the great principle of the Torah. Ben Azzai answers that a greater one is “This is the book of the generations of Adam… in the likeness of God He made him” (Gen. 5:1) — this portion. The difference is load-bearing. Akiva grounds ethics in reciprocity and self-reference, and “as yourself” fails at the edges: it wobbles when a man holds himself cheap, and the commentators note it can license “I was humiliated, so let my fellow be humiliated with me.” Ben Azzai grounds ethics in an ontological fact about every human that holds no matter what you feel about yourself or them. Dignity by fiat, not by empathy.
The sharper fight, though, is over what the image is. The plain readers held that God has a form. Their evidence is the Torah itself: His hand, His face, His back that Moses sees (Ex. 33), plus the aggadot — God wearing tefillin (Berakhot 6a), the shiur komah literature that gives His measurements. This was never fringe. Moshe Taku, a 13th-century Ashkenazi tosafist, argued in Ketav Tamim that corporealism is simply the Torah’s position and that philosophical allegory is the innovation. Even Rashi, on 1:27, is strikingly careful — “in the image that was made for him,” a created template — dodging the question of God’s own form.
Rambam built his entire system against that reading. The Guide for the Perplexed opens — chapter one, before anything else — with tzelem: image means not shape but intellect, the capacity for abstract apprehension, the one respect in which humans genuinely resemble a God who has no body. For Rambam a corporeal God is worse than idolatry (Guide 1:36): the idolater worships a symbol of something beyond it; the corporealist worships a finite, located object and calls it God. And he legislated it — Hilchot Teshuvah 3:7 lists anyone who says God has a body among the minim, with no share in the world to come.
Then comes maybe the greatest gloss in rabbinic literature. Rabad of Posquières, on that exact line: “Why does he call such a person a heretic? Greater and better men than he have held this view, following what they saw in Scripture, and even more in the aggadot that confuse opinions.” Note what Rabad is not saying — he isn’t endorsing corporealism. He is refusing to let a philosophical doctrine define membership retroactively. So argue either side. Rambam’s: a religion that tolerates a false conception of God has idolatry at its core, and if Judaism polices anything, it must police this — otherwise “one God” is just a slogan draped over whatever each Jew imagines. Rabad’s: Judaism’s boundary is practice and allegiance, not metaphysics; the simple Jew who davens to the God of the plain text is in, and importing Aristotle’s standards to excommunicate him makes philosophy, not Torah, the sovereign.
Honest flag, consistent with the whole week: Bereshit’s own content is cosmic, not covenant-and-land, and tzelem Elohim has nothing to do with territory. The portion still doesn’t carry your standing theme. But the war over this verse is one of the best case studies anywhere of the portable homeland operating as a polity — and it ends in fire.
Rambam died in 1204. Within a generation the Jewish world split over exactly the question above. In the early 1230s, Solomon ben Abraham of Montpellier and his students (among them Jonah Gerondi) placed the Guide and the philosophical opening of the Mishneh Torah under ban; the communities of Provence and Aragon counter-banned them; letters and envoys flew from Toledo to Marseille to Acre. Ramban — Jonah’s cousin, an admirer of Rambam but no Aristotelian — wrote to the French rabbis trying to broker a settlement: leave the Guide to the sophisticates of Spain, keep it from the young. Look at what this actually is: a stateless people scattered across hostile jurisdictions conducting a full constitutional crisis — competing claims of jurisdiction, bans, counter-bans, appellate letters, an attempted negotiated settlement — with no king, no army, no territory. Herem and the circulating letter were the entire state apparatus, and they worked across a continent. Heine’s “portable homeland” line is usually read as poetry about books; the Maimonidean controversy shows it functioning as a government.
Then the limit case. Around 1232, the Maimonist sources charge, the anti-Maimonists denounced the Guide to the Dominicans — the new inquisitorial order, glad to burn heresy in any language — and the Guide was burned in Montpellier. Nine years later the same machinery burned twenty-four cartloads of the Talmud in the Place de Grève in Paris (1242). Tradition has Jonah Gerondi recognizing the connection and publicly repenting — he spent his later years teaching and writing penitential works, reportedly vowing to prostrate himself on Rambam’s grave. The lesson the tradition itself drew is the one that matters for your theme: the portable homeland runs on one absolute rule — disputes stay inside the text. The moment one faction borrowed the territorial sovereign’s fire to win an internal argument, the fire didn’t discriminate; the sovereign had merely learned that Jewish books burn. A system that survived losing the land could not survive inviting the landlord in.
Postscript: the fight was never resolved, only absorbed. Rambam’s thirteen principles — incorporeality included — ended up versified in the siddur (Yigdal, Ani Ma’amin), sung for centuries by communities that never opened the Guide. That is the portable homeland’s characteristic move: canonize the winner’s poetry, quietly shelve the enforcement.