In The Beginning… There Were No Kings

The night before a contingent of Mishkanites joined the massive October 18th, 2025 No Kings March, Rabbi Lizzi gave us some  framing for the longstanding Jewish rejection of the idea that any person or people is greater than another. In the beginning, there were no kings. So, how did we end up in this mess? And what can we do about it?

Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

Knowing that this Shabbat service was going to coincide with the No King protests all around the country, I wanted to make a connection between the Torah reading and our activities this weekend. Turns out it is not that hard when the entire underlying thesis of the Jewish tradition is that no human being is of inherently higher status or worth than any other human being because God created all of us. Turns out this is a revolutionary idea– it was 4,000 years ago and it still is today. So I want to give us a little bit of grounding and hizuk/fortification in how we arrive at this foundational Jewish idea that really emerges from this first Torah portion, Beresheet.

First of all, I want to just take a moment to dwell on what might to us seem obvious, but has not been obvious throughout history, and to be honest is still not really obvious: the idea that there is a creator, let’s call her Goddess, or God, or YHVH — the force driving universal existence past, present and future — and that force created human beings, all of us, equal. And not just equal, but infinitely unique and infinitely valuable. 

When I say this might seem obvious it’s because we, I know I, grew up in a country where our central text begins with the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” And it goes on from there.

This was a novel and revolutionary idea against the backdrop of a monarchy in which the government did not derive their just powers from the consent of the governed rather, from a sense that the king was ordained by God to rule over the people no matter what they thought of him, no matter how oppressive his rules were, even if they didn’t consent. It’s actually really powerful with the abuses of power we’re witnessing now at the executive level, to go back and read the Declaration of Independence and its critique of Monarchy– and see how critiques they identified then are unfolding in real time right now.

And if you got stuck on the “All men are created equal… and governments are instituted among men…” thing, and you thought about how “men” actually meant white, Christian, property-owning men at the time they wrote this, then I especially want you to appreciate how even more revolutionary the Torah is, asserting from the beginning, 4,000 years ago, that every human being– male and female, of all genders– is created b’tzelem elohim, in the image of God.

Genesis 1:26 is where we meet this human being, ADAM (not a name, rather a translation for the word “person made of earth”), for the first time– God says “Let US create humanity in OUR image”. This is strange on a few levels… who’s the our? And if you don't believe God has a body or form, then what is God’s image? 

Answer: “our image” is all our infinite capabilities, abilities, unique traits, and everything they enable us to do. Sure, to procreate and perpetuate life, but that’s not the half of it. To imagine, to create, to destroy, to love, to shape, to plan, to tend, to heal. Every time we read a line in our tradition describing something God does, you can take it as a personal invitation: like in the Amida, we read that God is somech noflim v’rofeh cholim matir asurim u’kayem emunato lisheney afar… lifts up the fallen, heals the sick, frees the captive, keeps faith with those who sleep in the dust. Being God’s image is being like that, imitatio dei. 

And on an even more basic level, our faces, our bodies. If every single one of us is created in God’s image then God is every color in the rainbow, every body and every face in all of our formations and malformations, symmetry and asymmetry, the baby smoothness and the wrinkles, all our abilities and all our disabilities; God is blond, brunette, gingit, has alopecia, and male-pattern baldness all at once. God is all of it. The Talmud describes it this way: When a King stamps a coin with his image on it, it comes out the same every time. But when the King of Kings– aka God– creates their currency in the world, makes their stamp, it comes out different every time, looking like every human being, since the dawn of time.

Now if we really believed this, could we walk past someone on the street or at the entrance to the grocery store, who needed help? A literal image of God is sitting there and needs money, a blanket, food, and we rush by? An image of God is in danger anywhere in the world and we turn the page of the newspaper, we click an ad and the story disappears? If religious people really believed this, could they turn a blind eye toward masked, armed men grabbing children from their beds, mothers from the school pick-up line, separating families, shipping people off to countries they aren’t even from without due process?

The writers of our holy books could never have imagined the amount of information about human suffering we would have access to in every waking moment of our lives– and we may be made in God’s image, but we’re not God: it’s not possible for us to have the capaciousness of heart and care that God has for every one of Her images in the world, and we can’t be too hard on ourselves for not doing everything we can for every literal person in need, despite the feeling that we wish we could. But the Torah was written in a time when people had communities in which they could look around and know their neighbors, know who was in pain or need, and still, these words and ideas were needed to shake people out of the human tendency to turn away from suffering, whether we caused it ourselves or were bystanders to it. The Declaration of Independence asks nowhere near as much of us as people, as family, as neighbors, as Torah does. 

Here’s where we first see that: fast forward a few chapters, same Parasha: Genesis 4:10: Adam and Eve have children, Cayin and Havel, in English, Jealousy and Ephemera. And remember this is still the beginning, everything that’s happening is happening for the first time, being discovered, and the Torah is trying to give us a picture of who we are in the world and how God wants us to act. Also important to note here: no one is Jewish. Religions have not yet been invented, not by God and not by humanity. All human beings have equal access to God. But already we start to see Jealousy rear its ugly head. Cayin is jealous of Abel, his brother and kills him, and God, horrified and also curious to know how one of his own images has destroyed another one of his images, asks Cayin, “Do you know where your brother is?”

This is meaningful. It’s the 2nd question God asks in the Torah. First one is “Ayeka: Where are you?” to Adam and Eve after eating the forbidden fruit. Where are you in the mistakes you’ve made? Will you be honest about them? Will you repent, will you change? No… OK, out of the Garden you go! Learn the lesson of human responsibility, would you, humans? And so now Cayin, the child of those unrepentant sinners, has committed his own sin. This time, God doesn’t say “where are you?” (it seems God know we hide from ourselves so there’s no point in asking where are YOU?)– Now God says, “Where’s your brother?” 

Which is where I think we begin to get the Jewish ethos around faith and works, which is to say, it’s great if your heart is in the right place, but at the end of the day, God cares less about that, than what you’re DOING to care for God’s creatures and planet. “Afo Hevel Achicha/Where is Abel, your brother?” Like: don’t tell me how you feel about the situation… tell me what you’ve done.

The answer is disappointing. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cayin says. Essentially– it’s not my job to take care of and protect my brother. Which you might say is true– God hasn’t given any rules yet, including no rules on how to care for siblings… but it’s totally disingenuous for him to say that here because Cayin didn’t just not keep track of his brother’s whereabouts… he snuck up on him in the field and killed him.

The implication of this story seems really clear here: It is our job to be our brother’s (and sister’s) keeper. To care for and protect our brothers, and our sisters, all our human siblings. And so God responds, “What have you done!? Your brother’s bloods cry out from the earth!” 

There’s a lot that’s interesting about this whole exchange but I want to focus on the strange turn of phrase, Bloods? The bloods of your brother? What’s that about? 

Lineage, potential. Not just their life but all the possibility that emanates from every single life. Every piece of art, every dish they might cook, every joke they might tell, poem they might write, every kind word, every contribution they make to their neighborhood or community, and yes, every future offspring and the entire lineage that emerges from it. All of that spills out when their blood is spilled. Cayin might not have realized those are the stakes when you kill someone– and the ancient reader might not have understood that either. So the Torah comes along to be really clear about, from the very beginning. Every human being is a world. And let’s not split hairs, btw, about whether someone is part of your tribe or not, because at this point there are no tribes. There’s just humanity. All of us, descended from one original person. Every person, a world unto themselves. 

The Talmud in Sanhedrin picks up on this, says, therefore learn this from this that a single person was created in the world– Adam– to teach that if anyone causes a single life to perish, they are deemed to have caused a whole world to perish; and anyone who saves a single soul is deemed to have saved a whole world. 

And not just that: the single person, one person, was created for the sake of peace among humankind, so that one should not say to another, “My father was greater than your father”. 

And finally: if only one person was created in the beginning, in God’s image, it shows the heretics claiming that there are many ruling powers that no, there’s just one, stamping out all the beautiful people from that original. Because while human beings stamp many coins with one seal and they are all the same, the King of kings, the Holy Blessed One, has stamped every human being with the seal of the first person, yet not one of them is like another. Therefore everyone must say, “For my sake was the world created.”

Torah was created at a time in a place when many other traditions were coming up with their own creation myths as well, and in most of them different Gods are vying for primacy and dominance. The Babylonians, Sumerians, Akkadians, Egyptians, came up with these stories where the pinnacle of creation was the human replica of God created here on this earth, in a particular place that was God's home: so the culmination of the Sumerian creation story is Sumer, culmination of the Babylonian creation story is Babylon, the Egyptian Pharaoh is their God, and so forth. Truth is, the Jewish people were on track to have the same thing: a class of people closer to God (the Kohanim, the Priests) who worked in the Temple in Jerusalem where God’s physical presence was said to be. If we’d stuck with that story we wouldn’t be here– only because of the Roman destruction of the Temple and the rabbinic re-creation of Judaism and re-focusing on Torah, not on sacrifice, that we liberated God to be everywhere, and we could return to our roots, and our original creation story.

What is the Jewish creation myth? One universal God, who creates all human beings in their own image. There are no tribes. There is no king. Why start with just one single person? To remind you that we’re all part of the same human family. No one better, higher, or more exalted lineage than anyone else. No one more worthy of life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness. No one above the law. No one whose life is expendable. When this was written it would be millennia before Jews would get the privilege to live in a democracy– a system of government that is created by the people, for the people, based on the consent of the governed… but the philosophical foundations for this system of government are baked into the DNA of Jewish tradition from the opening chapters of Genesis.

So tomorrow, all of us will gather at Mishkan to pray and sing, and read these revolutionary opening verses of the Torah that place us in the human family, that require of us to care for us siblings, wherever they come from, citizens and immigrants and sojourners, and that demand us to answer the questions: “Where are you, and Where is your brother?”

I am moved and inspired by the stories of our neighbors answering “Akeya: where are you,” not by hiding, like Adam and Eve, like Cayin, but by saying Hineni (like Abraham– we’ll read about him in two weeks). By coming outside to protect  their neighbors– in Albany Park, for example, people forming a human chain to stop ICE from detaining a neighbor; enduring tear gas and having objects thrown at them, like folks protesting outside the Broadview ICE Detention facility have been enduring for weeks, and all over the city as Chicagoans have come outside to say Hineni, We are here.  We will protect our siblings. We’re all part of this family.

Torah reflects both humanity’s best and our worst, and much of the Torah is telling cautionary tales about the worst of what people can do to each other. But the moral arc of it describes people resisting tyranny and oppression and taking each other out of the narrow place. And whenever we do that now, we’re living Torah’s purpose. We’re praying with our feet, with our hands, with even if our voices shake. So tomorrow/today, we are gonna jump on the train and go downtown and stand with hundreds of thousands of other Chicagoans, and millions across the country, to say that the greatness of our country comes from its people, not from raising up a ruler above anyone else. So let us March, with the feeling that 4000 years of Jewish tradition stand with us in the streets, proclaiming the dignity and worth of every human being. That much we know.